Why Accused Is Needed
I had never intended to make this documentary. Like most Americans, I was blissfully ignorant to a vast problem within our national legal landscape. But then I saw first hand the financial and social destruction that happens when false accusations are leveled against someone.
A close friend of mine was falsely accused of raping children, was arrested and is currently awaiting trial. When I began researching how someone defends themselves against such vile accusations (and they are vile, I know my friend to be innocent) I opened a door to a world I thought couldn't possibly exist in our country. It was a door that I could not close. What I saw shattered my belief and faith in a fair and impartial legal system.
And it made my heart sink when I knew my friend would be forced through a broken system, knowing that regardless of the outcome of his trial that he wouldn't come out of it unharmed.
Accused isn't a documentary about my friend. It isn't just about people falsely accused of child rape and molestation. It is about a national hysteria towards sex offenders and a resulting political, judicial and law enforcement environment that more closely resembles Russian Roulette than a rational carriage of justice. And no one has immunity: the revolver is pointed at each of us. You could be next.
Over the past couple decades the number of accusations of child sexual assault has skyrocketed: 500,000 accusations a year. However the number of substantiated claims has largely remained the same at 300,000 cases. This means that 200,000 Americans a year are wrung through our legal system despite their innocence. The average cost of receiving a proper and adequate defense against false accusations is an astounding $50,000 and the need for specialization in these types of cases makes the reliance upon public defenders almost a guaranteed guilty verdict. Once the innocent are falsely convicted, fighting on appeals can run into half a million dollars in legal fees.
But we don't stop there. Our societal zeal for persecuting sexual “crimes” and lauding the Sexual Offenders Registry as a success story surpassed absurdity moments after its introduction. Landing on the sexual offenders registry need not require a violent crime. It need not even require sex or sexual conduct of any kind. In several instances, you can become a sexual offender and added to the registry for committing a “crime” against yourself, so you are both the victim and the perpetrator.
Accused makes a comparison to the Salem Witch Trials. The reaction to this is that the Witch Trials were worse than anything happening today, that we no longer drown people who do not confess (yes, we do, just not with water), we don't accept heresy in our courts (oh but we do), we don't convict people without evidence (are you sure about that?). After all, most people argue, 19 people were executed as a result of the “legal dark ages” of Salem Massachusetts.
Accused will show how we have more than surpassed the absurdity of the Salem Witch Trials and the 19 innocent people who lost their lives. The death toll just from people who have been murdered, many targeted at random for being on the sexual offender registry has surpassed 55 people. Accused will show the atrocities that happen behind a veil of public safety and reveal the festering cancer which is eating our legal system, our due process and our civil liberties alive.
-Austen Hoogen, Producer/Director
