No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times

In 1742, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, wrote, "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." Two hundred forty-three years later, in 1985, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a syndicated columnist and television commentator, encountered the case of a New Jersey day care worker named Kelly Michaels, accused of 280 counts of sexually abusing nursery school children -- and exposed the first of the prosecutorial abuses descri...