'I'm just happy I got through it'
By Allison Sundaram
Even though John Stoll spent two decades in a jail cell, he is not bitter.
Falsely imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and with the help of the Northern California Innocence Project, Stoll's conviction was overturned and he was released -- but not before losing a third of his life to the California penal system.
"Everybody says I ought to be bitter, ought to be angry," Stoll said. "But I had 20 years to be bitter and angry, so now I'm just happy I got through it."
Arrested in Bakersfield's Kern County during the 1980s, and accused of being a member of a "child sex ring," Stoll was one of dozens of men falsely accused and convicted of child molestation by a "witch hunt" based out of the county's district attorney's office, according to his lawyer, Linda Starr.
Stoll was convicted on the testimony of several neighborhood boys, even though no physical evidence was presented at the trial and none of the boys was examined by doctors.
The boys later testified that they were coerced by prosecutors. "They were highly inappropriate methods, they would do things like threaten with overt threats, 'you won't see your mother again, your family will be torn apart,'Ã " Starr said.
He was released on his birthday in May 2004.
In his former life, Stoll was a contractor, and although in the middle of a divorce, he was happy.
"What you have to understand is I had a date that evening, I went out to dinner, I went home at 11:30 that evening and they woke me up and I was in prison for 20 years -- just like that," Stoll said. "If there had been allegations along the way I would have saw this coming, but just nothing was said."
Innocence Project Director Cookie Ridolfi says there are many reasons for false conviction, including "mistaken identification, false confession, junk science (and) the use of snitch testimony."
Stoll is not the only victim in his story. The young boys who were coerced into testifying against him and other men about abuse that didn't happen, have grown into men who now face their own demons.
"Their relationship with children is tortured. They're afraid to touch their own children," Starr said. "Each one has said this, how it has affected their ability to bond, how they're frightened to be around other people's children because they're so afraid that someone's going to accuse them of having done something they didn't do, because they know it can happen, because they've seen it happen, because they did it."
Similarly, it has not been completely rosy for Stoll following his release. He still is faced with the stigma of having been imprisoned, and finds it hard to find employment. Stoll has also lost contact with his son, Jed, who is now 27.
"The last day I saw him, I remember taking him home and he was crying because he didn't want to go home. He was just a happy, wonderful little boy, he was just disappointed that he couldn't stay with me a little longer," Stoll said. "We went to the preliminary hearing and he said, 'Hi, Daddy!' and they took him out and when he came back he never looked at me again," he said.
"And that was just about the worst thing, worse than the conviction, to see him. To this day, my son's the hardest," he continued. "I saw him at the hearing, at my habeas corpus hearing, and I haven't seen him since. And I just don't feel its right, people say why don't you try and contact him? A guy contacted me, that I went to high school with, to congratulate me, so Jed (his son) could contact me if he wanted to."
Contact Allison Sundaram at (408) 554-4546 or asundaram@scu.edu.