MovieChat Forums > Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995) Discussion > Evil? Not so much

Evil? Not so much

posted 16 years ago by tabbycat
2 replies | jump to latest

Although there is plenty to be found here, this movie is not really about evil.

It's about incompetence.

In "Outrage", fabled prosecutor Vince Bugliosi attacks the unfounded trust the public has in the competence of our "experts". We need to believe our doctors, lawyers, accountants, police, prosecutors, and judges do their jobs well, even when there is scant evidence that this is actually the case.

The Manhattan Beach Police, upon hearing the (as-yet uncorroborated) story of the first alleged victim, sent letters to other McMartin parents asking if their children had similar complaints. Newsflash: that's not how you conduct a molestation investigation. Was there no one in the MBPD that knew that? Why not? Shouldn't there be at least one detective with some actual background in this type of crime? What do you do, when you don't know what you're doing, and you know you don't know what you're doing, but it's your job to know? Do you just pull investigation protocol out of your ass and wing it? Wouldn't the rational, responsible thing be to bring in an actual expert, one with LAW ENFORCEMENT EXPERIENCE in child sex crimes?

Well, of course, that's what they thought they were doing. They brought in Kee McFarlane. They either didn't notice, or didn't care, that she was 1) not in law enforcement 2) had no credentials 3) had something to gain from an amplified investigation and 4) was a total quack.

And that's the crux of it. In the world of Oprah and Phil, everyone's an expert. They're on the teevee. A psychologist with a P.H.D. and a state certificate, a psychiatrist with an M.D. and years of internship, Dr. Laura with a BA in physiology. All equal. Right?

If we no longer hold any standards for our society's "professionals", why should it surprise us that the institutions created to protect us don't either?

[–] HalRagland 15 years ago

I have to disagree. I wouldn't use the word evil, but it is simply wrong to use children to further the end of persecuting the McMartin-Buckey family. The whole case was based on hundreds of coached child "witnesses" and a total fraud.

Kee McFarlane's credentials, or lack of them, is really a non-issue for me here. And if she had some "credentials" she could pull out of her purse, would that make any of the coached "testimony" she put before the jury anymore legitimate? No! She's simply instructing the children on what to say and not to say. The outcome on the "interview" with each child is preordained. McFarlane is going to find a child abuse "victim" ever time and she refuses to let the children say no to the question of whether or not they were abused. This is fraud and it doesn't matter what kind of education the "expert" interviewer in the case has. McFarlane earned her PhD. in witness coaching in this trial.

[–] IL_Maestro 10 years ago

although what happened was evil but i don't it was like that
back then, as i hear they weren't as good as they r now
they r better now, coz the learned from mistakes like those
they learned from the MacMartins that coaching the kids is wrong, they should only ask abt what happened instead of giving them choices to choose from
and this still happened later, in that movie "The Hunt" which was a Danish movie abt a similar real story and i knew this movie from discussing "The Hunt", in that movie they did the same mistakes coz they were not qualified to carry the investigation as it was a small town and who investigated the case first was the head of a small nursery so she did those mistakes
i think those cases were not so familiar b4 the MacMartins, so there were no experts back then
i agree though that everybody is an expert now, everybody is judging anything thinking they know everything abt anything whether it was political, legal, any department they just know everything abt it which is bad and it affects courts sometimes and affects some decisions as well.

"It is never about what happened, it is only how you look at it!"