Martha Coakley is the attorney general of the state of Massachusetts and the Democratic nominee to replace Sen. Ted Kennedy in Tuesday’s special election.

Coakley shouldn’t be given any position of public trust – even dogcatcher – as Pulitzer Prize winner Dorothy Rabinowitz noted last week in the Wall Street Journal. I strongly encourage you to follow the link and read the entire article, but take any blood pressure medication you need first.

I vaguely remember the sex abuse scares of the 1980s growing up. I remember the McMartin Preschool case. The Amirault’s names rang a bell. I definitely recall the Dale Akiki case as it happened a stones throw from where I grew up.

What all these cases had in common were overzealous, out of control prosecutors allied with “child advocates” and “therapists” who “recovered” “memories” of horrendous abuse – that could not possibly have happened.

From the Akiki case:

During an extensive series of therapy sessions, the children began to tell stories of Akiki mutilating and/or killing a baby, an elephant, [!] a giraffe and rabbits in their presence. They also said that he had kidnapped them, taken them in his car, raped them, dunked them in feces-filled toilets, sodomized them with curling irons and toy firetruck ladders, forced them to play naked sex games, hung them upside down, threatened them with guns and knives, urinated on them, and assaulted them with blood torture rituals. All of this abuse allegedly occurred during a series of 90 minute Sunday school classes. Actually, the available time to transport and abuse the children would have been less than 90 minutes, because considerable time would have been needed to clean up the children and to calm them down so that they would not have been hysterical when their parents returned. None of their parents or the Sunday school supervisor observed any abuse. Sodomizing young children would have had to have left massive telltale evidence of abuse. But no physical evidence was ever introduced at trial. [emphasis mine]

The case was the same with the Amiraults. Gerald Amirault, the alleged ringleader, was convicted of sodomizing children with a butcher knife. This was apparently the world’s only butcher knife that leaves no physical wounds. The lack of physical evidence didn’t stop Gerald Amirault, along with his sister and mother from spending more than a decade in prison.

And that’s where Coakley comes in. Long after Rabinowitz had won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the gross injustice that was the Amirault’s prosecutions and there was a wide consensus that the techniques that “recovered” these “memories” from children were fraudulent, Coakley went out of her way to keep an obviously innocent Amirault in prison.

In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald's sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations" on which they had been convicted.

Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board's findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board's ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald's commutation.

Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004.

Amirault is still considered a convicted felon. He’s registered as a level 3 sex offender and must wear an ankle bracelet that monitors his whereabouts. He has to obey a curfew.

And he’s obviously an innocent man.

The fact that no governor of the state of Massachusetts has ever made an effort to right this wrong by pardoning the Amirault’s (I’m looking at you Gov. Romney) is a scandal.

The fact that Coakley went out of her way to keep him imprisoned is a scandal. In a just world, Coakley would be tarred and feathered.

Hopefully we’ll just have to settle for her continuing as Massachusetts problem for a few more years – and not a problem for the entire nation.

You can find audio of an interview with Amirault after the break courtesy of the Radio Equalizer.