Lee

Jan. 22, 2018

“Sex offenders have a relatively low rate of committing the same sex crime after being released from prison. Yet policymakers often base policies on rearrest rates or the fear that sex offenders are more likely than other convicted criminals to commit the same crime after release….”

– From “Justice Alito’s misleading claim about sex offender rearrests” by Michelle Ye Hee Lee in the Washington Post (June 21, 2017)

As far as I’ve been able to tell, not a single one of the defendants in the Little Rascals, McMartin, Fells Acres, Wee Care, etc., cases has been accused of later sexual offenses – or had been accused of earlier offenses. How could the serial perpetrators of such outrageous crimes possibly have avoided recidivism for a quarter-century?

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Martha Waggoner

June 30, 2016

“North Carolina’s district attorneys say a proposed rule that would require them to turn over evidence of innocence after a person is convicted is….”

Anyone familiar with the worst practices of  DAs won’t be surprised at the rest of Martha Waggoner’s sentence:

“….unnecessary because prosecutors already believe it should be turned over at any point, including post-conviction.”

Chris Mumma of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, herself punished for exposing wrongful prosecutions, wondered why DAs would object to putting their high standard in writing: “If all the rule does is raise confidence in the process, then it’s beneficial.”

A more visceral response appeared on reporter Waggoner’s Facebook page – from exoneree Dwayne Dail:

“If it is unnecessary and they already believe that there is a rule that holds them to that standard, then why haven’t they been doing it?! Why have they argued that they had no obligation to do this? Why wasn’t I told that there was an alternative suspect in MY case, who just so happened to be the true perp? Why did I only find out after years of investigation during my civil suits, after my exoneration, that the actual perp’s name was in their files but was never investigated? I call BS.”

Dail was convicted of raping a 12-year-old Goldsboro girl in 1987. DNA evidence cleared him in 2007.

Jan. 25, 2013

“With regard to recovered memories, ritual abuse charges and multiple personalities, the tide seems to have turned. Courts are continuing to reverse decisions…The Edenton Seven have been released from prison…. Yet many of these people’s lives have been wrecked by false allegations….

“If, as some polls claim, millions of Americans believe in alien abduction, we have a long way still to go before credulity, superstition and hysterical epidemics are on the wane…”

– From “Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media” by Elaine Showalter (1998)

July 30, 2012

Death noted: Radical-left polemicist Alexander Cockburn, who as early as 1990 was raging against claims of satanic ritual abuse.

Cockburn gave particular attention to feminism’s role in the mania:

“In the coalition powering the satanic abuse persecutions,” he recalled in a 1999 column in The Nation, “feminists constituted a powerful component, most conspicuously in the form of Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine.

“How did feminism, a movement that grew out of the radical passions of the 1960s, navigate itself into this demonic alliance? Charges of perverse abuse of children seemed an inviting line of attack in the larger onslaught on patriarchy, sexual violence and harassment. Social workers and therapists – many of them feminists – became the investigators and effective prosecutors.”

Cockburn oversimplified, as was his way, but it’s no stretch to see how feminism fed into not only ritual abuse, but also the sister hoaxes of recovered memory syndrome and multiple personality disorder.