and sister were convicted of similar crimes against four children and sentenced to jail for eight to 20 years. At both trials, the children testified in open court sitting directly in front of the jury with their backs to the defendants and their faces to the jurors. Interviews of children as evidence Much of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' case depended on the information obtained in the interviews of the children who were allegedly sexually abused by the Amiraults. The interviews claimed that the children were raped with knives, sticks, forks, and magic wands; were assaulted by a clown (allegedly Gerald) in a "secret room" and a "magic room"; were forced to drink urine; were tied naked to a tree; and subjected to many other acts. The main criticism of this case centered on the reliability of the information obtained from the children. The bulk of the evidence was developed through videotaped interviews conducted by Susan J. Kelley, a pediatric nurse. The children repeatedly told interviewers, including Kelley, that nothing happened to them, that there were no secret rooms, and there was no clown. However, the questioning continued and eventually the children claimed all these things happened. One police officer, John Rivers, said at a seminar that interviewing the children was "like getting blood from a stone". At one point, an interviewer told a child that the child's friend had already testified that the clown had them take their clothes off. The girl being interviewed denied this happened, at which point the interviewer said that she believed what the child's friend told her. Kelley also rejected alternative explanations for events and ignored the children's denials of the abuse scenarios. The chief prosecutor of both of the Amirault cases maintained that "the children testified to being photographed and molested by acts that included penetration by objects ... the implication ... that the children's allegations of abuse were tainted by improper interviewing is groundless and not true." Post-trial In October 1992, Violet and Cheryl's sentences were reduced by their original trial judge, John Paul Sullivan of the Middlesex County Superior Court, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) reversed that ruling in 1993. In March 1995, Charles M. Sennott published an article in The Boston Globe that was sympathetic towards the Amiraults and reported that Miriam Holmes, who was assigned as a counselor by the Department of Correction to Violet and Cheryl, and