Many of Jagels.s victims are profiled in the moving 2008 documentary Witch Hunt. They aren.t limited to the people he put in prison. Particularly wrenching are the interviews with children who made the false accusations. They.re now adults, and have carried unfathomable guilt and remorse. Some of these children put their parents in prison for a decade or more. In one scene, a man who falsely accused his neighbor of molesting him as a child breaks down in tears as he explains how due to fear and guilt, he.s never been able to bathe his own son.
But when some of these child accusers came forward as adults to recant their testimony and demand the release of the people they helped wrongly put in prison, Jagels and his deputies called them liars in court.
Witch Hunt includes footage of Jagels stating with isn.t-it-obvious mockery that children simply don.t lie about these sorts of things. Except that they do, especially when they.re led and guilted into lying by adult authority figures. Jagels.s victim Jeff Modahl was released in 1999 after serving 15 years for molesting his own daughters. One piece of evidence key to his release was an audio tape that surfaced in the late 1990s of a police interview with one of the girls. In it, the interviewers clearly lead the girl, drop in suggestions, and repeat questions until they get affirmative answers. Modahl.s lawyers also found a medical exam performed on Modahl.s daughter showing none of the physical evidence that should have been present if the allegations had been true. Neither the report nor the tape were turned over to Modahl.s lawyers for his trial. His daughter has since recanted her testimony and helped win her father.s release. She says in the movie that she.s battled addiction problems her entire life to bury the guilt she feels for putting him in prison.
In 1986, a grand jury released a blistering report on the sex abuse prosecutions, accusing Kern County officials of fostering a .presumption of guilt. and bringing charges on little more than hunches. California Attorney General John Van de Kamp released a report in September of the same year reaching the same conclusions. But no Kern County official was ever fired or disciplined, and the prosecutions continued. Jagels continued to get elected. So far, Kern County has paid out more than $9 million in wrongful conviction settlements.