Sept. 28, 2012

As mentioned last week, the preponderance of women among the Edenton Seven was one of many curiosities that apparently failed to burden the prosecution with second thoughts.

Mary DeYoung addresses the issue in “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” (2004):

“By the 1980s… research studies consistently found that child sexual abuse by women was a statistical rarity….To accuse (female day-care workers of ritual abuse), child-savers had the daunting challenge of fashioning folk devils out of quite ordinary women engaged in traditional women’s work, and then persuading the public that evil had lurked unnoticed for so long behind such homely facades…..

“The answer was simple: belief trumps gender. Women who are satanists do what no other women even imagine….”

July 19, 2013

“…There should be lessons here, lessons about the risks in cases so emotional that they take on a life of their own; lessons for prosecutors who need to use their considerable investigative resources to learn, and not to crusade; lessons about the price in credibility paid by a judicial system in which defendants who are not rich are up against tremendous odds….

“The Little Rascals case…. has wasted many years of many lives. The greater waste will be if nothing is learned from it.”

– From “Case dismissed” (News & Observer editorial, May 28, 1997)

Jan. 4, 2017

“[Richard Beck’s ‘Believe the Children’] is perhaps most poignant on the subject of the damage to the young people who acted as witnesses. ‘Children as young as three and almost never older than nine or ten,’ Beck writes, ‘children who previously understood their time in day care as essentially normal, whether happy or not, had their lives reorganized around the idea that they were deeply and irrevocably traumatized.’ ”

– From “Our Panics, Ourselves” by Rebecca Onion in Boston Review (Sept. 22, 2015)

March 5, 2012

“DURHAM — Tracey Cline could not admit she was wrong….”

Thus begins J. Andrew Curliss’s latest behavioral analysis of Durham County’s latest disgraced district attorney.

Coincidentally, Curliss cites a book I’ve been reading to better understand the rigidly wrongheaded behavior of the Little Rascals prosecutors.

“Carol Tavris, a Los Angeles social psychologist who has researched and written about the behavior and decision-making of prosecutors, said studies show the human brain, when sorting out conflicting beliefs and actions, will engage in a powerful act known as ‘self-justification.’

“It can keep people from admitting they are wrong and can be more powerful and more dangerous than an explicit lie, she said in an interview and in a 2007 book she co-authored, ‘Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)’…

“Self-justification is especially concerning in the justice system, Tavris said, because authorities often view themselves as ‘good guys’ doing the ‘right thing’….

“ ‘It’s really, really, really hard to face the reality that you screwed up,’ she said. ‘When we have a view of ourselves as good, competent, ethical, honest people and we are now confronted with evidence that we did something that was incompetent, unethical, immoral or harmful, we have two choices. We can ’fess up – say, “Oh, my God, look at this evidence, what did I do? How can I make amends?” – or, we deny.’ ”

Here’s a recent public ’fessing up that could be a model for errant prosecutors: “I want to express my sincere regret and apology…. It was a terrible mistake, and we knew it was wrong while we were doing it. Instead of getting caught up in it, I should have stopped it.”

Alas, it comes not from Cline – or from H. P. Williams Jr., Bill Hart or Nancy Lamb – but from the NFL coach who oversaw the “bounty” system for disabling opposing players.