March 31, 2015

“…The watershed event marking the shift in public opinion on these (“satanic ritual abuse” day care) cases was the HBO airing of ‘Indictment: The McMartin Trial’ (watchable here on YouTube) in May 1995, wherein Ray Buckey, the child-molesting villain of the McMartin trial, was recast as the victim of a hysterical conspiracy theory.

“Five years earlier, no major television network would have dared question the infallibility of the testimony of ravished, innocent babes. A network like HBO is closely attuned to shifts in the public mood.

“Such TV dramas and feature films are generally more likely to respond to existing trends in public opinion on controversial issues than to break new ground, and so this docudrama marked a sort of closure on the issue in the public imagination, though the judicial system cannot shift direction so quickly.”

– From “The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America” by Sandra Baringer (2004)

Eighteen days before HBO broadcast “Indictment,” the North Carolina Court of Appeals had overturned the convictions of Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson, but Kelly’s torture at the hands of the state was far from over: A year later he would be charged with raping a young girl outside the day care in 1987. Was prosecutor Nancy Lamb unable to “shift direction so quickly” – or simply unwilling?

imdb.com

Darryl Hunt

March 17, 2016

The award-winning documentary “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” was released in 2006, but of course Hunt’s world-famous exoneration only freed him to face new trials on the outside – most recently divorce and cancer.

Winston-Salem police Wednesday attributed his death to suicide by gunshot.

Amazingly, Darryl Hunt overcame the unspeakable damage done by 19 years of wrongful imprisonment to build a life of righteous achievement. I’m choosing to remember his journey, not its end.

Jan. 20, 2012

Although the West Memphis Three weren’t day care workers, their notorious case – most recently updated in HBO’s “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory” – holds obvious parallels to that of the Edenton 7.

In both courtrooms voodoo justice ruled.

Most poignant to me, however, is that prosecutors in Arkansas and North Carolina shared a dedication to ensuring the defendants’ long-overdue release bore the least possible resemblance to exoneration.

In August 2011 the West Memphis Three were required to enter an Alford plea, maintaining their innocence but acknowledging that sufficient evidence existed to convict them.

On May 23, 1997, Nancy Lamb announced the decision not to challenge the overturned convictions of Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson in order to “allow wounds to heal…. The paramount thing is not having to drag these children through this again.” Her timing seemed aimed – futilely, as it turned out – at averting the national outrage that would come four days later with the airing of the final episode of “Innocence Lost.”

Two years later, when the last charges against Kelly were dismissed, here’s how Joseph Neff of the News & Observer described the scene:

“The prosecutors in the longest, most expensive criminal case in North Carolina history picked a day when all attention was focused elsewhere to quietly throw in the towel.

“It was Sept. 15, as Hurricane Floyd churned northward toward landfall the next day, that Assistant District Attorney Nancy Lamb filed a two-page document with the Clerk of Superior Court in Edenton, dismissing eight counts of sexual abuse against Robert Kelly.”