The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read Online Free PDF

allegations, the school sent out a letter informing the parents and alumni for the first time about the reasons behind Hanson's firing (though it didn't name him).The school encouraged former students to come forward with information about past incidents of sexual abuse (though it didn't disclose that it had, in fact, settled several other lawsuits in the eighties and nineties). And it hired an expert for advice on its child-protection policies.
    In April 2002, the New York Times and Nightline, fed leads by Hardwicke, broke the story in tandem. Hardwicke then set up a Web site that further spread the details. The fallout for the school was harsh. Concert bookings evaporated; recruiting students became an uphill slog.
    Edwards's frustration with all of this isn't hard to comprehend. The abuse took place long ago; today, the school is safe and ever-vigilant, he says. "The irony is, probably the one person who will never bear any burden if there is a judgment against the school is Donald Hanson," Edwards notes. "The people who are bearing the burden now are our students, faculty, parents, and trustees, none of whom were around in 1970 and 1971."
    All of that is true, of course. But one of the legal system's central functions is to allocate responsibility for harms that occurred even decades ago-thus creating incentives for sound behavior in the future.
    In any event, it would be easier to sympathize with the school had its fight against Hardwicke not been so vicious-and, at times, so ham-handed. When, for example, the lawsuit was filed, the school's lawyers submitted an official reply that argued that Hardwicke had no case because he consented to the sex with Hanson-and that by not revealing it sooner, he was more negligent than the school. (To be precise, the term the document used was "fraudulent concealment.") Both statements were leaped upon by the Times and Nightline.
    "That was very unfortunate," Jay Greenblatt, the school's litigator, tells me one afternoon in his office in Vineland, New Jersey. Greenblatt was appointed to the case by the school's insurance company, which also pays his fees. He came aboard after the reply was written. "It was a boilerplate-type pleading," he limply explains."I don't even know if it was reviewed."
    Greenblatt is a past president of the New Jersey State Bar Association.At sixty-eight, he's got a rumbling voice, close-cropped gray hair, and wears a big gold signet ring. He tells me the school would have preferred to settle with Hardwicke, if only to avoid the flood of adverse publicity. But, Greenblatt goes on, "this isn't just a matter of money. His goal is to close the school. I think that he along with his id wants to do it. He's looking to punish someone for what unfortunately occurred to him at the hands of a man thirty-five years ago."
    In the absence of the prospect of a settlement, Greenblatt says, the school turned to charitable immunity, which, he maintains flatly, "doesn't apply only to negligence." Besides, he argues, the school can't be held liable for Hanson's private behavior-which he equates with an employee's stopping in a bar after work and slugging someone in the mouth. "Is the company responsible?" he asks. "No.Why not? Because they're not acting within the scope of employment."
    If the case does go to trial, Greenblatt clearly intends to wage an assault on Hardwicke's credibility. "I don't know where fact ends and fantasy begins with John," he says."I believe he was molested. I believe that molestation took place in private and that no one knew about it or reasonably should have known about it. However, of course, if he was being molested fifteen times a day in half of the rooms of the institution, it could create the implication that somebody should have known… So the more notorious it was, the better for his case."
    Yet despite Greenblatt's assertions to the contrary, what shines through all the school's dealings with Hardwicke is a stark unwillingness to countenance