Witch Hunt (2008)

To give everyone a little background of what was happening before Jagels was elected, there were many named city and government officials, as well as business owners and campaign managers, who were involved in a loosely knit society of abusing 10-14 year old boys. These children were being used as sex slaves, and many other completely horrendous acts that these men forced upon these kids. The most famous (or infamous) of these children was Robert Mistriel, who was accused of killing a high official, Edwin Buck. Apparently Mistriel was a hustler (male prostitute) when he was referred to Buck from another molester, who at the time was a co-owner of the newspaper. Mistriel was needless to say treated as a sex slave, among other things, and eventually could not take the abuse any longer and apparently conspired to kill Buck with an acquaintance. Mistriel was put on trial in 1983 and was sentenced to 31 years to life in prison, and has adamantly stated he was not the one who killed buck. Here's the kicker... all those officials who molested these children were well- known by law enforcement for doing these acts; they were never reprimanded for their actions, and never denied they had taken part in these actions.Here's my take on WHY they concocted the entire child molestation ring; to deflect the fact that Bakersfield had molesters in the highest positions of city government.

You will have read other comments, obviously this was a travesty on every front for each family and everyone affected.I was disappointed that it did not go in to any detail as to WHY the police just knocked on their doors with warrants and took their children away.Who made the decision to just arrest these people and on what grounds - I think that's a question anyone would ask after watching it. People somewhere should have been bought to justice, surely!? You would certainly hope so.Regardless this takes nothing away from a very interesting and shocking insight in to so called justice - replicated all around the world of course. I would highly recommend watching Witch Hunt. I can only hope these poor people were given millions in compensation and can find some forgiveness.Bless your souls!

America can only remain a free nation if the judicial process is fair, untainted, and subject to review. During the early 1980's, it seems that the residents of Bakersfield, CA sacrificed their judicial rights for the illusion of Law And Order. WITCH HUNT is a riveting documentary about a group of citizens who became the target of a joint task force of Law Enforcement and Social Services that illegally and immorally usurped their power. The State's position was that this police and social service unit provided an opportunity for sexually abused children to be heard, and allow the law to apprehend and punish their abusers. However, as the the film clearly demonstrates, Child And Family Services, with the aid of an overzealous police force, were able to orchestrate children's testimony, and allowed the local government to create a non-existing threat to the community. Bakersfield became a city under siege by pedophiles-perverted by "Sexual Weapons Of Mass Destruction". WITCH HUNT shows that these 'dedicated and thoughtful public servants' invented a phony threat to the community, and then rode it for all it was worth. This 'Response To Evil' allowed them to parade before the media and appear to be 'Tough On Crime', when really they did nothing but railroad innocent citizens by using Child And Family Services to badger and bully innocent children until they gave them the 'sexual horror' that they craved. In no way should this film be viewed as a fair and balanced treatment of child molesters, but what this documentary shows us is that Law Enforcement and Social Service Agencies are able to foster a climate of hysteria which might allow citizens to give up an unbiased legal system for the illusion of Safety. In the commentary to the film, we find that when Child and Family Service personnel were told by the children that 'nothing happened', the impressionable children were badgered and bullied and told that they were 'in denial'. What is truly alarming is that, given these conditions, this gross travesty of justice could happen to any of us.

If I were judging this as a public service message, I'd give it a higher grade. As a documentary film, it spends all but the last fifteen minutes of its time on case studies of four or five families convicted of child molestation in Bakersfield, California. There were several dozen convictions, some 35 of which were reversed years later -- and I mean years. One innocent man and wife were excoriated by the judge and received cumulative sentences of more than 500 years. Before finding an organization willing to look closely into their cases, four of the cases we follow served ten or twenty years. (What do you do when you've spent 20 years in jail and are released on your 60th birthday, as one victim was?) And it was hard time, too -- San Quentin, where child molesters must claim they were convicted of owning automatic weapons and possession of marijuana if they want to live.It's interesting to see the development of the cases, the means by which convictions were brought, and the experiences of the victims, their children, their families and friends.One weakness -- aside from the unnecessarily lugubrious score -- is that there is really no attempt at an explanation, no attempt that involves any sophistication anyway. One or another of the talking heads attributes the wave of mass hysteria to "political ambition," "zealotry," and what we would call "command pressure." But those explanations don't tell us much. Let me put it this way. Why -- out of all the avenues of advancement -- did the politically ambitious District Attorney (who has been reelected seven times) happen to choose child molestation as his conduit to power? "Zealotry" is a personality trait that explains nothing. It's like saying "greed causes robbery." And "command pressure" -- the sense that those above you must be given the performance that they want from you -- is omnipresent, and constants can't explain variations.I'd love to have seen the case studies squeezed into one hour and the rest of the time given over to an examination of the causes of this craze at the time it happened in Bakersfield -- or rather the causes of these kinds of crazes as they happen again and again, over generations, over centuries. Because, when you get right down to it, collectively and historically, we've seen all this before in one form or another. Witchcraft, Freemasons, hidden Communists, pre-school porno rings, and Satanism. For the past few years we've been working on "internet predators" that do not exist to any measurable extent, according to the only scientifically respectable study that I'm aware of. (I taught sociology, including classes on social problems that used to be called "mass hysteria.") What started this particular craze in this particular place? And, equally important, what stopped it when it was finally ended? The explanation must lie in the system itself, the entire social system, of which the legal system is only an instrument. You can't really blame it on an ambitious DA.Is there some reason society NEEDS an internal enemy to hate? Anyway, that's a lot of criticism of a film that desperately needed making and would have been far more useful if it had been made twenty or twenty-five years ago. God, how many lives have been ruined by our righteous wrath?