STATE of Utah, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. Alan B. HADFIELD, Defendant and Appellant No. 880234 Supreme Court of Utah 128 Utah Adv. Rep. 6; 788 P.2d 506; 1990 Utah LEXIS 14

. . . The medical witness, Dr. Stephen Golding, strongly and effectively criticized Dr. Snow's methods. He opined, for example, that the testimony of W. and C. had been irretrievably contaminated by the suggestive and coercive nature of Dr. Snow's techniques and was highly unreliable as a result. Defendant's strategy of undermining the believability of the children by attacking the practices of Barbara Snow was ultimately unsuccessful with the jury, but it does not appear that he had any other options.

For the foregoing reasons, the issue of new [**4] evidence relating to Barbara Snow's role in the allegations of the children in her treatment, including W. and C., is a critical one. The claimed new evidence includes (1) a doctoral thesis in which Barbara Snow discussed the use of authority and punishment to modify patient behavior, (2) testimony that she used this technique to modify the responses of her child patients to questions about sexual abuse, (3) testimony from law enforcement personnel that false information deliberately "fed" by them to Barbara Snow in their investigatory work promptly appeared in the statements of children she interviewed, and (4) a highly suspicious correlation between the factual patterns revealed in at least four child sex abuse investigations in which Barbara Snow was involved. The first three categories of "new" evidence are problematic for various reasons. Defendant offered several witnesses at trial who [**5] described the suggestive and coercive interviewing techniques allegedly utilized by Dr. Snow and one police officer who described how the children in Dr. Snow's care were able to reproduce specific information after he had suggested to Dr. Snow that such information should be present in their statements. Additional testimony about these matters might enhance defendant's chances for acquittal, but standing alone, would not qualify as newly discovered evidence warranting a new trial.

. . . Eventually, in Barbara Snow's interviews with the Hadfield children and others, a total of at least fifteen adults and fifteen children were identified as participants in various unusual sexual activities, including instances of group abuse of children by adults. The activities described by the children involved [*509] satanic ritual, costumes and masks, photography equipment, men dressing in women's clothing, and frequent episodes of playing [**7] with and consuming human excrement. A specific instance of abuse related to Dr. Snow by W. and described by her at trial, for example, involved defendant's removing feces from W.'s rectum with a spoon and forcing him to play with it.

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