Not Guilty, but Punished : Acquitted Van de Kamp Aide Cites Pain, Dangers of Ill-Prepared Child-Abuse Prosecution

SACRAMENTO —  “My life will never be the same,” state Justice Department official Brian Taugher said Wednesday as he returned to work after his acquittal on a child molestation charge he said should never have been filed.

Taugher, 38, a special assistant to Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, said at a news conference that in their anxiety to answer the growing public outcry against child abuse, prosecutors must be more scrupulous about investigating before charging suspects.

“In this case,” he said, “a decision to arrest was made in the D.A.’s office before the investigation had barely begun.”

Sacramento Dist. Atty. John A. Dougherty reacted unhappily, saying he was both “distressed by the inherent accusations” in Taugher’s press conference statement and “surprised by his factual misstatements and unsupported generalizations.”

The decision to prosecute Taugher for the alleged molestation of a 9-year-old girl at his daughter’s slumber party last July 7 was “the result of a thoughtful decision-making process,” Dougherty maintained. He said the arrest warrant was obtained upon a mutual decision by his office and sheriff’s officers.

In testimony, the girl he was alleged to have molested said that he walked naked into the living room where she was sleeping on a sofa, unzipped her sleeping bag, pulled up her nightgown and lay on top of her for five minutes. On Tuesday, a jury found Taugher not guilty.

Taugher said Wednesday that for many years “we didn’t find child abuse when it was there. Now we are in danger of finding it when it is not there.”

He added that an investigation that “boxes a child into pursuing a false accusation does as much harm to the child as to the person falsely accused.”

And he told of hearing from “dozens of individuals with various horror stories about being falsely accused of child abuse.”

He said he still believes that child abuse “is one of the most heinous of all crimes. . . . But we owe it to ourselves to have the benefit of a full investigation before we start throwing charges around.”

Taugher claimed that the alleged victim’s initial comments were “confused and contradictory” and “should have been meticulously investigated.”

He said that no statement was taken from her until 10 days after his arrest. “Had the conflicting medical reports been read,” he said, “it would have been clear that there was no physical evidence that a molestation had occurred.”

Dougherty, however, countered that the young girl was interviewed by a Sacramento County sheriff’s detective after the matter had been reported by her parents and before Taugher’s arrest.

Furthermore, Dougherty said, “the report of the child’s doctor appeared to substantiate her allegation.”

“Physical evidence of child molestation,” the prosecutor added, “almost never exists in nonviolent cases.”

Also, Dougherty argued, Taugher was wrong in saying he was not allowed to tell his side of the story. “He was given an opportunity to state his position at the time of his arrest and denied any wrongdoing.”

At his news conference, Taugher said he was “especially angry” about the way his daughters, aged 9 and 16, were treated shortly after his arrest: They were “taken into custody, strip-searched and continually interrogated over a period of 16 hours,” he said.

Dougherty said that also is inaccurate. “They were not in custody,” he said. “They were not strip-searched. They were not interrogated over a lengthy period.”

He said the daughters were simply taken to the Children’s Receiving Home because they told officers their mother was out of town.

Taugher, who is in charge of the attorney general’s legislative affairs, said the legal battle had left him broke and his reputation scarred. But he thanked “the hundreds” of friends and acquaintances who stood by him--including his boss, Van de Kamp.

As for the latter, he said he intends to call upon Taugher as an expert in the area of child abuse because “he has been through the process” and his experience “reinforces the necessity for restraint as we move ahead in what is a very difficult, tragic area.”

As a father who shares with his former wife joint custody of his daughters, Taugher said he can empathize with other single fathers who could find themselves in such sensitive situations.