![\"150527Balko\"](\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/150527Balko.jpg\")
May 27, 2015<\/p>\nMay 27, 2015<\/p>\n
\u201cHere\u2019s an observation from the (\u201csatanic ritual abuse\u201d day-care) panic that I don\u2019t think has been fully explored: These kids didn\u2019t make up these stories.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this case (of\u00a0Fran and Dan Keller<\/a>)\u00a0and dozens of others, the kids were telling tales with details about geography, history and current events about which kids of their age couldn\u2019t have known. That\u2019s likely what made their stories seem somewhat credible. But the fact that it all was fictitious reveals a particularly unsettling truth:<\/p>\n \u201cThese sick, lurid, unimaginable abuses could only have been a product of the imaginations of the therapists, social workers, cops and\/or prosecutors who interviewed the children. If the memories were implanted, those are the only people who could have implanted them.<\/p>\n \u201cThat means that the same people entrusted to protect these kids, and in whom these communities trusted to police the streets, prosecute crimes and administer therapy, were ultimately the ones capable of dreaming up detailed sexual fantasies that put children in bizarre rituals involving violence, animals, corpses and so on.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot to be learned from these cases. For one, there are lessons about professional accountability<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cNot only were the vast majority of the prosecutors who put these innocent people in prison in these cases never sanctioned, but also most went on to great professional success, sometimes because of their role in these high-profile cases, and sometimes even after it was widely known that the people they prosecuted were innocent.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are other lessons here about how we screen \u2018expert\u2019 witnesses, and how bad science gets into the courtroom. There are lessons about the power of suggestion that could be applied to eyewitness testimony and how we conduct police lineups.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the drawing of lessons is something we typically do once a crisis is over. This one still isn\u2019t. There are\u00a0“still people in prison awaiting exoneration<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 From \u201c<\/em>The ongoing legacy<\/em><\/a>\u00a0of the great satanic sex abuse panic\u201d by Radley Balko in the Washington Post (May 26)<\/em><\/p>\n Is there something about \u201csatanic ritual abuse\u201d cases that knocks courts off their game? Although the Texas Court of Appeals manages to overturn (at last!) the child sexual abuse charges against day-care operators Fran and Dan Keller, it can\u2019t bring itself to acknowledge their actual innocence. Thanks to Judge\u00a0Cheryl Johnson for her\u00a0clear-eyed concurring opinion<\/a>\u00a0noting that \u201cThis was a witch hunt from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May 27, 2015 \u201cHere\u2019s an observation from the (\u201csatanic ritual abuse\u201d day-care) panic that I don\u2019t think has been fully explored: These kids didn\u2019t make up these stories. \u201cIn this case (of\u00a0Fran and Dan Keller)\u00a0and dozens of others, the kids were telling tales with details about geography, history and current events about which kids of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2316,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions\/2316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}