June 30, 2016

“North Carolina’s district attorneys say a proposed rule that would require them to turn over evidence of innocence after a person is convicted is….”

Anyone familiar with the worst practices of  DAs won’t be surprised at the rest of Martha Waggoner’s sentence:

“….unnecessary because prosecutors already believe it should be turned over at any point, including post-conviction.”

Chris Mumma of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, herself punished for exposing wrongful prosecutions, wondered why DAs would object to putting their high standard in writing: “If all the rule does is raise confidence in the process, then it’s beneficial.”

A more visceral response appeared on reporter Waggoner’s Facebook page – from exoneree Dwayne Dail:

“If it is unnecessary and they already believe that there is a rule that holds them to that standard, then why haven’t they been doing it?! Why have they argued that they had no obligation to do this? Why wasn’t I told that there was an alternative suspect in MY case, who just so happened to be the true perp? Why did I only find out after years of investigation during my civil suits, after my exoneration, that the actual perp’s name was in their files but was never investigated? I call BS.”

Dail was convicted of raping a 12-year-old Goldsboro girl in 1987. DNA evidence cleared him in 2007.

Sept. 9, 2016

“Strange what we worry about when it comes to our children. A great deal of the culture-war politics of the 1980s consisted of theatrical wailing about threats to our children that were either entirely made up or wildly exaggerated: The boys in ‘Stranger Things’ love to play Dungeons & Dragons, and, in a rare oversight, the series does not even touch on the minor cultural panic surrounding that game in places such as small-town Indiana, where D&D’s supernatural elements sparked terrified tales of occult experimentation.

“It’s not for nothing that this came around the same time as the Salem-style mass hysteria over ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ at the nation’s child-care centers, with fanciful worries about Luciferian cults obscuring the more straightforward anxiety associated with abandoning one’s children to child-care facilities. Yesterday’s Satanic cultists and Alar [a controversial apple growth inhibitor] are today’s online predators and brain-scrambling vaccinations….”

– From “Familiar Things: The TV series ‘Stranger Things’ portrays family breakdown yesterday and today” by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review (Aug. 29)

…and clowns?

Jan. 12, 2016

“There are strong similarities between the confessions taken from accused witches in early modern Europe, the testimony of Satanic ritual abuse taken by modern therapists, and accounts of alien abduction given under hypnosis.

“In each of these narratives, a subject describes horrible sexual transgressions performed on them at the hand of a mysterious other: the thorny penis of the Devil, the bizarre anal insertions of Satanists, and the mysterious probing of aliens.

“The motive behind these sexual acts is never revealed and the existence of the perpetrators is usually in doubt….”

– From “Carnal Knowledge: The Epistemology of Sexual Trauma in Witches’ Sabbaths, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Alien Abduction Narratives” (abstract) by Joseph Laycock in Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (2012)

Did prosecutors and therapists even attempt to ascribe any cause or context to the “bizarre anal insertions” common to the day-care allegations? Candles, Magic Markers, burning flower stems?

Did they think such shocking behavior had appeared full blown out of nowhere? On the list of known sexual perversions exactly which box – or boxes! – would they check?

Nov. 18, 2015

“Readers who want a deeper look at how young children’s accounts of CSA (child sexual abuse) were discredited in the same time frame of the (Roman Catholic) clergy CSA scandal should read Ross Cheit’s 2014 book ‘Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children’….

– From “ ‘Spotlight’ Gets A Lot Right” by Colleen Friend in the Chronicle of Social Change (Nov. 15)

Whoa.

The clergy sex abuse scandal at the center of the just-released newsroom drama “Spotlight” had nothing to do with the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic so earnestly if unpersuasively denied by Professor Cheit.

Clergy abuse was all too real, and the evidence proved undeniable; abuse in day cares was a fantasy produced by undertrained and overreaching therapists. Tragically, the children’s accounts that were “discredited” were their original denials that they had experienced abuse.

Worth noting: Dr. Friend is former director of Stuart House in Santa Monica, Calif., a child abuse treatment center opened to accommodate the tidal wave of (mostly imaginary) abuse cases spawned by McMartin.