by Levi Bradley

Created on: June 10, 2008

False allegations of child abuse are a blow to the core of your being. Few events in your life will strike you as hard. The accuser insults your honesty, integrity and decency as a human being. A legal charge further demeans your humanity. The emotional toll can impact your health, but more than anything else, it affects your focus at a time when you need it most.

Make no mistake about this...if you don't run out fighting at the first hint of a charge, you will lose. The tools of the prosecution are stacked against you, and they will always get a head start. You can never let up.

At 11 years old, my son was charged with sexual assault on two younger boys. Baseless from the very beginning, as time went on, the stories the two mothers told grew uglier by the day. The background is revealing, but would take pages; let it suffice to say the facts never supported the stories; the motive was clearly money; the method was unforgivable; and the victims were all children, most notably my son, but also the two younger boys.

Two women concocting a story inconceivable to the rational mind given the facts should never have been considered a legal issue, but it was. The accusations, given the layout of the environment, a crowded sports park, were impossible. The prosecution systematically ignored any and every fact that did not support their case. The police fully enabled and supported the railroading of an innocent boy. The investigator lied when he unsuccessfully tried to trick my son into admitting guilt, and he lied again to a judge just to keep my son in jail. The responding officer, who told me at the scene that no one had actually seen anything, and whose story was inconsistent with the lurid details on the women's affidavits, told me later he had been ordered to destroy his notes from the initial response; the first time in 14 years; yet he was called to the stand during the trial and lied to protect his career. The pressure on us to plead out the case was nearly overwhelming. My son put it in perspective. We asked him if he wanted to admit to doing something bad so we could just go home. "If I say I did something I didn't do, that would be lying." He refused to lie when the legal system was trying to force him to. He refused to lie when no less than a half-dozen lawyers advised us to plead guilty.

When we wouldn't plead guilty, the prosecution added another charge, upping the ante. My son could have gone to jail for 40 years, and if found guilty or pleaded guilty, he

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