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The Massachusetts Parole Board announced on October 17 that Gerald Amirault, convicted in 1986 of sexually assaulting eight children at the Fells Acres daycare center in Malden, Massachusetts, will be granted parole. The decision to return Amirault to the community was a unanimous gesture on the part of officials who in 2001, acting as the Board of Pardons, had already recommended commutation of his 30-to-40-year sentence, citing "real and substantial doubt" as to his guilt.

In a statement calculated to avoid putting Middlesex County prosecutors on the defensive, the Parole Board noted that while "Mr. Amirault stands convicted of serious crimes, it appears that justice has been served by his 17 years of incarceration."

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But for Amirault and his family, the light at the end of the tunnel is not yet fully visible. The 49-year-old father of three must remain confined to the Bay State Correctional Facility at Norfolk, Massachusetts, until Middlesex County DA Martha Coakley, who opposes his release, decides whether or not to seek his civil commitment as a Sexually Dangerous Person (SDP). State law gives the District Attorney six months to consider civilly committing a sex offender accorded parole.

One-day-to-lifetime civil commitment is a means of prolonging the incarceration of a putative SDP whose presence within the community is thought to pose a danger. If at any time between now and her April 30, 2004 deadline Coakley waives her right to try to have Amirault ruled sexually dangerous, he could be freed immediately. If she does opt for civil commitment, Coakley could wait until April 30 to have the prisoner remanded for evaluation to the Massachusetts Treatment Center at Bridgewater, a secure facility for sex offenders, and held there pending a trial that might not take place until 2006.

Amirault, who was arrested in 1984 along with his mother, Violet, and his sister, Cheryl LeFave, is among the last of the daycare workers railroaded into prison in the 1980s who is still being held behind prison walls. The Amiraults' ordeal began with a single dubious accusation that sparked a barrage of abuse tales from about 40 of the 70 small children enrolled at the family-run daycare facility. Asking leading questions and demanding "disclosure," police, therapists, and parents extracted allegations from children who claimed that a "bad clown" had raped them in a "magic room"; that the Amiraults had tied a naked boy to a tree in the open schoolyard within sight of passing cars; that the trio had sexually assaulted toddlers with knives, sticks, lobsters, and a robot resembling Artoo Detoo; and that Gerald had forced children to lick food off his penis and to sodomize him.

Prosecutors postulated a family plot to support Gerald's alleged cocaine habit by manufacturing kiddie porn. No child pornography linked to the Fells Acres School has ever been found; no evidence linking any of the Amiraults to such material was presented at trial. No credible evidence of any kind, physical or otherwise, has ever existed. The convictions rested on the deeply tainted statements of child witnesses presenting canned testimony while shielded from the sight of the accused.

Tried jointly in 1987, Violet and Cheryl were also found guilty and sentenced to eight to 20 years' detention. The women were freed in 1995 pending a new trial that never took place. The family's plight gained national recognition in January of that year, when Dorothy Rabinowitz published the first of many Wall Street Journal op-ed columns on the case. (Rabinowitz's recent book No Crueler Tyrannies is thus far the best account of the Fells Acres case to reach print.) Violet Amirault died of cancer at 71 in 1997; Cheryl Amirault LeFave, whose sentence was reduced in October 1999 to time served, now lives quietly in a Boston suburb.

While nearly every other case of its kind across the USA was overturned on appeal, the Amirault case fell afoul of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's "finality" doctrine, which maintained that even if the case had serious flaws, the public would best be served by stopping further legal action. Thwarted by the state appeals process, the Amiraults' legal team sought commutation.

The favorable recommendation of the Board of Pardons was rejected, however, by Republican Governor Jane Swift, then hoping to seek a second term of office while hysteria mounted over real and imagined sexual wrongdoing by Roman Catholic priests. The case has been permeated with local politics from its inception. Prosecutors used it to build their careers; former Middlesex DA Scott Harshbarger trampled the Amirault family en route to becoming state attorney general.

Following years of frustration, the prospect of Amirault's parole has inspired overconfident optimism among his supporters. On October 27, Robert L. Bartley wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Gerald Amirault's release "will bring down the curtain on this sad saga of American jurisprudence."

But Amirault is still being detained, and a second wrongfully convicted ex-daycare worker, Bernard Baran, remains imprisoned at the Massachusetts Treatment Center. Baran, who is openly gay, was arrested in the fall of 1984 at the height of the daycare sex panic. He was tried against a backdrop of media frenzy over the Amirault case-- and, in California, the notorious McMartin case. Early in 1985, he was sentenced to three concurrent life terms. The evidence against him amounted to little more than the fact that he was a gay man who worked with children. (See The Guide, December 1999.)

Baran's lawyers are now preparing a motion for a new trial. They have recently been granted broad subpoena powers to obtain exculpatory documents. These include records of children's recantations, as well as evidence, apparently withheld by the prosecution at the time of Baran's trial, that the principal accusing child, who tested positive for gonorrhea, was molested by one of his drug-addicted mother's numerous boyfriends. (Baran's gonorrhea test was negative.)

Baran's plight has received far less media attention than that of Gerald Amirault, a heterosexual man with a devoted wife, two attractive daughters, and a hockey-playing son. One positive result of this neglect, however, is that Baran has been spared the attentions of the abuse cultists who have played a key role in keeping the Amirault mythos alive.

Current abuse-groupie street dogma maintains that Violet Amirault and Cheryl LeFave were mere enablers, abetting the crimes of Gerald, the insatiable male, who deserves to spend rest of his life in prison. Most of Amirault's alleged victims, who shared about $20 million in insurance settlements, have had nothing to say about his prospective release, but two of them, Brian Martinello and Jennifer Bennett, have been stridently vocal.

Assuming that Amirault is indeed set free by next April 30, the conditions of his parole will prohibit contact with his accusers. Other requirements will include registration as a sex offender, avoidance of all unsupervised contact with persons under 18, regular visits to a parole officer, and, most probably, participation in sex-offender therapy.

Editor's Note: The legal defense funds of both Gerald Amirault and Bernard Baran are maintained by the Boston-based National Center for Reason and Justice. For more information, visit the 501(c)3 organization's website: www.ncrj.org.