Joe Lavigne, Jr.

Despite the inconsistencies in the victim's story and her failure to implicate her father on the stand, the jury still convicted Mr. Lavigne.

It’s not unusal, according to Carol Tavris, for juries to convict suspected child abusers on razor-thin evidence. A social psychologist in Los Angeles and advisor to the National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ), an innocence project specializing in those falsely accused of child abuse, she told Where Doubt Remains that juries are so afraid of the possibility of putting a pedophile back on the street, that they’ll forgo logic and the standards of proof required for criminal convictions.

“They would often rather put an innocent person in prison than take that risk,� she said.

And when it comes to police and prosecutors who refuse to abandon early theories of crimes that aren’t supported by evidence, she says that there are “those who blind themselves to the possibility of error … when you put the words ‘child’ and ‘sex abuse’ in the same sentence, a lot of people lose their critical faculties.� Ms. Tavris co-authored the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) in which she argues that self-justification blinds most people to the possibility of error, police and prosecutors no exception.

On the board of NCRJ and author of Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives, Mark Pendergrast told Where Doubt Remains that "people jump to conclusions and they leap to an assumption of guilt almost immediately, more than any other form of crime." Once accused himself by his daughters after they underwent therapy that helped them recover what they believed were repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, Mr. Pendergrast says there's a "witch-hunt mentality" in the country that started with daycare panic cases in the 80s and continues today.

But it’s not a surprise or even unusual that the police focused on Joe Lavigne as a suspect, at least, at first. He readily admits that his daughter spontaneously and without leading accused him of rape. But in a letter to Where Doubt Remains, he wrote “I am not a child rapist. I did not rape my daughter. The man who did got away because I was the only one the police and the prosecutor would look at.