June 10, 2013

“The danger posed by courts and prosecutors who abdicate their responsibilities to uphold the Constitution in favor of overwhelming community sentiment was recently illustrated in State v. Robert Fulton Kelly Jr.

“The trial prosecutor and the Superior Court judge were so overwhelmed by community sentiment that the trial was converted from a proceeding to adjudicate Mr. Kelly’s guilt or innocence into a forum to assist the families of the scores of alleged child victims recover from the gut-wrenching allegations of the 100-count indictment. The result: Justice was poorly served.

“The individuals thought to be victims and their many family members, loved ones and neighbors were frustrated, angered and in the end felt cheated. The individuals accused of heinous abuse of scores of children were deprived of a fair trial and deprived of liberty for more than three years.”

– From a talk by Henderson Hill, director of the N.C. Resource Center, Office of the Appellate Defender, at the Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. Constitutional Issues Program, (May 18, 1995)

June 17, 2013

“I don’t know if Bob Kelly and the staff of that now-infamous Edenton day care center abused those children… But I do know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that something is dreadfully wrong in that case, and I applaud the (N.C.) Court of Appeals ruling that ordered a new trial for Kelly and Kathryn Dawn Wilson. Everyone who cares about justice should join in a standing ovation for the court’s common-sense ruling.

“Fat chance of that.

“The prosecution, led by Attorney General Mike Easley, has already begun its campaign to discredit the ruling as a nitpicking exercise that found minor technicalities in the state’s longest and most expensive trial….”

– From “Justice unlikely for Kelly” by News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers (May 9, 1995)

Easley said he would petition the N.C. Supreme Court to review the cases immediately: “The decision casts no doubt on the credibility of the children or the integrity of the investigation…. In both cases, the facts supporting the convictions were clear and overwhelming. (The appeals court) disregarded these facts and misapplied the law.”

The Wilson Daily Times opined that “Easley’s vow to appeal the overturning is futile, and he knows it. … Easley tried to play tough prosecutor… implying the convictions were thrown out because of technical indiscretions. But he well knows that the errors in the trials were substantial and egregious (and) made a mockery of justice.”

 Four months later, when the N.C. Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeals, Easley had lost his bravado. “All prosecutors know that cases involving children weaken with age,” he said. “A retrial in this matter will be extremely difficult.”

March 28, 2012

Had North Carolina prosecutors been interested in anything other than racking up convictions, they would’ve given earnest consideration to analyses such as this one in the Los Angeles Times in 1990, barely a week after a jury returned not guilty verdicts in the McMartin Pre-School case:

“Experts across the country say the interview techniques intended to extract the truth from youngsters who attended the Manhattan Beach nursery school were so misguided as to make the children seem coerced, rehearsed and ultimately unbelievable to the jury….

“According to both child development and criminal defense experts who have closely monitored the case for the last six years, some of the adults — the parents, the prosecutors, the therapists — who tried hardest to find out what happened in the first place may have done the most to confuse the case in the end…. Most of the children were never given the chance to simply tell what, if anything, happened to them.

“‘They were never given the opportunity to tell their stories as they knew them, in their own words, until long after their minds had been contaminated with the thoughts and fears of the adults around them,’ said David Raskin, a psychologist at the University of Utah who has been studying child abuse cases for the last 15 years. By then, he said, it was too late.”

Contamination proved every bit as rampant among child-witnesses in the Little Rascals case, but prosecutors had learned from McMartin to conceal it by denying access to verbatim records of therapists’ interviews.

Dec. 18, 2012

The hands-off-my-guns community is hunkering down, as it did after Columbine, after Tucson, after Aurora, confidently waiting for the storm of outrage to pass.

Just curious: If 20 dead children aren’t enough to start the change process, how many would it take? 100? 500?

But those questions assume that SOME number, however outrageous, would at last open a tiny crack in the massive resistance of the gun lobby.

In reality, no such number exists.

– Lew Powell