Friedman’s Sexual-Abuse Conviction Was Justified, Report Says

Friedman's Sexual-Abuse Conviction Was Justified, 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 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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