Jan. 20, 2016

“The Jan. 15 editorial ‘The limits of zeal’ contrasted the penalty given Christine Mumma with the absence of rebuke to prosecutors for the ‘massive failure’ that kept her client wrongfully imprisoned for more than 36 years.

“It is not enough simply to point out this shameful disparity. The public embarrassment resulting from the hearing should move the North Carolina State Bar to empower a separate disciplinary panel to deal only with prosecutorial excesses. Such a panel would not lack for business.”

– From “A Panel for Prosecutors,” my letter to the editor of the News & Observer  (Jan. 19) (text cache)

Feb. 24, 2012

“Samuel Sewall was one of nine judges appointed to hear the Salem witch trials in 1692.

“Five years later he stood up in church in front of the congregation while the minister read out his apology.

“None of his colleagues on the bench followed suit.”

– From “Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming
of an American Conscience” by Richard Francis (2005)

No regret – or even doubt! – has ever been expressed by Judge Marsh McLelland, by prosecutors H.P. Williams, Nancy Lamb or Bill Hart or by the misguided therapists who served not the children but the Little Rascals prosecution team.

Do they ever give a passing thought to the lives they ruined?

Aug. 26, 2013

“Attorney General Roy Cooper stopped far short of apologizing to (Greg Taylor and Floyd Brown). He said that the SBI had better investigative practices now and that ‘It was in the best interest of the state to settle these cases.’

“And maybe in the best interest of justice, too?

“These two men lost their youths thanks to agents of the SBI. That is an outrage for which they can never be adequately compensated. State officials have been encouraged to offer profuse apologies, and that is not unreasonable, though it’s a little late for it now….

“But let no one involved in prosecuting these two men believe that the debt for their ‘mistakes’ is paid in full.”

– From “Two former prisoners’ lives, valued,” editorial in the News & Observer (Aug. 15, 2013)

As compensation for their flagrantly corrupted prosecution, Taylor received about $4.5 million from the state, Brown about $8 million. Attorney General Cooper seems to find such an outlay easier to swallow than offering an apology – providing yet another example of the “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)” approach to accountability.

By contrast, in 2007 the Duke lacrosse case moved Cooper to give the defendants a “statement of innocence” and to at least brush up against remorse:

“In the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly…. I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people.”

But in 2009, after yet another wrongful conviction settlement – this one for $3.9 million – Cooper declined to give murder defendant Alan Gell a statement of innocence. ”The Duke case was a clear case, very unusual,” he explained. “There was no crime committed….”

“No crime committed”? Why, I know another “clear case, very unusual” that precisely meets that standard!

July 6, 2012

“When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again.

“Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget, rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early ‘80s – the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities.”

– Margaret Talbot, writing in The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 7, 2001