I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get past the decisions I made concerning my brother. I shouldn’t have succumbed to threats and then asked him to take a plea. In doing the research about cases similar to my brother’s I’ve found a number of broken people who have had to live through the turmoil of false allegations of sexual abuse. Brad Mavis of Lee Summit, MO served 5 years of a 50 year sentence after he was falsely convicted of sexually molesting his step-daughter. His conviction was overturned in 2005, and he was acquitted at re-trial. After further review it was learned that The Lee Summit police detective who initially investigated the allegation was having an affair with Mavis’s then wife and framed Mavis on false charges to get rid of him. Mavis’s ex-wife subsequently married the detective and Brad Mavis is suing both of them.
In Texas, a 12 year-old girl accused her adopted father of sexually assaulting her. He phone CPS about the allegation and was arrested. Over the next two years his wife was also charged. The couple lost their business, their home and their two biological children. A jury found the father not guilty of the sexual assault charges and ruled that the girl had made the allegations up because she felt she was not getting enough attention from her parents.
In Brooklyn, New York a school custodian was accused of stockpiling child pornography and of being a child rapist. The two teenagers who accused the man of the heinous crime wanted to find a way to become famous. The custodian was found not guilty, but the man is now too scared to go out of his front door, he can’t sleep, he can’t wipe away the nightmare of being arrested, jailed, and wrongly accused.
For Michael Lenvens of Orlando, Florida the nightmare began in August of 2004 when his youngest daughter accused him of molesting her, a charge Lenvens absolutely and unequivocally denied. His first trial ended in a hung jury. Lenvens was convicted at his second trial in 2005, a conviction that the Fifth District Court of Appeals concluded rested on claims that Lenvens had a prior conviction of assault. (It was later found that it was another Michaels Lenvens that was charged for assault. How familiar this all sounds.) When the Court of Appeals reversed Lenvens’ conviction, the Orange County judge continued to refuse to allow Lenvens’ release from prison.
Lenvens, who is awaiting his third trial on the same charges stated, “I am 54 years old and must have been sleeping all those years not to realize that the trial courts and the prosecutors in this country are so corrupt only looking for the conviction and not the truth. The people of this country need to be told about the state of affairs in the judicial system in this country. Until this happened to me I thought that this country was a very good country to live in. The people of this country need to vote to change the system back to what our founding fathers wanted. Without the knowledge of the broken system though people will not know to make the changes.”
