Reno To Review Sex-Ring Case News Articles Renew Interest In Wenatchee Prosecutions

Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday she will examine new evidence of possible civil rights violations in the prosecutions of child sex-abuse cases in Wenatchee.

Reno’s comments came in response to a series of Seattle Post-Intelligencer articles that reported widespread wrongdoing during the investigation and prosecution of the Wenatchee sex-ring cases in the mid-1990s.

“If there’s any new information that would be available in those articles, we’ll certainly take a look at it,” Reno said at her weekly news conference.

Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin said the articles would be forwarded for review to the department’s Civil Rights Division.

“It will be up to that division to determine whether the articles contain any new evidence warranting further review into the matter,” Marlin said.

In Olympia, Gov. Gary Locke’s spokesperson, Marylou Flynn, said “it’s helpful to know that (Reno) is going to review the case again. The governor will be watching to see if they uncover anything new.”

Flynn also said Locke is keeping a close eye on the criminal appeals, civil cases, and review under way by Vickie Wallen, the Family and Children’s ombudsman.

In 1995, Locke’s predecessor, former Gov. Mike Lowry, and House Speaker Clyde Ballard asked the Justice Department to investigate possible civil rights violations.

But Reno at the time concluded there was “no evidence of prosecutable violations of federal civil rights.”

However, the Post-Intelligencer found that federal agents were instructed to question no one - only to retrieve documents.

In 1994 and 1995, 43 adults were arrested on 29,726 counts of sex abuse involving 60 children. The investigations were carried out by the state Child Protective Services and Wenatchee Police Detective Bob Perez.

A five-month investigation by the newspaper found that police, prosecutors and judges permitted civil rights violations, conflicts of interest and rulings that may have denied fair trials for many defendants, many of them poor, under-educated or retarded.

In addition, state social workers violated guidelines. Working with mental health therapists, they behaved more like prosecutors pursuing evidence of crime, rather than helping children. Critics of the investigation faced retaliation. They included some social workers who were fired after they questioned the validity of the probe.

Lowry said he and Ballard felt the only neutral agency capable of a thorough investigation was the U.S. Department of Justice.

Yesterday, the former governor said he was unaware that Reno’s response to his request was limited to sending agents to collect documents. Agents were instructed not to interview anyone connected with the investigations.

“I expected it to be seriously looked at and I think it was fair to have the assumption that it was,” Lowry said Thursday. “I think they definitely should have given it very serious consideration in 1995.”

In her news conference, however, Reno defended the initial inquiry, saying her department was required only to look into whether the cases merited further investigation.

“We did not conduct a full investigation,” she said. “We reviewed it (the cases) to determine whether there was any possible basis for federal action and determined that there wasn’t.”

Kathryn Lyon, a former Tacoma public defender who examined the Wenatchee investigations, was a lone voice in the wilderness when she wrote an unsolicited report on what she saw and sent it to Reno in 1995. Lyon’s report changed the tone of media coverage of the investigation, but fell on deaf ears in Washington and Olympia.

Lyon, who has turned her report into a book, “Witch Hunt,” yesterday was excited but skeptical about Reno’s announcement.

In a phone interview from her home in New York, Lyon said that in the initial Justice inquiry, “what (Reno) did … was just blow it away without any real thought, without any form of investigation at all. It was a total abdication of responsibility, in my opinion.”

“I’m excited because this is in the national public eye again, where it should be because it’s not just a Wenatchee problem,” Lyon said. “But I’m also aware of the fact that Janet Reno was been a zealous prosecutor in some of the most outrageous criminal prosecutions.”

As a Dade County district attorney before becoming attorney general, Reno bought into the very problems surrounding investigation of child abuse cases, Lyon said.

Several of Reno’s more sensational child sex abuse cases, which destroyed families and careers, have been overturned by the courts.

Reno should not believe Wenatchee’s problematic experience with child sex abuse cases was a small-town aberration, Lyon said.

“It’s not,” Lyon said. “The attorney general needs to own up to the magnitude of the problem. This problem is inherent in the national structure of law and other cases that have happened all over the country. There needs to be a federal solution.”