The Wall Street Journal's Robert Bartley writes on the case of Gerald Amirault:

He will finally go free--17 years too late.

The end of Gerald Amirault's long struggle for freedom is in sight. A Massachusetts parole board saw to that with a unanimous decision on Friday granting his petition for release--officially set to occur at the end of April.

It was a joyous day for this prisoner of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, behind bars since his conviction, in 1986, as a molester of nursery school children in a case based on bogus testimony dragged from browbeaten child witnesses. It was an exultant day too for his family, which has kept its hopes up despite years of having them dashed.

Mr. Amirault's freedom could have been derailed by one factor of consequence to Department of Corrections parole boards--namely the prisoner's refusal to agree that he was guilty. Like his mother and sister, who were also wrongly accused but were released earlier, Mr. Amirault refused to attend sex offender classes despite what it could cost him. They refused to do anything that would suggest there was any merit to the charges against them…

It is newspaper practice to drop the "alleged" when a person has been convicted of a crime. But in the face of so much that says Amirault was wrongly convicted, is it truly "fair" journalism to refer to the man at the center of the Fells Acre case this way or this way, or to continue to refer to the complainants as "victims?"

The state prosecutor who built his career on the Fells Acres case, Luther Scott Harshbarger, liberal do-gooder icon, who went on to become state attorney-general and Democratic candidate for governor, and then to head Common Cause, has been named to lead a review of state prisons. Perhaps on an inspection tour he can stop and say hello to Gerald Amirault, the man he put behind bars all these years.

There is something more than a little appalling about being lecture on ethics and good government by a politician who made his name sending an innocent family to prison – and still, in the face of overwhelming evidence they were unjustly convicted, refuses to admit he made a mistake. Good government, indeed.

Here's a page that was compiled to protest Harshbarger's connection with Common Cause. Another chronicles the Amirault case and draws a comparison to the Salem Witch Trials.