The case of Frank Fuster has been back in the news thanks in part to this magazine’s efforts at reminding the public of the injustice of his situation. Fuster is, as National Review’s headline put it, Janet Reno’s Last Victim, the last man serving time for a conviction resulting from the "Satanic ritual abuse" hysteria of the Eighties and Nineties.
Fuster is certainly a criminal (he served time for homicide, and there is no question as to his guilt in that matter), and he may even be a child molester, but it is almost certain that he did not commit the crimes for which he was convicted, because it is almost certain that those crimes did not occur at all.
In Fuster’s case and in others like it, discredited and unethical psychological and pseudo-psychological techniques were used to unearth "recovered memories" in children, memories that were then used to convict men and women, many of them workers in day-care centers, of sexual assault. The stories the children told were, as stories invented by little children often tend to be, preposterous. They told not only of being sexually abused but of being transported via flying saucer to outer space to be abused, of being taken from their day-cares in American suburbs to distant Mexican prisons where they were abused and returned within the course of a few hours, of being dismembered and reassembled, of murder, being buried alive, and much more. That there was (of course) no evidence that any of these things had happened, that prosecutors dismissed the details as inconsequential distractions from the "greater truth," that Satanic sexual-abuse cults were real and active in Florida suburbs.
Of course, there was no evidence that these Satanic sex-abuse cults existed at all, much less that they had infiltrated the nation’s day-care centers, but that was treated as beyond question: They had to exist, because we were having a national hysteria about them, and we wouldn’t be having a national hysteria about nothing, would we? Why would we do that?
Janet Reno was prominent among those prosecutors and took the lead in the Fuster case. She oversaw the torture of his young wife, who was kept in solitary confinement, kept naked, denied basic hygiene (an observer testified that he found her covered with sores), subjected to sleep deprivation, etc. And though it is impossible to say at this point, it is probable that she was a party to the falsification of evidence purporting to show that a child in the case was infected with gonorrhea by Fuster; she certainly was complicit in the destruction of that evidence before it could be more fully examined. (Subsequent tests found no gonorrhea in Fuster or in the child.) Reno and her colleagues exhibited absolutely moral certainty in the justness of their cause: When the sexual abuse of children is at issue, justice will bear a great deal of innovation.