Margaret Kelly Michaels Trial and Appeal: 1987 & 1993 Defendant: Margaret Kelly MichaelsCrimes Charged: Aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault, endangering the welfare of children, and terroristic threatsChief Defense Lawyers: Harvey Meltzer and Robert ClarkChief Prosecutors: Glenn Goldberg and Sara Sencer McArdleJudge: William A. Source for information on Margaret Kelly Michaels Trial.

Margaret Kelly Michaels Today Thirty Years Later - fasrhs For seven months Margaret Kelly Michaels, a 22-year-old teacher's aide at Wee Care, had been sexually abusing the girl and her classmates. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. Defendant, Margaret Kelly Michaels, appeals from her jury conviction on 115 counts of sexual offenses involving twenty children who were in the Wee Care Nursery School (Wee Care). The trial court sentenced defendant to an aggregate term of forty-seven years in prison, with fourteen years of parole ineligibility, and $2,875 in fines payable to.

TRENTON, N.J. -- 'Believe the children' was the battle cry when a young aspiring actress was sentenced to 47 years in prison for sexually molesting children at a New Jersey day-care center.

Five years later, as Margaret Kelly Michaels' conviction comes before a state appeals court, her supporters charge that believing the children put an innocent woman behind bars. They compare the case to the mass hysteria of the 17th century, when 19 men and women were hanged as witches in Massachusetts on the word of a pack of teenage girls.

'There is so much doubt here, to send someone away for that kind of sentence is just outrageous,' said Nat Hentoff, who writes a column on civil liberties for the Village Voice.

Hentoff believes zealous investigators and anxious parents induced the children to believe events that did not happen.

Margaret Kelly Michaels Today

To the other side, Michaels is a young woman who engaged at least 19 young children in bizarre sex play at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, threatened them and left them with emotional scars they may carry forever.

Prosecutors, parents and others who believe Michaels is guilty say that children have the right to be taken seriously and to be protected.

On Monday, a state appeals court hears oral arguments in the case. The judges there must attempt to balance the rights of an accused abuser against the need to protect children and to decide whether the judge who presided over Michaels' trial made the correct choices.

The appeal is going forward without the lead lawyer, Morton Stavis of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Stavis, at 77 a veteran civil rights lawyer, was killed in an accident in December, leaving the case in the hands of Robert Rosenthal, a young lawyer who first became involved as a student intern.

The Michaels case cuts across conventional political lines. Those who have rallied to her defense include Hentoff and Dorothy Rabinowitz, a conservative editorial writer and critic for the Wall Street Journal, while radical lawyer William Kunstler is part of the defense team.

'A good many liberals shy away from these kinds of cases because they think it's axiomatic to believe the children,' Hentoff said, suggesting that many reporters, judges and, for that matter, jurors do not want to look like they are condoning child abuse.

Anna Quindlen, the author of a syndicated New York Times column, has weighed in on the prosecution side.

'Kelly Michaels was convicted of those charges,' Quindlen said. 'That does happen to be the case.'

Lisa Manshel, author of a book on the case, 'Nap Time,' and one of the few reporters to sit through the entire nine-month trial, attacked Rabinowitz in the Washington Journalism Review, charging that she has published misleading information about a trial she did not attend. Manshel accuses other journalists of basing their reports not on the facts, but on an article Rabinowitz wrote for Harper's magazine.

'It's ironic that a press drive crying 'witch hunt' shows so many signs of being on a witch hunt of its own,' Manshel concluded.

Rabinowitz responds that Manshel, who first learned of the case from friends of the parents, 'was brought in as an advocate.'

Like most of the defendants in daycare sex abuse trials, Michaels seems an unlikely criminal. She grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, graduated from a Roman Catholic women's college, moved to New Jersey to be close to the New York art and theater world and got a job at Wee Care to make money.

Michaels was convicted in 1988 and jailed immediately. Her sentence includes a 14-year period to be served without parole eligibility.

The charges of abuse surfaced after her resignation in 1986 to take a job at another daycare center. The investigation began when a Wee Care pupil, submitting to a rectal thermometer during a doctor's examination, said his teacher had done the same thing.

The most damning witnesses were the victims, who testified from the judge's chambers over closed-circuit TV. They described games played in the nude and said Michaels had penetrated them with tableware and forced them to perform sex acts on her and on each other.

Jurors clearly believed the children, spending 13 days of deliberations reviewing the videotapes of their testimony and audiotapes of investigative sessions.

The childrens' testimony was buttressed by testimony from parents who said that they had seen changes in behavior that appeared, after the fact, to be the result of abuse, and by the evidence of investigators and experts who examined the children.

Defense experts were not allowed to examine the children, a key issue in the appeal.

But there was little or no physical evidence of abuse or eyewitness testimony. The first stories from the children came with the investigation, although some parents later said their children had been trying to tell them indirectly that something was wrong at Wee Care.

The daycare center was in an Episcopal Church parish house that was also used by the rector and his staff, but no one saw any abuse. A Wee Care teacher who entered Michaels' classroom unexpectedly said Michaels behaved as if she had been interrupted in the midst of something untoward.

The law on prosecutions involving young children as victims was evolving even while the trial was played out. Judge William Harth dismissed a number of counts mid-trial following a court ruling in another case on the use of hearsay testimony.

Since then, the state Supreme Court has limited the use of expert testimony on 'child sexual abuse syndrome,' saying it cannot be offered to prove that abuse occurred. Rosenthal believes that decision helps his case.

Max R. Selver∞

I. Introduction

New York Family Courts routinely admit “validation testimony” in cases involving allegations of child sexual abuse. Validation testimony consists of a mental health professional’s opinion that a child’s behavior is consistent with the occurrence of sexual abuse, and is often accompanied by a diagnosis that the child suffers from Child Sexual Abuse Syndrome (“CSAS” or “SACS”) or Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (“CSAAS”).

Since the development of these theories in the 1980s, mental health experts have concluded that they lack scientific merit. A treatise synthesizing the literature on the subject explains that “[t]here is no psychological symptom or set of symptoms observed in all or even a majority of sexually abused children,” and “[t]here is no sexually abused child syndrome that detects or diagnoses child sexual abuse.”[1] Accordingly, several state high courts have found validation testimony to be inadmissible under their standards for admitting expert testimony.[2]

Surprisingly, no New York court has ever scrutinized validation testimony under Frye v. United States[3]—the state’s standard for admitting expert testimony. The standard requires scientific theories to have gained general acceptance in the relevant scientific community to be admissible.[4] As a result, parents in New York Family Courts regularly face the prospect of erroneous findings of guilt in maltreatment cases, the stigma of being labeled sex abusers, and, most gravely, having their children removed from their care on the basis of scientifically unsupported evidence. The total absence of scientific support for validation testimony makes its continued use in New York Family Courts inconsistent with Frye and especially concerning when a parent’s