On the night John Stoll was roused from his bed and carted off to jail, his atti­tude bor­dered on the cav­a­lier.
“Aren’t you wor­ried?” His lawyer won­dered.
“Hell no, I ain’t wor­ried,” John answered. “I didn’t do this. You can’t con­vict me of some­thing I didn’t do.”

It was more than two decades before John Stoll was free again.

Witch Hunt Offi­cial Film Website

Buy Witch Hunt DVDs

Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer Sean Penn proudly presents “Witch Hunt,” a grip­ping indict­ment of the United States jus­tice sys­tem told through the lens of one small town. It’s John Stoll’s story, but it’s also the story of dozens of other men and women who found them­selves ensnared in a spi­ral of fear, igno­rance and hys­te­ria. These peo­ple are Amer­i­cans, work­ing class moms and dads, who were rounded up with lit­tle or no evi­dence, charged and con­victed of almost unimag­in­able crimes. All sex­ual. All crimes against chil­dren. Years, some­times decades later, they would find free­dom again, but their lives and the lives of their chil­dren would be changed for­ever. This film shows view­ers what the real crime in this case is, not molesta­tion, but the crime of coer­cion. View­ers hear from the child wit­nesses who were forced to lie on the wit­ness stand as they describe scary ses­sions with sheriff’s deputies in which they were told — not asked — about sex­ual expe­ri­ences that hap­pened to them. Their coerced tes­ti­mony led to dozens of con­vic­tions. Many times their own par­ents were the ones they put behind bars.

Witch Hunt Trailer

Soon after the tri­als, the chil­dren started to crack. They told adults of the lies they’d been forced to tell on the stand and hoped it would make a dif­fer­ence. It didn’t and the con­victed con­tin­ued to sit in prison. As the alle­ga­tions grew more out­landish, California’s Attor­ney Gen­eral wrote a scathing report on the court mis­con­duct, but instead of being buried by crit­i­cism, Kern County Dis­trict Attor­ney Ed Jagels thrived, doing what he did best– putting peo­ple away. He boasted one of the high­est con­vic­tion rates in the coun­try. This strat­egy served him well. Jagels is still in office today. Through new inter­views, archival footage, and unflinch­ing nar­ra­tion by Mr. Penn, the film­mak­ers con­struct an inti­mate film that illus­trates a uni­ver­sal point; when power is allowed to exist with­out over­sight from the press, the com­mu­nity or law enforce­ment, the rights of every­day cit­i­zens can be lost for decades. National film critic Mar­shall Fine says, “This is a chill­ing story about Amer­i­can law-enforcement run amok and unteth­ered. It’s par­tic­u­larly timely in the wake of rev­e­la­tions about the way the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has tram­pled Amer­i­can civil rights. A movie that can’t help but move you — to tears and to action.”

Witch Hunt won the Best Documentary Award at the 2009 DC Independent Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 Cinequest Film Festival.