Aug. 13, 2016

“A bill to increase criminal penalties for prosecutors who intentionally withhold or falsify evidence is headed to the [California] state Senate after being approved in committee.

“The measure by Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, D-San Fernando, would upgrade the violation from a misdemeanor to a felony for offending prosecutors. It’s already a felony for police officers to withhold or falsify evidence. The proposal provides for sentences of 16 months, two years and three years.

“The bill received the go-ahead from the Senate Appropriations Committee despite opposition from prosecution groups that say it is redundant and potentially costly.

“Opponents say that boosting the penalty for prosecutors would bog down the courts and that prosecutors already are subject to sanctions by the state Bar Association when they commit misconduct.

“Supporters argue that judges and the Bar rarely take action against offenders.”

– From “Bill boosting penalty for prosecutor misconduct gets OK” by Tony Saavedra in the Orange County Register (Aug. 11)

Is it possible that other states, such as California, aren’t as timid in disciplining prosecutors as is North Carolina?

Dec. 17, 2012

“(They) are arrogant and self-centered, and feel privileged and entitled. They have a grandiose, exaggerated sense of self-importance and they are primarily motivated by self-serving goals. They seek power over others and will manipulate, exploit, deceive, con, or otherwise take advantage of others, in order to inflict harm or to achieve their goals. They are callous and have little empathy for others needs or feelings unless they coincide with their own. They show disregard for the rights, property, or safety of others and experience little or no remorse or guilt if they cause any harm or injury to others. They may act aggressively or sadistically toward others in pursuit of their personal agendas and appear to derive pleasure or satisfaction from humiliating, demeaning, dominating, or hurting others….”

The passage above, from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders best describes

A. Psychopaths

B. Prosecutors of ritual-abuse day-care cases

C. Both A and B

May 16, 2012

“The researcher-therapist gap came to public attention because of three psychological epidemics, which spread like wildfire during the 1980s and ’90s: recovered memory, multiple-personality disorder and sex-abuse allegations at day-care centers. Each phenomenon was supported by clinical opinion; each has been discredited by empirical research.

“Of course, research never provides ‘the’ answer in a case; and, of course, clinical opinion is sometimes correct. But research does provide ways of correcting biases and testing assumptions. For example, the day-care scandals, from the McMartin case in California to Margaret Kelly Michaels in New Jersey to the Amiraults in Massachusetts, were perpetuated by therapists who testified that children never lie about sexual abuse and aren’t curious about sex unless they have been molested, that masturbation is a sign of sexual abuse and that abuse can be diagnosed by observing how children play with anatomically correct dolls. But each claim has been disproved by research on the cognitive abilities of children, on factors that increase suggestibility, on the normalcy of masturbation and sex play among children and on the way nonabused children play with the dolls….

“The researcher-therapist gap has been institutionalized by the rapid rise of free-standing schools of therapy not connected to university psychology departments. Graduates of these schools typically learn only to do therapy and seldom learn about other areas of psychology relevant to their work – like the limitations of hypnosis, the fallibility of memory or the normal process of suggestion in therapy.”

– From “A Widening Gulf Splits Lab and Couch” by Carol Tavris
in the New York Times (June 21, 1998)

June 12, 2014

“He thinks the continued treatment of these cases as a modern-day episode of mass hysteria does disservice to children and even puts them in danger.

“ ‘We have, over the last 20 years, discounted the word of children who might testify about sexual abuse,’ he writes. ‘We have become more worried about overreacting to child sexual abuse than we are about underreacting to it.’

“If that were the legacy of the day-care cases, it would be a damning one. But when I spoke to psychologists in the field – those Professor Cheit cites respectfully, as well as those he attacks – they gave a different account of the science at the heart of this history….”

– From “Abuse Cases, and a Legacy of Skepticism” by Emily Bazelon in the New York Times (June 9)

Thank you, Ms. Bazelon. In the category of “fat books in desperate search of a reason to exist,” Cheit’s “The Witch-Hunt Narrative” belongs right up there with William D. Cohan’s contemporaneous “The Price of Silence,” an account of the Duke lacrosse case that sympathizes not with the railroaded (and later exonerated!) defendants but with District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was disbarred and briefly jailed for conspiring to rig the case against them.

At the core of each book is the unsubstantiated contention that something surely must have happened, either at a Durham party house and at countless day cares. Fortunately, Cohan and Cheit can only gratuitously smear the reputations of innocent defendants, not put them in prison – unlike Little Rascals expert witness Mark “where there’s smoke there’s fire” Everson.