Competency & Taint Hearings of Preschool Children

Child Sex Crimes Lawyer: Taint and Suggestibility

Young children are naive, suggestible and eager to please. When a parent, teacher, police officer or social worker asks leading questions, children understand that certain answers will please the questioner and they comply.

"Daddy touched you in a bad place, didn't he?"

Young children are also psychologically vulnerable.

An authority figure with an agenda can coerce a child to making statements that are not true. When these questions and answers are repeated again and again, they become embedded in the child's memory. The child comes to believe that these falsehoods are, in fact, true. The child will then learn to repeat them in a very convincing way.

"Daddy hurt you, didn't he?"

Thomas A. Pavlinic, Esquire understands how a child's testimony and his or her memory can be tainted by repeated interrogation and coaching from parents, social workers, psychologists and others. Tom is an authority in the area of taint and suggestibility in children who have made accusations of sexual abuse.

Tom's Passion and Mission: Aggressively Defending the Falsely Accused
Call 410.974.6560 (Office) or 410.703.0543 (Cell)

In the 1994 New Jersey Supreme Court decision of State v. Michaels, a procedure was created that allows defense attorneys to request a pretrial "taint" hearing to challenge the investigative interviews of the children. The taint hearing has since spread to other states. However, it has not yet been accepted in all states. Thomas A. Pavlinic routinely requests taint hearings to challenge the reliability of evidence obtained in suggestive or coercive interviews with children. He has been successful in persuading judges to rule that information obtained in these interviews is tainted and, therefore, inadmissible in court.

Tom has also been successful in challenging the competency of young children to testify in court. See the Pennsylvania case of Commonwealth v. Delbridge.

Located in Annapolis, Maryland, Tom Pavlinic represents people falsely accused of child sexual abuse throughout the nation.