July 29, 2016

“Sometimes prosecutors withhold exculpatory evidence of a defendant’s innocence, and don’t turn it over until they are forced to. Take a look at the exonerations reported in recent years and you will see a pattern of prosecutors continuing to fight against our release even when our innocence is uncovered. Many innocent prisoners have been buried alive in these prisons by this kind of corruption….

“How do the culprits sleep at night? Well, to be honest, these people have no consciences. It’s like any other day at the job for them. Some have built their careers on the backs of us innocent prisoners, and now they sit in high places.

“Until the day comes when culprits responsible for wrongful convictions are held fully accountable – wrongful convictions will never stop.”

– From “When Courts Are Used As A Weapon Against The Innocent” by Lorenzo Johnson at Huffington Post (July 12)

Johnson had served 16 1/2 years of a life-without-parole sentence when in 2012 the Third Circuit Federal Court of Appeals found insufficient evidence for his conviction. He remained free for four months, after which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the conviction and ordered him back to a Pennsylvania prison. He continues to seek a new trial.

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

Feb. 10, 2012

“(The scene of children screaming invective at a prison-bound Bob Kelly) was… the graphic heart of the documentary….

“The car pulled away, and they began to giggle self-consciously. A second or two of awkward silence heightened the artificiality of the moment, the sense of a construct that the girls fully understood. Then an older woman (presumably a mother) moved into the silence, and began to clap and cheer. A few others joined in in desultory fashion. ‘Let’s go get something (to) eat,’ said the mom….

“By chance, I had just finished reading ‘The Professor,’ a minor novel of Charlotte Bronte’s. Like most Bronte novels it was laced with leisurely reflections, and this one struck me powerfully enough to note down: ‘Human beings – human children especially – seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consists only in a capacity to make others wretched.’

“As those children shrieked at Bob Kelly through the glass of the police car window, I wondered if there wasn’t more than a whiff of that pleasure in power in the air.

“And then I remembered this town is called Eden, and we’ve known for a long while that the darnedest things happened in Eden.”

May 17, 2018

In recent years the Little Rascals Day Care case, probably the most significant event in Edenton in the 20th century, seems to have been a taboo subject in the local Chowan Herald and in the Daily Advance of Elizabeth City. I’m grateful that the Herald has published my letter to the editor in this week’s edition:

“In the 1990s the town of Edenton was torn apart by the Little Rascals Day Care case, in which seven local people were accused of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ of dozens of children. The case attracted reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post and received eight hours of documentary coverage on PBS’s “Frontline” series. Co-owner Bob Kelly’s trial was the longest and costliest in North Carolina history. After Kelly served six years in prison and cook Dawn Wilson three, their convictions were overturned.

“The Duke University Law School Library recently opened to researchers an exhibit and archive on the Little Rascals case, including the transcript of Bob Kelly’s trial and numerous other documents. ‘The case is one example of the preoccupation with perceived abuse taking place at daycares and preschools in the 1980s and 1990s,’ Duke wrote in its announcement. ‘Often, these cases also involved allegations of Satanism or devil worship. Like the Little Rascals case, most of these daycare abuse accusations turned out to be false.

“Today no reputable psychologist, social scientist or legal expert will argue otherwise. From Wikipedia to the National Registry of Exonerations, the defendants in cases such as Little Rascals are recognized as innocent victims of a bizarre ‘moral panic’ that bore striking similarities to the Salem witch hunts 300 years earlier.

“During the years-long prosecution of the Edenton Seven, townspeople were divided family vs. family, friends vs. friends. Today the former Little Rascals Day Care Center is being converted into housing – is that what would happen if townspeople believed it was the site of mass molestation of their children? So where now does Edenton stand?”