June 29, 2016

“Compensation is intended in part as a deterrent: a municipality that has to pay heavily for police or prosecutorial misconduct ought to be less likely to allow it to happen again. But it is taxpayers, not police or prosecutors, who bear the costs of litigation and compensation. Prosecutors enjoy almost total immunity in cases of misconduct, even if they deliberately withhold exculpatory evidence from a jury. A 2011 Supreme Court ruling also made it virtually impossible to sue a prosecutor’s office for such violations….”

– From “The Price of a Life: What’s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?” by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker (April 13, 2015)

To “deliberately withhold exculpatory evidence” seems all too neatly illustrated in Bob Kelly’s trial. Here’s how the North Carolina Court of Appeals described the prosecution’s actions:

“Judge L. Bradford Tillery, a pretrial Judge, directed the State to file and present for in camera review identifying information, medical and psychotherapeutic files and DSS files with respect to the ‘indictment children’….

“In apparent compliance with Judge Tillery’s order… the State turned over a box of files to the trial court, Judge (Marsh) McLelland presiding. The box contained, inter alia, complete medical notes and therapy notes on the 29 indictment children, 12 of whom testified at defendant’s trial and 17 of whom did not….

“After trial, defendant’s appellate counsel went to the Office of the Clerk of Court for Pitt County to view the exhibits. He opened several boxes containing trial exhibits, none of which were sealed. One of the boxes contained 29 files labeled with the names of the indictment children…. Defendant argues that the files contained undisclosed information that would have been material to the defense.”

To wit, the withheld files were bulging with exculpation – conflicting claims, evidence of hysteria, eyewitness testimony that nothing happened.

Prosecutors H.P. Williams Jr., Bill Hart and Nancy Lamb walked away rebuked by the Appeals Court but otherwise unpenalized. How differently might the Little Rascals case have unfolded had they known their recklessness wouldn’t be shielded by prosecutorial immunity?

Aug. 28, 2013

“It’s not by chance that day care centers are the sites of magical molestation, and not public schools with their powerful lobbies and unions…. Those primary and secondary school teachers’ organizations provide protection and security for their members, much as the AMA protects doctors and the ABA protects lawyers.

“It’s only you – a day care teacher – who has no protection at all. If hysterical parents gang up and attack you, you are as helpless as a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.”

– From “Magical Child Molestation Trials: Edenton’s Children Accuse” by Margaret Leong (1993)

Nov. 26, 2019

I’ve previously cited here and here Elle magazine’s deeply reported 1993 article on the Little Rascals case. You can read it here.

But I had somehow overlooked this response to Greensboro journalists Edward Cone and Lisa Scheer from assistant attorney general Bill Hart. It has not aged well.

Dear Ed and Lisa,

I have read your recent article in Elle Magazine, “The Demons of Edenton.”

I found it interesting that you chose to leave out the fact that Chris Bean, now a District Court Judge, had initially represented Bob Kelly as his lawyer, until he found out that his son had been abused.

I also found it interesting that you chose not to include the fact that Bob Kelly’s jury had the full benefit of the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of both Maggie Bruck and William Kenner through their testimony at his trial.

Notably absent from your article was any balancing psychological viewpoint to the Bruck/Kenner/Ofshe propaganda. You had access to the testimony of Mark Everson, a psychologist who testified for the state at Bob Kelly’s trial, but did not quote him. You criticized Roland Summit, but did not quote him….

Sincerely,
William P. Hart
Special Deputy Attorney General

I won’t use this post to address all of Hart’s claims, but….

– Chris Bean’s role in the case, far from being culpatory for Bob Kelly, actually provoked stinging criticism from the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “This boils down to the most fundamental questions of fairness,” Judge Gerald Arnold said. “When you have an attorney testifying that ‘I was Mr. Kelly’s attorney and I believed in him very strongly until I learned the truth, that is to say that he’s guilty, and then I was shattered.’ How can there be more prejudicial, stronger evidence put before a jury than to have a former attorney, the defendant’s attorney say that?” Further, Bean was among those parents whom prosecutors inappropriately but persuasively presented as de facto experts on child psychology.

– Mark Everson, UNC psychologist, was tragically influential with a “coherent package” of misconceptions he clung to long after they had been exposed by updated research. And of course there’s his jaw-dropping “where there’s smoke there’s fire” argument….

– Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit, a key player in the McMartin Preschool trial, tried too late to shed responsibility for the many defendants wrongfully convicted by his “child sexual abuse syndrome” theory.

Bill Hart’s letter didn’t mention it, but I have to wonder whether this was the Elle passage that actually got under his skin most annoyingly:

“[Hart] is emotionally involved in the Little Rascals case to a startling degree. Last year he married Patricia Kephart, the mother of a Little Rascals child, who Hart had become romantically involved with during his prosecution of the case. ‘If anything it’s made it more difficult on me,’ he says of his entanglement in the investigation.”

There are huge and obvious problems with Hart’s behavior, but his “difficult” personal consequences don’t rank high on the list.

Nov. 7, 2012

“Mass hysteria always makes perfect sense when we are trapped in it. It can take decades – or even longer – before the crazed irrationality of a particular episode shows itself for what it was.”

– From “When Mass Hysteria Convicted 5 Teenagers” in The New York Times (October 27)

Thanks to a new documentary by Ken Burns, the Central Park Five – all convicted of a widely publicized 1989 rape and beating – will soon return to the spotlight. According to the Times,
Burns depicts “the forces that led citizens, politicians, the media and the criminal justice system to brush past yawning gaps in the evidence in the case.”

Beyond a shared year on the timeline of wrongful prosecutions, these urban teenagers, black and Hispanic, seem to have borne few similarities to the Edenton Seven. But I could never read  the  words “yawning gaps in evidence” without thinking of a Little Rascals prosecution built almost entirely on the resolutely manipulated, deceitfully paraphrased testimony of children.