Friedman 1988 Sexual-Abuse Conviction Was Justified, a very limited Report Says

Jesse Friedman, the Great Neck, N.Y., teenager whose role in a sexual abuse case a quarter-century ago was portrayed in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” and came to symbolize an era of sensational, often-suspect accusations of child molesting, was properly convicted and should not have his status as a sexual predator overturned, according to a three-year review that was released on Monday.

Jesse Friedman served 13 years in prison after he and his father, Arnold, were convicted of molesting children at their home in Great Neck, N.Y. His father committed suicide in prison.

In a 155-page report written with very little ambiguity, the Nassau County district attorney, Kathleen M. Rice, concluded that none of four issues raised in 2010 in a strongly worded ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit were substantiated by the evidence.

Instead, it concluded, “By any impartial analysis, the reinvestigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates and the Second Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender.”

The review concludes another chapter in a case that came to national attention after the 2003 release of the film, which portrayed both the breakup of a deeply troubled family and what was characterized as a flawed, biased police investigation and judicial process. The case led to guilty pleas in 1988 by Jesse Friedman, then 18, and his father, Arnold Friedman, who ran a popular computer class at his house on Piccadilly Road in the affluent Long Island community of Great Neck.

The report’s conclusion was not entirely unexpected, even by Mr. Friedman and his advocates, given the explosive nature of the charges, the impossibility of a definitive finding on many of the allegations more than 25 years in the past and the high bar for prosecutors to overturn convictions, especially those based on confessions.

Still, Mr. Friedman’s lawyer, Ron Kuby, and the film’s director, Andrew Jarecki, reacted with disappointment and anger, saying the report was a biased whitewash by the office that originally botched the case. Mr. Kuby promised to pursue appeals.

“D.A. Kathleen Rice has made a craven, but not surprising, political decision in failing to admit to the wrongdoing of the Nassau County D.A.’s office and former sex crimes chief Fran Galasso, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Jesse’s innocence,” Mr. Jarecki said.

Mr. Kuby said that the district attorney’s office had fought Mr. Friedman’s efforts at every turn and that this was just more of the same.

“My immediate reaction is that we have spent three long years in a pointless waste of time waiting for D.A. Rice to issue this report,” Mr. Kuby said.

“Fortunately, the conclusion of this bogus reinvestigation clears the way for the Friedman team to return to court based upon the new evidence we’ve collected as well as the increasing likelihood of obtaining the original case documents.”

The review led both to evidence supporting the conviction and to evidence suggesting it should be overturned. Perhaps most powerful for the defense was a detailed and chilling statement that it obtained from Ross Goldstein, a high school friend of Jesse Friedman, who was the only person other than the Friedmans convicted in the case. Mr. Goldstein said his confession had been a lie coerced by intimidating police conduct and the threats of a draconian sentence.

In its 2010 decision, the Second Circuit reluctantly upheld the verdict on technical grounds but harshly criticized the trial judge, prosecutors and detectives in the case. The court said there was a “reasonable likelihood” that Jesse Friedman, who served 13 years in prison before being released in 2001, was wrongfully convicted and suggested that Ms. Rice reinvestigate the case. Arnold Friedman died, apparently a suicide, in prison in 1995.

Yet Ms. Rice’s report, in all instances, found that the preponderance of evidence pointed toward upholding the conviction. And her report comes with a limited, but potentially powerful, seal of approval in a case that is also being played out in the court of public opinion.

When she began her review, Ms. Rice, a Democrat first elected in 2005, appointed a four-member independent advisory panel to guide and oversee the work. It included Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project and one of the country’s leading advocates for overturning wrongful convictions.

The report was prefaced by a four-page statement by the panel. It said its job was about process more than findings. It did not reinvestigate the case itself, and it was not given access to key documents like grand jury records and interview reports.

Still, it commended the investigation, and said that if the evidence had pointed toward exoneration, “we have no doubt the Review Team was prepared to recommend without reservation that Friedman’s conviction be overturned.”

The statement, signed by all four members, said it was not the role of the panel to make an ultimate judgment about Jesse Friedman’s guilt, but added: “We do have an obligation to express a view as to whether we believe the conclusions expressed in the Review Team’s report are reasonable and supported by the evidence it cites. We think they are.”

The report centered on four points raised in the film and by the appeals court: that the case may have been tainted by repeated police interviews that pushed children toward confessions; that children may have been hypnotized to recover memories not based on fact; that the case was distorted by a “moral panic” that created false accusations and a predisposition toward conviction; and that Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea may have been unlawfully coerced by the police, prosecutors and a hostile judge.

The review rejected them all. It said that though some interviews late in the case may have been flawed, the rapid pace and early flow of accusations from children in the classes indicated that the allegations arose from spontaneous accounts, not from investigators pushing children toward accusations. It said the first child interviewed reported improper behavior, 12 children leveled accusations of illegal sexual behavior at Arnold Friedman in the investigation’s first two weeks and, five weeks into the investigation, 13 boys described criminal behavior by Jesse Friedman.

It said, that despite one student’s account in “Capturing the Friedmans” of making allegations after being hypnotized, any use of group therapy or hypnosis came after all the indictments were filed. It disputed the one account of hypnosis in the film.

The review said the Friedman case was “in no way similar” to other notorious cases of its time, like the McMartin preschool case, which produced allegations of satanic ritual abuse of children but ended with no convictions. The review said that the children in this case were twice as old as in that one and that many victims complained of abuse early rather than through months of questioning.

And it said Jesse Friedman had competent legal representation, weighed his options intelligently and pleaded guilty after determining it was “the optimal strategy” in light of the available choices.

It cited other evidence damaging to Mr. Friedman’s case — students and parents who stuck by their accounts and added fuller details, a psychiatric evaluation conducted for his defense that labeled him “a psychopathic deviant” and a telephone interview with Arnold Friedman’s brother, Howard Friedman, in which, according to the report, he said: “Jesse is guilty and you’re going to ask me how I know. Because Arnold told me.” He said Arnold Friedman had confessed that both he and his son had “misbehaved” with children in the class, but it is not clear from his statements what that misbehavior might have entailed.

Still, the panel and the review team cited the enormous difficulty in getting to the truth because of the passage of time, incomplete and shoddy record keeping and faded memories. Participation was entirely voluntary, so only some of those involved in the case took part in the investigation. Only three original accusers repeated their accounts to the review team. And many of the figures in the case gave different accounts at different times, making evaluation difficult, the investigators said.

Most glaring of the conflicting accounts was the one given by Mr. Goldstein, who said that “every single thing” in his grand jury testimony had been a lie and that he had been “coached, rehearsed and directed” by a prosecutor and a detective to tell the story they wanted, which was devastating for Jesse Friedman’s defense. The review said his recantation was unreliable.

Ms. Rice said in a statement that “instances of wrongful conviction are real and exist in far greater numbers than any of us would like to admit.” But she added: “The case against Jesse Friedman is not one of them.”

Original report here




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