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Wednesday, February 25, 1998
With every step, rights were trampled
By
MIKE BARBER WENATCHEE -- Gideon's trumpet was muted, almost silent here. Clarence Gideon won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case 35 years ago that gave poor people accused of crimes the right to legal counsel -- strengthening constitutional guarantees of a fair trial. The majority of those accused of raping and molesting children in Wenatchee were poor, illiterate or mentally disabled. They had no inkling of the rights Gideon helped win. For them, justice was denied. A five-month investigation by the Post-Intelligencer shows the rights of the convicted were usurped at every step -- from police interrogation rooms to courtrooms. Only now, after years in prison, are some of the accused getting a fair hearing. Many cases hinged on children whose testimony was influenced, if not coerced, by threats and suggestions from police and caseworkers from the Office of Child Protective Services. Though some children later recanted accusations and some adults retracted confessions, only their incriminating statements were given any weight. Prosecutors received a special state grant -- $141,000 funneled through the Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development -- to boost their cases beyond what the county could afford. The court-appointed guardian of the accused, the public defender, was forced to use his personal credit card to cobble together a team of lawyers -- some right out of school. One defense attorney, Eric Christianson, quit Wenatchee and the law, sickened that a judge wouldn't give the resources needed to adequately defend two clients he insists are innocent. Now a Spokane high school teacher, Christianson questions the entire legal system. "Accusations can be embellished or fabricated. Confessions can be cajoled, coerced or threatened, especially from the mentally retarded, the ignorant and the terrified," Christianson says. "The prosecutor must trust the cop. The judge must trust the prosecutor, and the jury must trust the judge. It all goes back to the blind faith they had in one cop." That cop was Detective Bob Perez, the linchpin of the child sex abuse investigations that resulted in charges against 43 people. In general, Perez maintains he went by the book, but few of his targets went through the legal process without some violation of their constitutional rights:
Seattle lawyer John Henry Browne, who defended two people in Wenatchee, says defending against child abuse allegations is "like trying to prove you're not a witch." "At first I thought that of about 40 defendants, 10 were guilty. Now I am not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of anyone," he says. Robert Rosenthal, a New York attorney who has a growing reputation for challenging questionable child abuse convictions, says what happened in Wenatchee is an example of the state trying to "present evidence when there is none." "It was all a blind pursuit of a singular hypothesis of guilt," says Rosenthal, who is handling appeals for several Wenatchee defendants. The pursuit began with Perez and his CPS counterparts. Perez has acknowledged he was inexperienced in child sex-abuse investigations, though he is a veteran police officer. He also acknowledges neither he nor CPS caseworkers had ever before handled the kind of complex, multi-level investigations they launched. Rosenthal says the results were inevitable: "The interrogation techniques of Detective Perez would have been condemned if they had been used on a serial killer." Most of the trials relied on statements gathered by Perez, who boiled down versions of his interviews before presenting them to prosecutors. "My notes are incorporated into my police report, and when that's done I throw them away," Perez says. "There's no reason to keep them. I'm available for cross-examination and review." In June, 1995, Wenatchee defense attorney John Beuhler gave a sworn statement that reveals how Perez developed his no-notes policy. In March of that year, Beuhler had punched holes in a sex abuse case by showing that Perez's typewritten report didn't match notes taken by Kate Carrow, a CPS caseworker, during an interview of an alleged victim. Beuhler says he was taking a break in the courthouse hallway when Perez said, "You know damn good and well why I destroy my notes. You burned me about 10 years ago on a case, and I have gotten rid of them ever since. And if I had known that these (Carrow's notes) still existed, I would have gotten rid of them, too." Beuhler won that case. Perez now says he was only joking. In July 1995, in preparing his defense of one of the accused, Auburn attorney Robert Van Siclen had requested all police and CPS documents dealing with the initial interviews of Donna, Melinda and their brothers. He was told all notes had been destroyed in 1995. But earlier this month, the notes were produced. "I was told that the notes of the interviews, both those by Perez and CPS, had been destroyed by Perez after he prepared his incident report. Now, two and a half years later those same interviews showed up in information provided for another case," Van Siclen says. "This was highly important evidence showing that Melinda had initially denied the sex abuse by her parents and was pressured into making the false disclosures. Due process goes out the window when the prosecution intentionally withholds evidence like this." Steve Lacy, a tough East Wenatchee attorney, has faced Perez more times in court than anyone in town, winning several false-arrest lawsuits over the years. "His memory is always better than his notes," Lacy says. In one case handled by Lacy, interview notes Perez failed to destroy tell a far different tale than what was typed up for prosecutors.
But when the Devereauxs divorced in 1991, Wenatchee CPS supervisor Tim Abbey and other caseworkers -- many of them Perez's friends -- questioned whether it was proper for Devereaux to continue to take in girls. The simmering controversy exploded in the summer of 1994 when Devereaux grounded Annie, one of his three foster daughters, after she had a late-night visit from a boy. Annie, then 15, retaliated by spiking Devereaux's soft drink with iodine. The incident was reported to CPS; Annie was sent to juvenile detention, where her confession seemingly ended the case. But on Aug. 3, Perez interviewed Annie at the detention center. Perez says he was following up on the iodine incident with his solo interview and stumbled onto a sex-abuse allegation against Devereaux. The following day, Annie recanted the accusation to Child Welfare Services caseworker Paul Glassen, saying Perez pressured her. Too late. Perez's notes from his later interrogation of Devereaux show the foster father talked in detail about the routine problems he has encountered with foster daughters. Those are what social workers call "boundary problems" -- girls acting out by running around in their underwear or expressing sexual curiosity. When Perez typed up the interview, he translated that conversation into a detailed confession of sex acts with children. Despite Annie's recantation, prosecutors moved against Devereaux. At the same time, evidence that could have helped Devereaux defend himself was withheld. Perez's own foster daughter, Donna, was a key witness in many of the Wenatchee prosecutions. She told Perez and Carrow she never saw anything amiss when she lived at the Devereaux home in 1993 and early 1994, when some of the abuse was alleged to have happened. That information was never reported. Devereaux eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to spanking a child but was cleared of all sex-abuse charges. The case against Devereaux was typical of the Wenatchee prosecutions in that no physical evidence was found. It all boiled down to children's stories and, in some cases, questionable confessions taken by Perez.
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