E-Mail This Article to a Friend The trials of Bernard Baran (continued)

Before the trial started, prosecutors contacted Baran with a plea bargain. Exhausted and unsure what to do, Baran called his mother. She told him that she knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he should stand up for what he believed in. But she also said she would understand if he took the deal. Then she asked him what he would do.

"Fight," he told her. Had he taken the deal, Baran would have been released 12 years ago.

"I’ve never forgiven myself for giving him that advice," Shaw says.

The trial was held in January 1985 and lasted five days. Prosecutor Dan Ford, a Berkshire County assistant district attorney (who was subsequently appointed Superior Court associate justice), centered his prosecution on the testimony of the children. There was little physical evidence.

Of the six original accusers, five testified. Tom Hill never took the stand, forcing the trial judge to drop the charges involving him. In the end, Baran was never convicted of any charge related to the boy whose family had sparked the investigation.

Baran testified on the final day. He appeared pale and exhausted, his mother recalls. The jury was unswayed. After less than five hours of deliberation, jurors found Baran guilty of nine counts: five for assault and battery against a child under 14, and four of child rape in the cases of Jane Reed, David Stowe, Mary Gomez, and Kathy Cooper. Ford dropped the rape charge involving Peter Slocum.

At 19, Bernard Baran was sentenced to two concurrent life terms in prison.

Flaws in the case

A three-month Boston Phoenix investigation by a team of Boston University journalism graduate students revealed deep flaws in the prosecution of Bernard Baran. Above all, almost every child’s case left important questions unanswered — significant gaps, given that the children’s testimony convinced the jurors of Baran’s guilt.

"The way the kids acted ... impressed me. That helped me [reach a decision]," said juror Edward Fields, a retired Pittsfield police officer, in a recent phone interview.

Indeed, the children had been well prepared. Before the trial, Ford led them through weeks of mock testimony, according to a DSS report included in court documents. But as in many other day-care sexual-abuse cases, the questioning techniques employed may have led the children wrongly to accuse Baran.

The detectives and psychologists investigating the allegations were working in uncharted territory, using unproven techniques that were later repudiated. "We know a lot more than we did 20 years ago about children’s memory and suggestibility, and how to interview children in the most forensically sound and effective way," Assistant District Attorney David Deakin, chief of the family-protection and sexual-assault unit in Suffolk County, said in a recent interview. "We’ve learned from all kinds of cases, not just day-care child-abuse cases, what works and what doesn’t when it comes to interviewing children."

Researchers like Dr. Maggie Bruck, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, and Stephen Ceci, professor of psychology at Cornell University, say that false memories are easy to implant in children’s minds and that suggestive, repetitive questioning can induce them to say things about abuse that simply are not true. In 2000, Bruck and Ceci co-wrote what some in their field consider the seminal text on the subject: Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony.

One example of how to induce false memories in children involves the use of anatomical dolls and puppet shows. "Investigators can misuse any props in a suggestive way," says Bruck in a telephone interview. "The misuse of props provokes more opportunities for false accusations. Research has shown that it leads to errors — kids play with the dolls and it may not be anything sexual at all, but investigators still include them in their reports."

To be sure, it would be nearly impossible to judge the techniques used 20 years ago by the investigators in the Baran case. Unedited tapes and transcripts of the original interview sessions no longer exist. But in a recent interview, Detective Collias, now retired, acknowledged that their approach toward the children in Baran’s case may have been flawed.

"We didn’t have the set-up" to properly interview the children, he says. "We did the best we could with what we had at the time."

As compelling as the jury found the children’s testimony, scant physical evidence was ever presented to support the charges of sexual abuse. Doctors examined all six children, but only two, Jane Reed and Tom Hill, showed any physical signs of harm.

Dr. Jean Sheeley, a Pittsfield pediatrician now at the Bay State Medical Center, in Springfield, examined both children. She testified that she found microscopic tears in Jane’s hymen, and gonorrhea in Tom’s throat. Such evidence was viewed as extremely significant at the time. In the 1980s, the field of child-sexual-abuse research was quite new, and doctors thought any genital damage in children was a sure sign of abuse.

"Twenty years ago, there were no sexual-abuse experts," says Dr. Angela Rosas. "It was all handled by pediatricians." The director of the Child Abuse Program at Sutter Medical Center, in Sacramento, California, Rosas specializes in abused and neglected children. The techniques Sheeley used to measure Jane’s hymenal tears are now considered "sort of useless," Rosas says, after Sheeley’s examination methods are described to her. "That practice has fallen by the wayside."

Jane’s genital injuries were relatively small, says Rosas, so a doctor would have to look at the surrounding tissue, like the vagina and labia, to diagnose abuse correctly. Sheeley never testified to any damage to those tissues, which can heal within a matter of days. All in all, based on Sheeley’s testimony, Rosas says, "you can’t draw any conclusions" about whether abuse occurred.