Nov. 27, 2014

“Of the dozen or so historical markers clustered in the town of Edenton, only one – recognizing novelist Inglis Fletcher – postdates the 1800s.

“The North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Committee now has the opportunity, 25 years after the first arrest in the Little Rascals case, to add to that number a 20th Century event inarguably significant in the legal and social history of not just North Carolina but also the nation.”

– From my application proposing “history on a stick” recognition for the Little Rascals Day Care case

The marker committee, composed of historians from four-year colleges across the state, will meet in December to decide which pending applications meet its criteria.

Aug. 10, 2012

Carol Tavris:

“After the McMartin trial in 1986, I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about research that had been done on how to interview children in sex abuse cases. Evidence at the time suggested that sometimes you have to ask children leading questions or they will not tell you they have been molested.

“For example, if you interviewed a child after a genital examination and you asked her just to tell what the doctor did, almost no child would volunteer that the doctor touched her genitals. But if you asked a leading question, such as, ‘The doctor touched your private parts, didn’t he?’ the children would say ‘yes.’ The L.A. Times headlined this article, ‘Do Children Lie? Not About This.’

“Of course that was preposterous. Of course children lie ‘about this’ and lots of other things. But my essay, although based on research at the time, helped support the child advocates who were on a rampage against child molesters, and who were running around saying ‘children never lie’ and selling bumper stickers that said ‘Believe the Children.’’ I didn’t foresee that prosecutors and therapists would use these same studies to coerce the hell out of kids.

“When I think of my own embarrassment about that little article, and how hard it was to say, ‘Boy, was I wrong about that research,’ I realize how difficult it must be for all those ‘believe the children’ people to acknowledge they were wrong, too. In fact, most of them haven’t. They are more entrenched than ever in their pernicious beliefs.”

– From “The Measure of a Woman: An Interview with Social Scientist Carol Tavris”
in Skeptic magazine (Feb. 9, 2011)

Feb. 15, 2012

I asked Mark Montgomery for an update on Junior Chandler’s latest appeal of his two life sentences for child sexual abuse:

“There are two prongs to the appeal. First, I am asking the N.C. Supreme Court to simply do the right thing by Junior. The Court said in 2010 that expert testimony like that in Junior’s case is (and was) inadmissible. That being the case, it is fundamentally unfair for Junior to be facing the rest of his life in prison, when many defendants have been freed because this sort of testimony was used against them at trial.

“Second, Junior’s lawyer objected to the testimony but did not raise the issue on appeal. I argued in a motion in Superior Court that the lawyer was ineffective for abandoning the issue. The Superior Court judge denied the motion without a hearing. If the Supreme Court will not itself set aside Junior’s convictions, it should at least require a hearing on trial counsel’s conduct.”

This is how the process works: “Petitions such as Junior’s go to one of the six associate justices. He or she decides what should be done and then presents the case to the court as a whole in a monthly (sort of) closed door meeting. The justices then vote on whether to grant the petition. If the Court grants the petition, it usually requires full briefs from both parties, but may decide the case of the basis of the petition and the State’s response alone.

“If it denies the petition, that’s the end of the road.”

The court could respond as early as April 13, according to this chart of petitions allowed and denied.

Dec. 31, 2012

Anticipating Attorney General Roy Cooper’s 2007 statement dismissing charges against the lacrosse defendants, Duke law professor Paul Haagen said,

“The critical thing could be the wording. It could simply say the state can no longer prove its case, which would be a very harmful outcome for the community, (or it) could provide a full accounting of why the case should never have been brought.”

As it turned out, Cooper – elbowed along by the Duke students’ phalanx of top-shelf lawyers – chose the road less traveled by prosecutorial bitter-enders such as H. P. Williams, Nancy Lamb and Bill Hart:

“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.”

Cooper’s words were appropriate to end the case of the lacrosse defendants – and they would be just as appropriate to end the case of the Edenton Seven.