Nov. 8, 2013

While we await Gov. McCrory’s decision on whether to promote Nancy Lamb to district attorney, another key figure in the Little Rascals prosecution is stepping aside.

From the Elizabeth City Daily Advance:

EDENTON – Judge Chris Bean, chief district court judge in the 1st Judicial District, does not plan to seek re-election to another term.

Bean, who has been a judge for more than two decades, said recently he plans to step down when his current term ends in December 2014.

“I have been doing this for 20-some years,” Bean said. “It has been a fascinating career.”

Unmentioned by Judge Bean (or by the Advance, which seems to have purged Little Rascals from its memory)  is his deeply prejudicial testimony against former client Bob Kelly.

Bean and Lamb have continued to share an immunity to just consequences. (Compare the enormity of the Little Rascals prosecution with the penny-ante misconduct that typically brings about disbarment in North Carolina.)

Only their innocent victims – the Edenton Seven, the child witnesses – paid a price, and it was a high one indeed.

Oct. 4, 2014

Among those journalists who fell for the “satanic ritual abuse” storyline, none fell harder than Civia Tamarkin.

She not only stage-managed an embarrassingly credulous episode of “Nightline,” but also testified earnestly at a Believe the Children convention alongside Little Rascals prosecutor H. P. Williams Jr. and supposed ritual-abuse survivor Laura Buchanan (““ was told that a surveillance device would be inserted into my brain….”).

In 1993 Tamarkin delivered a lengthy address on “Investigative Issues in Ritual Abuse Cases” to the Fifth Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality in Alexandria, Va.

Like Ross Cheit two decades later, she had no trouble detailing numerous flaws in the prosecution of McMartin and other ritual abuse cases but inevitably came up frustrated in her search for a smoking gun or two.  Most striking, after recounting all her journalistic fault-finding, was her unquestioning gratitude to SRA snake-oil theoreticians Roland Summit and Bennett Braun for “(taking) the time to teach me what they could.”

Prior to her affiliation with Believe the Children, Tamarkin had reported commendably for Time, People and the Chicago Sun-Times and had coauthored a book with Chicago educator Marva Collins.

More recently, she has directed a documentary on the aftermath of a soldier’s death in Iraq….

So what happened in the 1990s? How did an experienced reporter lose her skepticism in the face of “ritual abuse” claims?

I’ve asked Tamarkin what she was thinking then – and what she believes today – but haven’t received a response.

June 13, 2012

“Actually, making a false memory is pretty easy.

“(Psychologist Elizabeth) Loftus describes a father convincing his daughter she’d gotten lost in a mall when she was five years old. At first, the daughter denied any memory of the event, but as the father provided more fake details – ‘Don’t you remember that I told you we would meet at the Tug Boat?’ – the daughter began to ‘remember’ and even provide details of her own. Eventually when her father said, ‘I was so scared,’ she responded, ‘Not as scared as I was!’…

“You can probably imagine the implications of false memory in the courtroom or on the therapist’s couch (which famously leads to the courtroom)….”

– From “How You Remember, How You Decide: Memory Part II”
by Garth Sundem in Psychology Today (October 6, 2010)

June 20, 2012

“The Little Rascals case still remains the greatest travesty of justice I’ve ever been associated with or seen or even heard about… since like 1960.”

– Joe Cheshire, attorney for Bob and Betsy Kelly (Triangle Business Journal, 1998)