Mean Justice (56 page)

As his mother began telephoning everyone she knew with the news, as his supporters planned a party to celebrate, and as his lawyer gave television interviews, Offord Rollins decided what he needed to do next. He excused himself and left the house. He had a class to go to.

In his cell at the California State Prison in Corcoran, Pat Dunn read and reread the article in the newspaper describing Rollins’ victory. He was happy for the young man, but envious, too, longing for his own phone call that might, one day, set him free.

•   •   •

As Offord Rollins’ trial came to a sputtering conclusion, another case rose from Kern County’s past, again to present the specter of innocents wrongfully convicted. Just down the hallway from the Rollins trial, in the same dreary county-courthouse basement with its tired linoleum and hard wooden benches, the first of the convicted molestation-ring defendants, Scott and Brenda Kniffen and Deborah and Alvin McCuan, had at last returned to court after fourteen years of imprisonment. Their
habeas corpus
hearing would, one way or another, put a stamp of finality on the saga of the Kern County Witch Hunt.

Theirs had been the first such prosecution of its kind, a sensational case that launched five years of hysteria in Bakersfield and ignited a national frenzy of similar cases, some of which are still rocking the justice system with allegations of misconduct and wrongful convictions. Now, it seemed, the first ring case to be tried, with its thousand years of imprisonment for the four parents involved, would be among the last to be revisited.

As in other Kern County ring cases, the Kniffens and McCuans had lost their initial round of appeals. Their prosecutor, Andy Gindes, had been flayed for his behavior in other cases, but claims by the Kniffens and McCuans about his conduct in their trial were denied.
⁶
However, the appellate justices who rejected these appeals made one ruling that gave the four convicted parents hope: The California Court of Appeal would welcome new hearings—to be held at the trial-court level in Kern County—if
new
evidence could be presented to show that key testimony was false or fabricated. It would not be easy, because even though coercion and false testimony had been proven in many other cases, the Kniffens and McCuans had to find new evidence from scratch. According to appellate rules, legally, their convictions were automatically presumed just, their trials fair, the investigations that swept away their children and put them behind bars, unbiased—despite what had been proven in comparable ring cases. Nevertheless, it was a genuine chance, even in the face of the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, which was determined to fight their case just as hard as it had the others, mustering all its resources to keep the Kniffens and McCuans behind bars, and acknowledging no doubts about the evidence or official conduct in the case.

By the time of their hearing in the summer of 1996, the Kniffens’ lives and families had long been in shambles. In the Corcoran State Prison, north of Bakersfield (where Pat Dunn also was sent), Scott Kniffen had to be placed in protective custody, so reviled are child molesters in the hierarchy of prison life, targets for every sharpened screwdriver and smuggled razor on the yard. Housed with the most notorious inmates in the state, he
saw Charles Manson nearly every day and played chess with Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin. Meanwhile, Scott’s wife, Brenda, dodged lit matches and human waste hurled at her through the bars in her women’s prison cellblock. The couple had not seen their children—had barely talked to them—for most of Brian’s and Brandon’s lives. They had missed the boys’ birthdays, their graduations and their first dates; their transformation from boys into young men. Brenda still had the first tooth Brandon, her younger son, lost—she hadn’t been there to see it loosen and fall, but the boy’s foster parent had taken pity on the imprisoned mother and sent it to her. Brenda would stare at that tooth for hours, a frail woman who had wasted away to seventy pounds by the end of her trial and who fainted at the verdict. Prosecutors at the time complained she was acting.

The Kniffen boys were now twenty and twenty-three. Both maintained that they had never been molested and supported their parents’ bids for release. But over the ten years since the charges were first lodged, they had recanted, affirmed and recanted their accusations so many times (depending upon whether Kern County authorities or their parents’ defense team was doing the questioning), it was difficult, if not impossible, to determine the truth. It was one of the ironies in the case that the prosecution, which in the past had tried to conceal and ignore contradictions and falsehoods in their child witnesses, now pointed to the very same inconsistencies to argue that Brian and Brandon could not now be believed in their recantations. During the Kniffens’
habeas
hearing, the boys sat in the courthouse hallway with friends and relatives, seething in resentment at this turn of events. As far as they were concerned, it was yet
another betrayal by officials who were supposed to protect them, but who in their view had ruined their lives.

