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Francisco Carrillo Jr.

April 14, 2017

“In wrongful convictions, the jury at some point was misled, either by false testimony or bad evidence. It’s the unspoken piece that the jurors – the public – are the ones who are ultimately used to convict someone unjustly because they were misled.

“When you’re selected, you’re officially deputized to be part of the system, and the jury can’t take the nonchalant position of ‘The professionals know what they’re doing, we’re just here.’ No, you’re a key part of this. You have to think about it, and if you don’t ask, if you don’t speak up if there’s a doubt, someone’s life could be ruined.”

–  Francisco Carrillo Jr., quoted in “Wrongful-convictions database moves to UC Irvine” in the Los Angeles Times (April 14)

Carrillo spent 20 years in prison for a fatal drive-by shooting in Los Angeles County, Calif. His conviction was overturned in 2011.

Gullibility was only one of the problems corrupting the decision-making of Bob Kelly’s jurors.

txstate.academia.edu

Joseph Laycock

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. 14, 2011

Raymond Lawrence, then director of chaplains for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, attended Bob Kelly’s trial on several occasions and founded the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven.

This passage is excerpted from a memoir I asked him to write for littlerascalsdaycare.org:

“One Monday morning on arriving at my office I noted a special delivery overnight package in my mail pile. Just as I walked in, my secretary buzzed me to say I had a long distance call asking whether I had opened the package. I told her to get the number and I would call back.

“Instead, the caller said he would call back. I assumed it was the kind of crank call which often comes to chaplains.

“When I finally turned to the special delivery package, I found inside cashier’s checks made out to various defendants in an amount of about $450,000.

“Finally the donor called back, but he didn’t want his name disclosed to the secretary or anyone else. He felt the case was a witch hunt, and he was in solidarity with the accused. He was a businessman who had made a fortune in the emerging computer industry. A year later he gave another $300,000.

“When I flew to Ohio to meet him, he told me he had a terminal illness, and some years later he died. He was a humble, unassuming man. I was in awe of his sensitivity and generosity.”

Dec. 22, 2014

““We evangelical Christians by definition live by our own narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. We believe in good and evil. That is why, as a group, we might be vulnerable to other meta-narratives – after all, if you believe in one, it’s easier to accept a second and a third.

“One example: in the 1980s and 1990s too many of us accepted the story of widespread Satanic Ritual Abuse, despite the fact that the evidence could not be found, nor could anyone name the thousands of missing children who supposedly had been sacrificed to the devil.”

– From “ ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ has its 50th Anniversary” by Gary Shogren at Open Our Eyes, Lord!

Although “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter was first published in response to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, it continues to offer insights into the attraction of a wide range of conspiracy theories.