The Fortune Teller Case

Malvina, injured party, b. 1976, step daughter

The district court, 1994-07-29, convicted by 3 votes against 1

The court of appeal, 1995-04-13, acquitted by the least possible majority, 3-2.

In both courts every lay judge found the defendant guilty and every judicial judge found him not guilty.

Malvina's family originally consisted of herself, her brother (b. in 1974), her biological mother and her stepfather as well as the three biological daughters of these two parents. The young daughters were born in 1983 and 1987, and one of them suffered from a heart disease. The mother left the family in November 1990. Half a year later the son also moved away.

The stepfather took care of the household. He supported Malvina and was the only firm point in her confused existence. In spring 1991 he arranged a kind of semi-therapeutic regular meetings with a social worker because of her anxiety. While Malvina was still living with her family she sometimes visited her mother. These visits would often lead to very aggressive quarrelling, and Malvina would telephone her stepfather and ask him to fetch her immediately in his car. He always did so.

Eventually Malvina came to have permanent problems with other people, inter alia with her siblings. She did not respect times and did not clean up when it was needed. Her irregular behaviour constituted a significant risk for the child suffering from heart disease. Her stepfather told her that she must either improve her behaviour, or move to her mother, or try to get a place of her own to live in. Malvina?s real psychic chaos started after this conversation. She said to the social worker that she had been thrown out of her home.

In March 1992 she moved to her biological father. This did not turn out well. In summer 1992 she moved to her mother. This did not work either: her mother literally threw her out on 1992-11-27. The social services formally took her into care and placed her in her boyfriend's family. Once a week she would also have the support of and semi-therapy by a social worker.

The foster family agrees that Malvina was resolute, courageous and self-confident. The boyfriend's parents did not intrude into the sexual life of the two teenagers. But they both had to do their homework for school. Consequently, the parents never accepted Malvina's persistent demand that the couple should share a room. The boyfriend observed that the relationship between Malvina and her stepfather was decidedly positive. Unfortunately, Malvina now based her entire life around her boyfriend. In the end he was exhausted and did not manage to continue his relationship with her.

According to the affidavit by the social worker Malvina had told her about sexual abuse in January 1993. This was a retrospective construction she made in April without support of any case-notes. During the cross examination in the district court she herself realised that this information was wrong. But the judge immediately stopped the interrogation when facts that were not in agreement with the affidavit emerged.

The first embryo of the allegation started in February 1993. The school was going to show a movie of sexual enlightening. Malvina got upset and asked not to see it. She talked with the school nurse, who referred her to the child and adolescent psychiatric clinic.

It was this clinic, not Malvina herself, who informed the social worker about the abuse allegation. This information was passed on after the sequence of events that started in February in conjunction with the film.

As a result, the aim of the semi-therapeutic sessions immediately shifted their topic. While the objective until then had been to support Malvina against her mother's strange reactions, their aim was henceforth to help her against her stepfather.

It can be seen from the facts outlined above, that the following part of Malvina's account is also a retrospective construction. Malvina experiences her first sexual intercourse during summer 1991. It was a disappointing experience because she could not indulge in the act. Shortly afterwards she came home. Her stepfather was standing at the kitchen table, cooking dinner for the entire family. He said hello and she said hello. And then she understood that he had abused her, and that this was the cause why she had not had an orgasm. It was also the cause why she had always [even before the alleged assault] been afraid of darkness and of thunder. She had no recollections of abuse, and she has never said that any abuse actually had occurred. She has merely stated that images of abuse came to her mind.

She told her mother about her images. According to the mother's testimony in the district court she contacted the fortune teller Saida, whom she had seen on television. Saida said: "Yes, your man has done something to her, but not sexual intercourse." In order to check whether Saida was trustworthy, the mother asked four control questions, and Saida could correctly tell the mother's height, her weight, her hair colour, and her eye colour.

In a Swedish judgement the court must describe the evidence presented by both parties. However, in the judgement of this case no trace can be found of this telling evidence of the mother's highly-strung personality.

An affidavit was also handed to the court by a psychiatrist and head physician at the child and adolescent psychiatric clinic. He was Malvina's second therapist. In his affidavit he guaranteed that Malvina had told the truth; that the sexual assaults had caused difficulties in her relationship with boys, and had also caused self-contempt and emotional isolation etc.

