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 molestation, 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.
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 a strongly worded 2010 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.
So the documentary's director, Andrew Jarecki, though cautiously
optimistic about a ruling favoring Mr. Friedman, who served 13 years
in prison before being released in December 2001, said before the
report came out that a ruling in Mr. Friedman's favor faced stiff head
winds.
"Old habits die hard, particularly when you have a crime like this,"
he said. "This is a radioactive crime. If there's one chance in a
million that it might have happened, the standard rules don't apply."
In an e-mail to supporters before the release of the decision, Mr.
Jarecki said that an unfavorable ruling by the district attorney would
be a "distraction," and that Mr. Friedman would continue with an
appeal. Mr. Friedman's lawyer, Ron 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 after learning of the decision but before reading the
report. "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 to evidence both supporting the conviction and
overturning it. Perhaps most powerful for the latter was a detailed
and chilling statement the defense 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 was 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, and suggested that it should
be reopened.
Yet Ms. Rice's report, in all instances, found that the preponderance
of evidence pointed toward upholding the conviction. And her report
comes with an unusual and potentially critical seal of approval in a
case that is also being played out in the court of public opinion.
When she began her review, she 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
commended the investigation, said it was done without bias and said
that if the evidence had pointed that way, "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 might have been tainted by repeated
police interviews that pushed children toward confessions, that
children might 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 might have been unlawfully coerced by the
police, prosecutors and a hostile judge.
The review rejected them all. It said that, though some interviews in
the late stages of the case might 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 levied
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 Jesse Friedman's defense that
labeled him "a psychopathic deviant" and an appearance before the
review team by 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 that 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 entailed.
Still, the panel and 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. The panel noted that
participation was entirely voluntary, so only some of those involved
in the case took part in the investigation. And many of the characters
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.
And both the review team and the panel made a few similar judgments
about Mr. Jarecki's film.
"The Review Team committed itself to follow the facts wherever they
might lead," the report said, "and found that the whole truth diverged
significantly from the edited version of events portrayed in the
film."
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