... with a candidate-centric poster showing up and in two hours posting links to right wing sites.

Not that MA politics is anything like Chicago's, of course. Let alone the 2008 primariez.

"Controversial" doesn't begin to describe that case. And yes, scattered and pre-Internet news sources and tendentiousness on all sides. Compared to the Willie Horton case, it's got undreamed of possibilities. Fortunately, we've got some subject matter experts in the field that we can trust, I would say.

From what I've been able to find out, Bob Chatelle was a journalist, free speech activist, and MWU officer and early advocate for the Amiraults, but probably the most famous writers on this case were Dorothy Rabinowitz (a conservative and WSJ op ed writer, who won a Pulitzer for her series on the day-care satanic ritual cases) and on the other side of the political spectrum, Alexander Cockburn. I'll drop the entire subject now--it just bothered me when I heard about Coakley's involvement in this case because the whole child care satanic ritual hysteria of the 1980s was such an ugly chapter in our country's legal and cultural history.

I think that Judge Borenstein, who eventually secured the release of Gerald Amirault, put it best.

“The overriding theme was how decent, well-intentioned people [prosecutors and judges] are capable of making huge mistakes. And secondly, how difficult it is to admit the mistakes we made.”

To this day, Borenstein seems baffled why prosecutors could not admit that the evidence presented to establish child abuse in the case was improper. “No one has asked, ‘Either we did blow it, or might we have blown it?’”

Link

I'm willing to accept Judge Borenstein's assessment that Coakley and others were well intentioned, but I would have more respect for Coakley if she had been willing to reexamine the evidence in 1999, when the case fell into her lap and by which time there was a much a better understanding of the proprietorial misconduct that occurred in this case.

I especially appreciated reading lightiris's views in that exchange, but I won't bring this subject up again. I don't like that fact that Coakley still to this day insists that the Amiraults were correctly prosecuted, given the coercive nature of the interviews of 3- and 4-year-olds with very porous memories and the lack of physical evidence (aside from some extremely ambiguous physical exam results). But I'm not going to have to vote for her, unless she does in fact run for President in 2016, by which time she will have a much longer record by which I can judge her. And I know that she has staked out many positions that make her quite popular with people whom I respect, so I am ready to let go of this.

Finally, I also now know that the cause to free the Amiraults was taken up by various "limited government" right-wingers, but that of itself doesn't make the case any less troubling, at least to me. But I've had my say and I'm done with it.