[moderation_is_not_a_bad_thing]

I'm a little confused here.... is the guy innocent or guilty? Obviously a jury found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, is he somehow different than every other criminal claiming innocence?

If he's innocent then he needs better lawyers, if he's guilty then let him rot in jail. I personally don't get the idea of letting someone out early for "good behaviour". Good behaviour while in prison? Bizarre.....

[Tymesup]

He was convicted on the basis of statements made by children from his day care center. After extensive interviewing by child experts, young children made statements to the effect that Amirault had abused them. It is debatable whether these statements were, in fact, true. Dorothy Rabinowitz has written about this case in the Wall Street Journal (I suspect she wrote this article, too).

[aristeides]

Dorothy Rabinowitz has written persuasively in the past that he's innnocent. My recollection is that the testimony at trial was completely unbelievable.

[TroutStalker]

He is an innocent man. His mother and sister were both convicted as well, later having their's overturned. This was a political witchhunt. Unless you read the Wall Street Journal, you will never hear about this case.

More information can be found here: [Dorothy Rabinowitz] Gerald Amirault Has Reason to Celebrate">

[bvw]

I will take your question as if you asked in good faith, as I see a number of others have. If you don't know this case and the others like it you should -- go and learn. Google up Rabinowitz's essays and storms!

Unfortunately there hasn't yet been a capable playwright to recast the material into the pablumatic pre-digested form young students and dottering socialists need. It is raw and messy.

Remember Albee's play "The Crucible"? Well, that play was a 1960's socialist's retelling of the actual witch trials held in Salem, Massachussetts in 1692. Albee had his target set on the Red Scares, the long series of anti-communist and anti-socialist hysterias that had swept up mnay Americans since the 1880's or so. And in particular what was to become the watershed mark of that long series of mass hysterias, the McCarthy hearings and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Albee hit his target square on and devastated it.

In our own time, in the 1980's and early 1990's, we too had a major mass hysteria. Maybe there wasn't yet enough Prozac to go around, whatever.

The subconscious guilt root of that hysteria, I firmly suspect, was in the big increase in working mothers of very young children, and the fact that by working full-time these fertile young women in the peak of their sexual and maternal instinct bloom had to place the very naturally beloved objects of their conceiving and motherhood into the hands of disinterested unrelated parties, whilst at the same time placing their maternally lovely and sexually-peaking selves into the dog-eat-dog work-a-day world where male co-workers and male bosses at best ignored their maternal and sexual blossoming and more than often enough did note it and all the longings and desires for being cherished, longed for, mothering, wife-ing etc.

So much misplaced young motherhood in bloom. Society had not yet adapted. There was an great and serious counter-reaction thrust out of the social subconscious.

The Day Care Sex Scare. From tales of mutilated rabbits used in some weird cultic sexual rituals with toddlers, evil clowns, secret tunnels, to more prosaic yet highly charged claims of sex games with kiddies. All the evil and dark forces of the imagination unleashed!

Evil persons like the Reno herself were quick to the chase and to the exploit of this poisoned cultural well.

And poor sods and innocent good souls, as usual, where burned at all the many stakes the mass and mad public craze was able to muster.