Rascals case in brief

In the beginning, in 1989, more than 90 children at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, accused a total of 20 adults with 429 instances of sexual abuse over a three-year period. It may have all begun with one parent’s complaint about punishment given her child.

Among the alleged perpetrators: the sheriff and mayor. But prosecutors would charge only Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris, Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, Robert “Bob” Kelly, Willard Scott Privott, Shelley Stone and Dawn Wilson – the Edenton 7.

Along with sodomy and beatings, allegations included a baby killed with a handgun, a child being hung upside down from a tree and being set on fire and countless other fantastic incidents involving spaceships, hot air balloons, pirate ships and trained sharks.

By the time prosecutors dropped the last charges in 1997, Little Rascals had become North Carolina’s longest and most costly criminal trial. Prosecutors kept defendants jailed in hopes at least one would turn against their supposed co-conspirators. Remarkably, none did. Another shameful record: Five defendants had to wait longer to face their accusers in court than anyone else in North Carolina history.

Between 1991 and 1997, Ofra Bikel produced three extraordinary episodes on the Little Rascals case for the PBS series “Frontline.” Although “Innocence Lost” did not deter prosecutors, it exposed their tactics and fostered nationwide skepticism and dismay.

With each passing year, the absurdity of the Little Rascals charges has become more obvious. But no admission of error has ever come from prosecutors, police, interviewers or parents. This site is devoted to the issues raised by this case.

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Today’s random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….

Prosecutors must recognize vulnerability to cognitive flaws

mic.com

Michael Shammas

Nov. 17, 2016

“It’s no secret that we humans grant far too much confidence to our opinions. But when powerful people do this, the dangers compound. Zealotry replaces fair-mindedness. The worst excesses happen when prosecutors forget they’re flawed humans, like anyone else, and that as a result they’re subject to cognitive flaws like tunnel vision, racial bias, and the desire to reduce cognitive dissonance through ‘cognitive consistency’ even at the expense of complicated, nuanced, self-contradictory, paradoxical truth….

“Cognitive bias and overconfidence touch us all. Only a conscious awareness that we might be wrong can counter unthinking heuristics, biases, and schemas that lead to imperfect conclusions….

“Wisdom counsels not the confident use of power, but the wise use of power. The first step of wisdom is recognizing how little we know….”

– From “ ‘Making a Murderer’ Attorney Highlights Our Troubling Rate of Wrongful Conviction — and Suggests a Solution” by Michael Shammas in the Huffington Post (July 12)

And the latest on the still-imprisoned Brendan Dassey.

Not everyone was moved by HBO’s McMartin drama

150331Indictment 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?

Nancy Lamb loses bid for district attorney

140603Lamb Nov. 5, 2014

Andrew Womble: 24,357 votes (53 percent)

Nancy Lamb: 21,411 votes (47 percent)

I’d like to attribute Nancy Lamb’s defeat to her misbegotten role in the prosecution of the Edenton Seven. But voters in the First Judicial District probably gave more weight to her being a Democrat and to her having allowed a backlog of cases during her time in the DA’s office.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, another unrepentant promoter of the “satanic ritual abuse” day-care narrative, Martha Coakley, was defeated in her race for governor.

A national epidemic of supposed ‘remembering’

Aug. 30, 2013

“The Edenton case is not just a horrifying aberration. Adults across the country are suddenly ‘remembering’ that they were abused as children, and filing civil lawsuits and criminal charges against aged parents…

“Claims of long-ago child abuse, ‘blocked out’ from memory until now, have become a common defense tactic. Unscrupulous ‘therapists’ and sensationalist writers feed the frenzy.

“Anything goes against accused abusers, especially the right to a fair trial.”

– From an editorial in the Arkansas Times (Aug. 5, 1993)