July 5, 2013

“RALEIGH – During a hearing at the state Court of Appeals, Chief Judge Gerald Arnold repeatedly asked a state prosecutor about the fairness of testimony by (Bob) Kelly’s former attorney in Edenton. Arnold said the attorney had, in effect, testified that he believed in Kelly’s innocence until he learned his child had been abused.

“ ‘How can you argue that it was not extremely prejudicial?’ the judge asked.

“Associate Attorney General Ellen Scouten argued that Chris Bean did not divulge confidential information and did not violate an attorney-client relationship with Kelly. She said Bean testified as a parent and a crime victim.

“Arnold said Bean, now a district court judge, had gone beyond describing what he had seen and witnessed as a parent.

“ ‘This boils down to the most fundamental questions of fairness,’ 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?’

“Scouten said that because the defense had contended that accusers in Edenton were hysterical people on a witch hunt it was fair to allow the state to show the type of people involved.

“ ‘Mr. Bean and his wife were reputable, respected thoughtful, educated people – not the type of people that would be swept up by community hysteria,’ she said.”

– From “Appeal of 2 defendants in Little Rascals case draws a crowd” in the News & Observer (Jan. 10, 1995)

Given this line of questioning, it came as no great surprise when four months later the Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of both Kelly and Dawn Wilson.

Bean’s unfettered opinionating was only one of three major defects cited by the court, the others being the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors and the testimony of parents as expert witnesses.

The prosecution got off light – the brief filed by appellate defender Mark Montgomery claimed no fewer than 222 potentially reversible errors.

July 3, 2013

“(Nancy Lamb) is aware of the naysayers, those who say she ran a witch hunt, gleaning hundreds of charges against (Bob) Kelly and his staff from the children’s accounts, which included trips aboard spaceships.

“ ‘You have to look at the big picture,’ she said. ‘You have to know that there are fantastic elements in children’s accounts of abuse, while they also say things that are quite believable.’ ”

“And believe she did….”

– From “How hard it is to say, ‘Enough’ ” by columnist Nicole Brodeur in the News & Observer (May 28, 1997)

What self-serving speciousness. Could there be a better example of failing “to look at the big picture” than Lamb’s focusing on only those fragments of the children’s manipulated testimony that supported her case?

July 1, 2013

I noted last week the continuing unwillingness of law professor John E.B. Myers, widely published authority on child sex abuse, to express an opinion “regarding the guilt or innocence of any of the McMartin defendants.”

In this passage in “Child Protection in America” (2006), which Professor Myers graciously forwarded to me, he justifies his indecision on the case by pointing to claims of secret underground tunnels supposedly discovered (too late!) beneath the McMartin Preschool:

“Several McMartin parents, especially the indefatigable Jackie McGauley, hired an archeologist to excavate under the abandoned preschool. The archeologist conducted an excavation and issued an exhaustive report concluding there probably were tunnels. The tunnels had been backfilled with dirt, but McGauley pointed out that the Buckeys had months to fill in the tunnels after the preschool closed. I read the archeologist’s report and came away convinced. Yet, I shared the report with a colleague who was just as firmly convinced the report proves nothing.”

At the very least, this approach constitutes feckless “research.” To see the tunnel report thoroughly vaporized, Myers needed only to click on “The Dark Truth About the ‘Dark Tunnels of McMartin’ ” by John Earl (1995) or “What Was Under the McMartin Preschool?” by Joseph Wyatt (2002).

When the McMartin parents went digging for nonexistent tunnels, the term “truther” hadn’t yet entered the lexicon. Too bad.

June 26, 2013

The suburban New York child sex abuse case documented in the Oscar-nominated “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003) returned to the spotlight Monday, this time because of a review panel’s finding that Jesse Friedman had in fact been rightfully convicted.

Although the New York Times describes the Friedman case as having come “to symbolize an era of sensational, often-suspect accusations of child molestation,” many aspects – including the 1988 confessions of both the defendant and his father – make it an outlier to the epidemic of day-care cases of that era.

The review panel itself emphasized this distinction, the Associated Press points out:

“The Friedman case has drawn comparisons to the 1980s McMartin Preschool scandal, but the investigators said they ‘were in no way similar.’ In the McMartin case, the report noted, more than 200 preschool children described being sexually abused by teachers, but only after months of highly suggestive questioning by social workers working with prosecutors. The report noted in the Friedman case, the victims were more than twice as old as the McMartin preschoolers and many in the Friedman case disclosed abuse quickly.”

