Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice has said she will select a group of law enforcement, legal and social science experts to help her investigators review a notorious child molestation case from the 1980s, although the attorney representing one of the accused said he would prefer the involvement of an independent prosecutor. The announcement came a day after a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit criticized police, prosecutors and the judge who handled the case against Arnold and Jesse Friedman. Jesse was a teenager when he and his father pleaded guilty in 1988 to molesting 13 children during computer classes in the basement of their Great Neck home. Jesse Friedman has long contended he was coerced into making the guilty plea and the appellate court said Monday there is good cause to believe that might be true (NYLJ, Aug. 17).

Jesse Friedman, now 40, was paroled in 2001; his father committed suicide in prison in 1995. The pair were charged with several hundred counts of sex abuse. Their story was the subject of the 2003 Oscar-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans.” The film, which featured archive video footage of the Friedmans, revealed evidence prosecutors had withheld—that at least one of the children who accused Friedman did so under hypnosis arranged by police.

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