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Brave acts help balance injustice
Saturday, November 20, 1999
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
The child sex abuse investigations in Wenatchee were a civil rights disaster.
But even during the two years when innocent people were being coerced into prison, there were flickers of hope: Jean Wake and Connie and Mario Fry, for example, refinanced their homes to hire lawyers for people being wrongly prosecuted.
Now we have been served another helping of hope by two acts of courage. We celebrate both of them as the system of justice makes its way through the Wenatchee wreckage.
Doris Green, the 39-year-old Wenatchee woman who has been behind bars for five years, refused to plead guilty last week to misdemeanors, though doing so would have spared her another 18 years in prison.
Green, who is illiterate, said Wenatchee police detective Robert Perez threatened her in September 1994 and concocted a confession she couldn't read. She has been in prison on charges of child rape and molestation. The children who accused her have since said they lied, under pressure from Perez.
Last week Green stood up to this failure of due process and said, "I know I'm not guilty, and I'm not going to plead guilty to something I didn't do."
The mother of four was out of prison for this week's fact-finding hearing on her petition for a new trial.
Other defendants among the 43 accused in the witch hunt have pleaded guilty to lesser charges in order to leave the cells where they have waited for the end of their felony sentences or for justice.
The only people qualified to question their decisions are those who have endured identical treatment. But Doris Green made a super-human choice in declining the trade offered by the Chelan County prosecuting attorney's office.
Another courageous act this week could help assure that Green does not go back to prison.
When he learned of Green's hearing this week, and her version of the 1994 events, Wenatchee police officer Dave Schreiber volunteered that his recollection of Perez's behavior supported Green's testimony.
Schreiber notified court authorities and, on the witness stand in Wenatchee Wednesday, he became the first police officer to contradict Perez's insistence that he did not yell to extract confessions.
People caught in the Wenatchee investigations are being granted new trials or freedom, in part because of the generosity and expertise of lawyers and law students representing them through the Innocence Project Northwest.
We know innocent people are incarcerated, and that the legal system, finally at work, is inherently slow. So acts of courage and acts of generosity are medicine.
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