Dec. 26, 2011

“When I saw ‘Innocence Lost’ on PBS, I was outraged. The defendants received a bad deal from the state of North Carolina….

“Thank you for building and maintaining this site. Someone needs to keep telling the defendants’ story. I’m glad to see Mr. Kelly stayed strong and moved on with his life.”

– From South Carolina reader Clarence Lankford

Thanks for writing, Clarence. “Stayed strong and moved on” is an apt description of Bob Kelly. When I called last week to wish him Merry Christmas, he laughed and said, “For me, it’s always Christmas.”

Feb. 10, 2012

“(The scene of children screaming invective at a prison-bound Bob Kelly) was… the graphic heart of the documentary….

“The car pulled away, and they began to giggle self-consciously. A second or two of awkward silence heightened the artificiality of the moment, the sense of a construct that the girls fully understood. Then an older woman (presumably a mother) moved into the silence, and began to clap and cheer. A few others joined in in desultory fashion. ‘Let’s go get something (to) eat,’ said the mom….

“By chance, I had just finished reading ‘The Professor,’ a minor novel of Charlotte Bronte’s. Like most Bronte novels it was laced with leisurely reflections, and this one struck me powerfully enough to note down: ‘Human beings – human children especially – seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consists only in a capacity to make others wretched.’

“As those children shrieked at Bob Kelly through the glass of the police car window, I wondered if there wasn’t more than a whiff of that pleasure in power in the air.

“And then I remembered this town is called Eden, and we’ve known for a long while that the darnedest things happened in Eden.”

Feb. 18, 2013

Gov. Jim Hunt was serving his fourth term (1997-2001) when prosecutors dropped the last Little Rascals charges. Although Gary Pearce, Hunt’s longtime adviser and later biographer, doesn’t remember the governor being involved in the case, Pearce experienced his own Edenton moment:

“I actually got called by one of the parents who had heard of me. I met with them and worked with them on a program that UNC-TV did (in 1993 to give parents a chance to respond to “Innocence Lost: The Verdict”). I did it just out of curiosity. It was one of the damnedest things I ever did.

“What the parents were claiming happened was, in the truest sense of the word, incredible. But they seemed absolutely and genuinely and sincerely convinced that it had happened….

“The best word to describe the whole thing is ‘gothic.’”

Defense attorneys were excluded from the program, UNC-TV director Tom Howe explained, because “We’re not really interested in getting into a tit-for-tat about guilt or innocence.”

Nov. 12, 2012

“It is not conceivable that any of the prosecutors (in cases such as Little Rascals) believed a word of the charges responsible for ruining the lives of so many people. The cases were brought for one reason alone: to gain name recognition for the prosecutors.”

– From “The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice” by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton (2008)

Could prosecutors really have sold their souls (not to mention their public trust) for mere “name recognition”? Or did their lust for guilty verdicts blind them to the obvious?

Most days, the latter seems more likely to me. Or perhaps a hybrid….

Indisputably, however, career benefits did attach to trumpeting from the courthouse steps that you’ve sent away Bob Kelly for 12 consecutive life sentences.