Witch-hunts & child abuse.

No Crueler Tyrannies Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times Dorothy Rabinowitz Free Press, $25, 239 pp.

Dorothy Rabinowitz won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for the reporting that makes up the bulk of No Crueler Tyrannies. No prize has been more deserved.

Throughout the 1980s, workers in day-care centers around the United States found themselves accused of sexual abuse. The charges were fantastic. Four-year-olds claimed to have been raped at knifepoint (or even with knives). Secret rooms filled with clowns and magicians and reserved for sex crimes were said to exist. Some children believed that peanut butter was spread onto their genitals and then licked off. Oddly, though, no evidence was ever found for the charges. The cases were built solely on the testimony of children who were carefully led to their conclusions by interviewers who essentially coached them. Defendants had no opportunity to challenge the testimony. Judges went along, adding their voice of disapproval for the presumed offenders. The convicted were given maximum sentences. Prosecutors congratulated themselves, including two who aimed for higher office: Miami's Janet Reno, who became attorney general of the United States, and Massachusetts's Scott Harshbarger, who lost a campaign for governor.

Some day, probably not until the children who were led to believe the worst have passed from the scene, the United States government may begin to make amends for the harms it imposed on innocent people like Gerald, Cheryl, and Violet Amirault, Grant Snowden, and Margaret Kelly Michaels. In the meantime, Dorothy Rabinowitz has not forgotten them. Her persistence in writing about their cases for the Wall Street Journal is in part responsible for the fact that all of them, except Gerald Amirault, have now been released from prison.

Rabinowitz has turned her articles into a book almost too painful to read. One feels particular pain for Gerald Amirault. To win parole, the State of Massachusetts insists, he must repent for his crime. But because he never committed any crimes, Amirault, a model prisoner, has made no such confession, and in return for his integrity--a virtue we ought to honor in America--he continues to sit behind bars. It is not enough that his life has been destroyed. His sister was also sent to jail, and his mother died shortly after her release. The contrast between this law-abiding man sitting in prison and the overzealous, rule-breaking, and brutally insensitive people who put him there is enough to make anyone wonder how a system designed to insure justice could have gone so haywire.

How did it? Perhaps the cause of the panic lay in the guilt parents may have felt at not spending sufficient time with their children. Or maybe it was caused by a growing irrationality that produced the cults and extraterrestrial sightings of the times. Better at description than analysis, Rabinowitz offers no explanation. Yet the power of her narrative suggests one anyway. Before blaming the system, we should focus on the actions of specific individuals. Three in particular stand in special need of censure.

The first is Scott Harshbarger. A liberal in the Massachusetts sense of the word, Harshbarger, who went on to head Common Cause after his gubernatorial defeat, has never once showed a trace of compassion for the victims of his crusade. As second thoughts began to creep into public consciousness about the abuses of the 1980s, Harshbarger went on a rhetorical rampage, equating the Amiraults with the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. He responded to those who sought to bring justice to the falsely convicted by accusing them in turn of abandoning the children his own office had so helped to manipulate. No one knows whether Harshbarger's inflexibility caused him to lose his next election campaign--I refused to vote for him because of it--but the more important point is that his actions revealed a most unattractive side of the liberalism he professed, a liberalism that had lost all sense of proportion in order to hold fast to a predetermined sense of who is a victim and who victimizes.

Conservatives come across no better in the book. The most perplexing figure in the entire episode may well be Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard and former member of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Fried, solicitor general of the United States in the Reagan administration, is widely known as a libertarian. Yet his love of liberty never extended to Gerald Amirault, an individual who had felt the full fury of governmental zeal. Fried wrote a decision saying that closure in the case mattered more than any miscarriages of justice that may have taken place. Even more remarkable, he opined that cases like that of the Armiraults routinely came before the court, as if, Rabinowitz acidly writes, clowns who drink urine and seduce children by dressing as elephants are the usual fare of daily life. Five members of the Supreme Judicial Court voted with him, including Margaret Marshall, the chief justice (and the wife of crusading columnist Anthony Lewis). Their decision was so shameful that lower court judges tried their best to work around it.

Gerald Amirault was victimized by a third individual as well, former governor Jane Swift. A young and relatively inexperienced politician, she assumed the office of governor when the incumbent, Paul Cellucci, was named ambassador to Canada by President George W. Bush. Trailing in opinion polls, Swift, when presented with a chance to approve a decision by the state's tough-minded Board of Pardons to commute Amirault's sentence, ducked, only to fall even further behind in the polls before exiting the race on behalf of Republican Mitt Romney. If anyone were in doubt why Swift would have been a bad choice for governor, her cowardice provided reason enough.

There are heroes as well as villains in Rabinowitz's book. Pride of place goes to Jude Isaac Borenstein, who ordered a new trial for Violet and Cheryl Amirault that eventually led to their release from prison. Others played similar roles in equivalent cases in Florida and Wenatchee, Washington. An attorney named Robert Rosenthal appears frequently throughout No Crueler Tyrannies, undertaking appeal after appeal on behalf of the falsely accused.

In the end, however, no amount of corrective action can ever remove the stains to American justice imposed by the army of the righteous united behind the conviction that children were being abused all over America. Ironically, of course, there were children who were being abused in the 1980s and earlier, all too often, alas, by clergy. Somehow the child protectors never looked there, no doubt intimidated by the difficulties of extending the law into religious establishments. Instead they took their fury where they could: leaving behind children and parents convinced that their children were abused. In fact the only abuse they suffered was at the hands of their presumed protectors who made a mockery of the claim that justice will always be served.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boise Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith will be published by the Free Press in September.