Four years earlier, their grandmother—Scott Kniffen’s mother, Marilyn—died of a heart attack, suffered at her kitchen table as she wrote a letter to her imprisoned son. She had never doubted his innocence. Nor did Scott’s father, Dick, who mortgaged his house and spent his retirement savings on investigators and lawyers, and who died in his sleep a few days after his wife. “They died of a broken heart,” Scott would later say, a weary bitterness in his voice and worn face leathery and pale from years of prison food and labor. “As far as I’m concerned, Kern County killed my parents, just as sure as if they had fired a gun into their hearts.”

The McCuans had fared no better than the Kniffens. Their marriage had ended. Their daughters still lived with Mary Ann Barbour, the stepgrandmother who had leveled the first allegations of molestation. Jenny and Jane, now adults, had never recanted in their parents’ case, though their allegations against others had eventually been disproved or dismissed. The girls still believed wholeheartedly in their memories of molestation, and they wanted nothing to do with their parents, their parents’ lawyers or their parents’ quest for freedom. The very thought of their parents walking free horrified the young women. When Susan Penninger attempted to interview them at Mary Ann Barbour’s home, the door was slammed in her face, after which someone emerged from the house and tried to douse her with a garden hose.

The McCuan-Kniffen appeal hearing began amid a carnival of news crews, lawyers, family members and courtroom voyeurs, the hallway outside transformed into a curious stage for posturing and speeches by various
hangers-on mixed with a quiet dignity and anguish shared by those directly involved. Even before it started, several Kern County judges were disqualified from the case, owing to allegations of conflicts of interest, bias and improprieties.
⁷
The matter finally landed before a newcomer to the Bakersfield bench, Jon E. Steubbe, a studious former law-school dean who had joined the Kern County Superior Court just seven months earlier. A virtual unknown to criminal lawyers, his main experience on the bench to that point was in divorce cases and custody disputes. Observers and prosecutors, as well as the attorneys representing the Kniffens and McCuans, all seemed to assume that the novice Steubbe would adhere to the same pattern every other Bakersfield judge had adopted in the ring cases—they figured he would deny a new trial and let the appeals courts sort it all out.

“I’m always hopeful,” appeals attorney Michael Snedeker said on the eve of the hearing. “But let’s face it. No Kern County judge has ever overturned one of these cases.”

Still, some of the best lawyers in Bakersfield, including Stan Simrin, who had won freedom for many other ring defendants years earlier, assembled to argue the case. They laid before Judge Steubbe a multitude of issues, from the withholding of key evidence to official misconduct. The now-infamous wink test was debunked for Steubbe’s benefit, as it had been in other cases, portrayed by a procession of experts as little more than medical quackery rather than a valid indication that a child had been molested, as Kern County prosecutors had labeled it. And the coercive questioning of the children, it was said, made false allegations likely and the truth impossible to know.

As the lawyers made their arguments and the experts gave their testimonies, it was apparent that they were doing so in a profoundly different atmosphere from the one that had prevailed fourteen years earlier at the beginning of the Witch Hunt. Outside the courthouse, there were no protesters this time, no activists demanding thousand-year sentences. The old hysteria had faded, bludgeoned into submission by years of revelations of official errors, overkill and misconduct; in its place was a tired public cynicism about the justice system, a fear that there could never be finality in any big criminal case in Kern County. The DA remained as zealous as ever in other cases, but in this courtroom, there were no prosecutors thundering about God and sin and the devil—only mounting evidence of unfair trials and potential innocence, and, with it, a shift in mood. The guards and bailiffs, who at first watched over the defendants with a stony mixture of fear and contempt, gradually began to relax. Their arms uncrossed and they could be seen smiling and joking with the prisoners; they even removed the defendants’ chains and allowed the long-separated Kniffens a brief hug and kiss. Much the same transformation occurred in Brenda Kniffen’s cellblock: As her case was made, guards and inmates alike came to believe her innocent. Where once she faced only abuse, now she was cheered and wished luck.

This change in atmosphere was not lost on the district attorney. A decade earlier, Ed Jagels brashly urged the court to allow TV cameras to record the proceedings; now his office felt besieged by “biased” reporting. When a crew from the ABC television newsmagazine
Turning Point
showed up to film the hearing, the defense lawyers readily gave interviews. The district attorney declined.

Yet the DA still expected to win. Deputy District Attorney John Somers, who had so adeptly put Pat Dunn away, led the prosecution team defending the conviction. As he had in the Dunn case, he conceived yet another brilliant strategy, choosing to present almost no evidence and hardly any witnesses to rebut the weeks of seemingly overwhelming evidence and testimony put on by the defense team. To some observers, including the original Kniffen-McCuan prosecutor, Andrew Gindes, it looked as if the DA was rolling over like a beaten dog on this case, preferring to put the controversy to a quick end rather than fight for victory. Others, though, including Stan Simrin, watched the prosecutor in awe while, point by point, he showed how each and every defense argument being presented as new evidence to Judge Steubbe had in fact been hashed out in one form or another during the original trial. It was a canny tactic: if there was no truly
new
evidence, there could be no new trial. Proving innocence, or reproving guilt, was not the point.

With an easy command over thousands of pages of testimony and a roomful of evidence, Somers cited reference after reference where the same ground had been covered thirteen years previously. Perhaps not as well, perhaps not as thoroughly, Somers told the judge, but questions about the interrogations of the children, the medical evidence, the psychiatric problems of the girls’ guardian, Mary Ann Barbour—all had been visited before. It was the “been there, done that” argument, and Somers was so convinced of the correctness of his position that he barely cross-examined some of the defense’s star witnesses. After all, if he was right, what they said didn’t matter.

Somers had boldly sidestepped the defense lawyers’
carefully laid trap. They wanted him to go head to head with their case, for they knew that they could shred any witness who dared suggest that the case had been investigated properly. On those terms, in a battle of experts and evidence, the defense knew it couldn’t lose. And so did Somers. But in the peculiar logic of criminal appeals, it didn’t matter that, in today’s world, the case would never have been investigated in such an improper manner, or that, in all probability, the Kniffens and McCuans would never have been convicted in the first place with today’s knowledge and experts. What mattered was the question of whether or not there was new information momentous enough to declare the first trial fundamentally unfair. And if all the issues raised before Judge Steubbe had been confronted and dealt with in the past by judge and jury, even in the most minor and incomplete fashion, then they could not be revisited again, Somers argued.

“There simply is nothing new about any of this,” Somers said time and again over the course of the two-week hearing, his small smile and quiet demeanor steadfastly impenetrable and confident. As his simple yet potentially devastating strategy became apparent, the defense team realized that if the judge—or the court of appeal—accepted his argument, the Kniffens and McCuans would die in prison long before becoming eligible for parole.

And Somers did prevail on almost every point of contention. When Judge Steubbe delivered his ruling, moving down the list of ten separate claims by the defense,
⁸
he agreed with Somers time and again. The questions about Mary Ann Barbour were old news. So were claims of withheld evidence.
⁹
Even on the issue of bogus medical tests, the judge sided with Somers: It was not new evidence,
just a disagreement between experts that had been argued during the original trial. The weight of scientific opinion may be much more in the defendants’ favor now, but that was not enough, Steubbe decided, even though he had heard from multiple experts who said there was no evidence of molestation at all.

There was one point, however, on which the judge disagreed with the district attorney, finding there had been new evidence presented. It concerned the interrogation of the children and new research, unknown thirteen years earlier, that helped explain how and when children told the truth—and what might lead them to give false testimony.