May 29, 2013

“Very sick! There is clear evidence (the Edenton Seven) are guilty… Very troubling to know someone wastes their time writing about this every day. He’s just as sick as they were. Will pray for (him) and the others. Very sad! Think about the real victims here, they were the children (who) never can escape what they went through. Let it go.”

– Comment from “Believer” in response to “Retired Charlotte Observer Columnist Lew Powell Pursuing State’s Admission of Guilt in Witch Hunt of Wrongly Accused” at NewspaperAlum.com (Aug. 9, 2012)

Was Ben Franklin (or Ambrose Bierce?) correct that “You cannot reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into”? If so, he could hardly have imagined a better example than continued belief in day-care ritual abuse.

Feb. 25, 2013

“The 99 guilty verdicts against (Bob) Kelly appear to have set a benchmark for such cases: that youthful witnesses can have enough credibility to win convictions on their word alone.

“‘This validated child witness testimony,’ said Carolyn McAllaster, who teaches a child advocacy clinic at Duke University’s law school and trial practice at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

“‘I think the reason a lot of prosecutors hesitate to take these cases is they fear these children won’t be believed by juries,’ she said. ‘They should give a child’s testimony the same weight they would give an adult’s testimony. I think that children are very believable and that their testimony can be judged on its own merits.’ ”

– From “Rascals verdict affirms children’s credibility” in the Raleigh News & Observer (April 26, 1992)

McAllaster has gone on to become director of the AIDS Legal Project and a clinical professor of law at Duke.

Has she changed her mind about the credibility of child witnesses?

I asked her.

She hasn’t responded.

July 16, 2012

“Elizabeth Kelly was denied parole Friday, three months after pleading no contest to charges of sexually abusing children at her Edenton day care.

“Mrs. Kelly, sentenced to seven years, was eligible for parole upon entering prison because she had already served more than two years while awaiting trial.

“Prosecutor Bill Hart said opposition to Mrs. Kelly’s release was heightened by her statements of innocence after entering her plea.

“‘From my work dealing with sex offenders there is no way you can treat a sex offender and restore them to the community until that person admits the wrongness of her actions and takes responsibility….’”

– From the Associated Press, April 16, 1994

From the beginning, the prosecution never missed a chance to tighten the thumbscrews on Betsy Kelly: Plead guilty, implicate your husband or suffer grave consequences. Although she eventually took a plea bargain, she never accommodated Bill Hart’s pious insistence that she admit “the wrongness of her actions.”

In October 1989, about six weeks after her arrest, a hearing had been held in Raleigh on whether Kelly should be forced to move from a mental health unit into Dorm C at women’s prison.

Recalls Faye Sultan, a Charlotte forensic psychologist who testified on her behalf: “She had been found guilty of nothing at that point, but she was being housed in the most isolated, restrictive facility in the prison, where Death Row and disciplinary inmates were housed. Seems a bit unfair, no?”

Sultan testified that Kelly’s “psychological condition is rapidly deteriorating, and in fact she is on the edge of becoming psychotic.”

Why would the state insist on moving a pretrial “safekeeping” defendant to such a hostile environment? “The reason was to pressure Betsy,” says Joe Cheshire, her lawyer. “They didn’t know her very well, did they?”

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.