But during cross-examination (which was sabotaged by the main judge to a rather great extent) he twice made a magnificent U-turn. First he admitted that he had not performed any investigation as to whether Malvina had been abused, or whether she suffered for the above listed deficiencies. He said that in his affidavit he had done nothing at all except repeating what Malvina herself had said.

But he also testified that lifted repression associated with recovered memories is an established fact. It is something that all psychiatrists agree about on. He himself and his colleagues regularly observed such phenomena.

Then the defence counsel threatened to report him to the police for perjury. The judge immediately stopped the cross-examination.

Nevertheless the psychiatrist made his second U-turn and now testified that the writings on this topic may well comprise a kilometre in a bookshelf; but as yet no one has proved that repression exists at all.

This U-turn in the middle of a testimony under oath is also concealed in the judgement by the district court.

Malvina has described a total of one assault with a minimum of details. During an event of violent thunder and lightening in the autumn when she was 12 years old and her mother was away, the stepfather gathered the entire family in the parents' bedroom. [At that time all the children's age must have been 1-1-3-12-14.] When the storm had subsided, the 14-year-old brother went to his room while Malvina slept in her mother's bed. Later in the night she felt a finger in her vagina.

A number of times she had fallen asleep while watching television. Her stepfather had carried her to her bed. Allegedly he had on two such occasions kissed her on the mouth and touched her breast. Once again, Malvina had no recollections of these events, only images.

Her account is also strange or impossible for other reasons. The house is situated at a dangerous location, and the risk of being hit by lightening is considerable. The entire family had repeatedly been sitting in the car when there was a thunder storm. And because of the electrical installation, the parents' bedroom is the most dangerous place in the house. The family can only have gathered in the living-room.

There is a meteorological station near the house. It could be unambiguously established that over a period of 5 months (the maximal period compatible with the temporal information supplied by Malvina), there was only one thunder storm at that location, and it was very mild.

Eventually Malvina becomes doubtful whether the "images" started to appear in 1986, 1987 or 1988, but she did not think at her three very young sisters. (This is strange, considering the active behaviour of the family brought on by the storm.) In the judgement of the district court this is expressed in the following mild and non-informative words: "From her image it is not clear where her three half-siblings were."

When Malvina recounts events that have no basis in reality, she will repeatedly recount a mixture of memories and "images".

In relation to the version provided in the police interrogations Malvina had further elaborated her account in the district court. But it should be noted that only irrelevant aspects had been further elaborated. She suspected that her stepfather had also abused his two youngest daughters, because he buys presents for them and they like him. She was also convinced that he had repressed what he had done to her.

The most important statement in the entire police investigation is taken from the interrogation on 1993-05-08, and it must be quoted in toto:

		"It was not until this guy who live in X-town became my boyfriend [,] when I started having sexual intercourse and then, then I began to have such feelings of repulsion and, hell, I thought this was very strange and such things and then a lot of images emerged and then I thought, hell – I don't know."

The chairman and only judicial judge at the district court voted for acquittal. Nevertheless, he had the main responsibility for the conviction, because he forbade the defence to present any real evidence. Seven (7) very important witnesses were not permitted to testify. They could have established that Malvina had lied. They could also have explained why she had done so. And her class teacher during her 7th to 9th year at school could have reported that she had often invented stories and over-reacted. The boyfriend mentioned above and a female friend could have shown that she had no problems in relation to boys, nor did she suffer from self-contempt or from emotional or social isolation.

The judge stopped the cross examination of the social worker and the psychiatrist when the content of their affidavits were about to be proven to be false. And the defence was not permitted to present an expert witness who could have testified (a) that repression is scientific fraud; the phenomenon does not exist at all; (b) even according to the pseudo-scientific theory maintained by the prosecutor and his allies, repression does not at all function in the way exemplified by Malvina. Repression is not lifted because of intercourse without orgasm, or by similar experiences.

The concept of impermissible evidence is unworthy any nation who wants to be considered a democracy. And it is the single most important cause of false convictions. In this trial all essential and truly informative evidence was forbidden (the prosecutor presented no non-trivial evidence at all). In turn the stepfather was convicted by the district court (although the verdict was reversed by the court of appeal), and this verdict was justified by the standard phrase that Malvina's account bore the stamp of being self-experienced events.







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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida