Nov. 21, 2011

Raymond Lawrence, the New York City chaplain who founded the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven, was an attentive and often appalled observer at Bob Kelly’s trial. This passage is excerpted from a memoir now posted in its entirety on the Bookshelf:

“Among the more obscene performances I witnessed by the prosecution was a long argument that Robert Kelly had had vaginal intercourse with a five-year-old girl.

“On a screen about four feet square the prosecutor displayed a color slide the girl’s genitalia, with two adult thumbs shown pulling back the labia to display the hymen and vaginal opening. The hymen appeared fully intact, covering most of the vaginal opening. The prosecutor thus spent what I recall as hours arguing that the stretch marks in the hymen were evidence of adult penile penetration.

“I wondered why the defense attorney did not rise up and ask if this were Alice in Wonderland…. It was as if I had entered an alternate universe.”

May 27, 2014

“The state court system says it hired a local defense attorney to prosecute three murder suspects because the current district attorney had conflicts of interest in all three cases and no other prosecutors were available.

“The N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts hired H. P. Williams Jr. as a special prosecutor on March 27 after attempts to find a prosecutor from either the state Attorney General’s Office or another district attorney’s office failed….”

– From “Williams to prosecute 2 more murder cases” by William F. West in The (paywalled) Daily Advance (May 24)

Yes, that’s the same H.P. Williams Jr. who as district attorney prosecuted the Edenton Seven, who as an ostensible expert appeared at conferences on “satanic ritual abuse” alongside “cult cop” Robert J. Simandl and Civia Tamarkin of Believe the Children, who as a candidate for reelection received only 41 percent of the vote and who after returning to private practice emphatically declined to discuss the Little Rascals case.

Yes, that H.P. Williams Jr….

Andersen

May 18, 2018

“Despite the acquittal in [the McMartin Preschool case], the hysteria kept raging there and nationally; mainstream news still gave it credence, police still made arrests, prosecutors still prosecuted, and true believers among psychologists and psychiatrists (and their clients) still believed and proselytized, often with a government imprimatur….

“In a small town in Tidewater North Carolina, children testified that a satanic cult operating a day care center had ritually abused them – and taken them in hot-air balloons to outer space and on a boat into the Atlantic where newborns were fed to sharks; several people were sentenced to long prison terms and served time before their convictions were overturned or charges dismissed.”

– From “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History” by Kurt Andersen (2017)

The ripples from McMartin were even more pronounced in Edenton, after prosecutors brought back from California a crucial lesson: Conceal, obscure or destroy the therapists’ notes that would reveal how relentlessly the child-witnesses had been manipulated.

Jan. 31, 2015

“ ‘You need to try to rectify whatever error you made,’ says Santa Clara County, California, Special Assistant District Attorney David Angel. ‘But it needs to really shift from this kind of highly moralistic, punitive view. Maybe it’s a cause for embarrassment, but it’s not a cause for shame.’

“He believes prosecutors have drawn the short straw in language, noting that defense attorneys who err are called ‘ineffective’ and judges are ‘reversed,’ while prosecutorial error alone is labeled ‘misconduct,’ with all the attendant negative connotations.

“Angel believes that most prosecutors are willing to admit to mistakes but that ‘people are very hesitant to admit to something that’s called “misconduct,” because it makes you feel like you did something morally wrong.’ ”

– From “Why can’t law enforcement admit their mistakes?” by Sue Russell at Pacific Standard (via Salon, Oct. 21, 2012)

The concept becomes trickier, however, the longer prosecutors cling to their fallacious and costly narratives. At some point – oh, let’s say 25 years later – might “mistakes” have toxified into “misconduct”?