As Attorney General, Massachussetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley defended the prosecutions of the Amirault family on bizarre and phony child molestation charges. She did her best to keep innocent people in prison in order look tough on crime and further her political career.

Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitizer Prize for her reporting on these bouts of pubic hysteria and miscarriages of justice, uncorks on Coakley.

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.