The award-winning documentary Witch Hunt, a story about the arrest, conviction and later exoneration of dozens of Bakersfield, Calif., adults for alleged child sex abuse in the mid-1980s, makes its world television premiere April 12 on MSNBC, with a DVD release April 14.
Witch Hunt weaves the larger Bakersfield story through the travails of John Stoll, a construction worker who while in the midst of a custody battle over his young son, was accused of sexually abusing the boy and five other children. Stoll was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison despite glaring problems, among them, a lack of physical evidence, suggestive questioning of the children by authorities, irregularities in the investigation and overreaching by prosecutors.
Stoll’s conviction was ultimately reversed after three attorneys from the SCU-based Northern California Innocence Project, along with 10 Santa Clara Law students, proved that the methods used to interview the child witnesses produced false testimony. The work by NCIP required two years and thousands of borrowed dollars.
After witnessing firsthand the dedicated team and vital services provided by the Innocence Project, which has lost the government funding it once received, directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy decided to donate a portion of the profits from the sale of the DVD to NCIP.
Read the full press release on the Santa Clara University website
