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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Legal Aid Offered To Child Abuse Suspects Justice Department Lawyer, Acting Unofficially, Will Help Robersons

From Staff And Wire Reports

A Department of Justice attorney who once helped free two Massachusetts women he says were wrongly convicted of child sex abuse has pledged to represent the alleged organizers of the Wenatchee sex ring.

Paul-Noel Chretien of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy said he would help defend lay Pentecostal minister Robert Roberson and his wife, Connie, if they are found guilty and appeal.

The couple is on trial in Waterville, Wash.

Chretien, acting as an individual and not on behalf of the Justice Department, said allegations of a sex ring in Wenatchee are “outrageous.”

Meanwhile, his agency has completed its review of allegations that Chelan and Douglas County police and prosecutors were overzealous in investigating and prosecuting more than two dozen people.

The scandal has torn apart the Wenatchee Valley and renewed a national debate about the integrity of allegations from children who “remember” abuse during interviews with therapists and police.

Conclusions of the review by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division weren’t immediately released because Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday she has more questions.

“We are trying to resolve the issues and make sure that we respond in the most appropriate manner possible,” she said at her weekly news conference.

The Wenatchee investigation has led to charges against 28 adults. Of those, 17 have pleaded guilty to or been convicted of sex-related crimes. Sex abuse charges against five people have been dismissed for lack of evidence. One woman, a Sunday school teacher at the Robersons’ church, was acquitted in what one juror said was a “witch hunt.”

Three others await trial.

Prosecutors say up to 50 children were forced to have sex with each other and groups of adults, who sometimes wore all black and sunglasses and raped them on the church altar.

Defendants claim the prosecutions were based on testimony from a girl whose foster father was the lead detective in many of the cases. They claim people were targeted in a vendetta by police and prosecutors.

Detective Bob Perez has a criminal record, is accused in court documents of stalking two ex-wives and had to pay back unemployment benefits he falsely claimed. His 1989 performance evaluation by his superiors states he is an egotistical bully prone to target people.

Pat McMahon, an attorney hired to represent Wenatchee authorities, said, “Our casework is sound. You can yell all day long about how the investigation was conducted, but what about the evidence?”

Investigation critics say there is no physical evidence, only the fanciful claims of troubled children and convicted sex molesters trying to win reduced sentences.

The Robersons are on trial for child rape and sexual abuse that prosecutors allege happened during ritualistic orgies at their church.

The couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Rebekah, recanted on the stand her earlier statement that her parents had sexually abused her.

In a Wall Street Journal article Wednesday, Chretien said the Wenatchee case was another in a long line of child sex abuse prosecutions that don’t hold up under scrutiny because of “the inherent unreliability of testimony extracted from young children.”

“The current child abuse prosecutions in Wenatchee combine the flaws of past trials with two new twists: Investigators do not videotape or even retain the notes they take of their interrogations of children, thus making it impossible to trace how the children made their ‘disclosures,”’ Chretien wrote. “Even more ominously, many defendants have been charged only after publicly criticizing earlier prosecutions.”

Chretien said appeals courts all over the country are overturning group child sex convictions because of tainted investigations. While Chretien conceded incest is an inherent tragedy in all communities, he said sex rings have never been proven.

Prosecutors across the country, he said, have stopped bringing these types of cases to trial “until Wenatchee, where they believe there’s this bizarre sex ring.”

Chretien noted that many of the defendants were mentally retarded and pleaded guilty to avoid lengthy sentences. It does not, he said, make them guilty.

“If this happened on the East Coast, there’d be 100 lawyers volunteering to help the Robersons,” he said. “But Wenatchee is in the middle of nowhere. There’s not a lot of lawyers there. Wenatchee is eight years behind on knowledge. It’s an absurdity.”

, DataTimes