Regardless, there are similarities, too. In an interview with the Village Voice interview last month, Jesse Friedman had this to say about the young computer students who testified against him:

“When I was in prison, my hope always hung on the idea that, give it five or 10 years; once they get to college, once they’re actual adults, once they’re old enough to no longer be living at home with their parents in Great Neck, they will come forward and admit that they lied.

“When (journalist( Debbie Nathan came to visit me, she told me that most of the complainants in the McMartin case publicly affirm that they were raped and abused in the McMartin Preschool. Whereas that case has been thoroughly, completely vetted beyond all doubt that nothing happened. And yet the kids involved believe that they were abused. She said, ‘You really can’t hang your hopes on the idea that the kids know that they lied and that nothing happened. Because they might very well think that something happened.’ “

Do the now-grown child-witnesses in the Little Rascals case “know that they lied and that nothing happened”? Or does the shapeless memory of their supposed abuse remain forever sealed from self-examination?

June 24, 2013

“(I) followed the Little Rascals case closely in the Norfolk and other papers…. Moved by (its) strangeness and patent senselessness, as well as by reports nationwide at the time of what came to be tagged ‘false memory syndrome,’ I wrote and later published a short story inspired by the spectacular miscarriage of justice…. The thrust of my story was popular hysteria and jaundiced, ambitious therapists together with a grievous breakdown of the judicial system….

“I believe that behind the recovered memory and child abuse therapeutic notions of that time, so destructive of the lives of the Edenton Seven and many others, lies Freud’s almost immeasurable popular impact on our now so heavily sexualized culture – though the easy lure of the witch hunt seems to have been all too contagious in Edenton’s fearful, credulous and manipulable parents as well.”

– Historian and writer John L. Romjue of Yorktown, Va., responding to “Remembering the shame of the Little Rascals Day Care case” at North Carolina Miscellany (Oct. 24, 2011)

Although “Witches of Devon,” the title story in Mr. Romjue’s 2002 collection, veers dramatically from the course of the Little Rascals case, it does indeed capture the essence: “It had started as a rumor – and not about molestation, not at first. There had been an ‘assault’ incident at Happy Children (day care). Joanne Jamison had spanked a little girl’s bottom and not suitably apologized to the mother….”

June 21, 2013

From blog commenter Mike:

“I’d seen the ‘Frontline’ episodes long ago, before I moved to North Carolina. I was surprised to learn, when I recently revisited the case, that this travesty happened in a state I love.

“For historians who might want to get a taste of what it was like to live in Salem in the late 17th century (or, to invoke a less well-known era, Germany of the 15th century), this staggering case would serve them well…. The unrepentant prosecutors, ignorant ‘therapists’ and others who ruined the lives of the defendants must not be allowed to be forgotten.”

Mike’s reference to the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1484 by two German friars to squelch skepticism about the existence of witchcraft, is painfully apt. Just substitute “satanic ritual abuse” for “witchcraft,” and – poof! – up in smoke go five centuries of the ascent of man.

June 19, 2013

The Little Rascals parents insisted their children had “disclosed” mostly on their own, rather than a result of persistent interrogation. But this live interview, in the giddy moments after Bob Kelly’s convictions (April 22, 1992), suggests a different pattern:

CNN: How did you find out this happened? You were apparently the first parents to realize something was terribly wrong.

Mark Stever: Kyle, our son, told us in his own way, just different things, like ‘Mr. Bob doesn’t do it anymore. He does it to the other children.’

Audrey Stever: We knew he had a secret, and we knew it happened at nap time, but he couldn’t tell us what it was, and to escape talking about it he would say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t do it anymore, Mommy.’

CNN: And how did you finally bring it out of him exactly what he said had been happening?

Audrey Stever: Well, I approached a friend (Brenda Toppin) who was the investigating officer in the case… and things kind of went from there.

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.”

June 14, 2013

Among visitors to Edenton during the Little Rascals prosecution was Margaret Leong, a Chapel Hill poet who worked with preschool children. In her book “Magical Child Molestation Trials: Edenton’s Children Accuse” (1993) she recounted this instructive episode:

“Edenton’s citizens (are neither blind nor) deaf – a fact I learned my first morning there, when I slipped on a downtown sidewalk and turned my ankle. In no time at all, several kind people helped me into a taxi. That evening, a mile away in an Italian restaurant, at least three strangers came over to ask how my ankle was.

“Thus I must conclude that the observational skills of the good people of Edenton are on a par with folks in other small towns. And if not one Edentonian saw a hint of  even one sex crime out of (the alleged) 450, then perhaps no crimes were committed.”