March 21, 2015

I spent several hours Friday at Duke University Law School listening to experts detail “Evolving Trends in Forensic Science.”

Fascinating. Topics ranged from the effects of sleep deprivation on jurors’ decision-making to the use of cell tower evidence to determine suspect location. But I was wedged into an auditorium otherwise full of lawyers to hear pediatrician Cynthia Brown and defense attorneys Mark Montgomery and Lisa Miles outline the latest standards for medical exams in cases of suspected child abuse. The good news – if you’re being wrongfully prosecuted in 2015 – is that those standards have become dramatically more specific and sophisticated.

If, however, you were wrongfully prosecuted in 1987, then the fruits of that scientific progress remain maddeningly out of reach.  Waiting for me when I returned home Friday was a letter from Junior Chandler:

“April 15 will be 28 yrs – nearly half my life, all because of lies when I did no crime. It’s a shame & disgrace to the whole N.C. justice system, not only to do this but never to be willing to say they were wrong….”

March 7, 2016

“Have any public officials apologized to Dudley?

“No.”

– From “Howard Dudley’s new life: restaurants, cellphones and a cemetery visit” (cached)  by Joseph Neff in the News & Observer (March 5)

Aw, what’s to apologize for – it was only 23 years of wrongful imprisonment  (cached)….

March 30, 2012

Kee MacFarlane is the notorious therapist who led the ritual abuse scare of the late 1980s (and pioneered the misuse of anatomically correct dolls in interviewing children). In just four months MacFarlane diagnosed more than 360 children at the McMartin Pre-School as abused.

In 2005 she declined to be interviewed by CNN but sent a statement:

“We’ve learned a lot in 20 years about how to interview children for forensic purposes and how to manage complex cases such as this one. It would be a sad commentary if we didn’t learn from such painful experience.”

Not much of a mea culpa – but still more than anyone connected with the Little Rascals prosecution has managed.

July 12, 2013

“Some professionals take the charges (of satanic ritual abuse) seriously. ‘It’s hard to believe, but so were the reports about Nazi atrocities,’ says Bennett Braun, director of the Dissociative Disorder Program at Chicago’s Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center. ‘Then we found the concentration camps.’

“Skeptics are still waiting for the equivalent to a concentration camp to be found. No investigation has ever turned up so much as a bloodstain that could be traced with certainty to these bizarre activities.

“What’s indisputable is the existence of a busy network of therapists specializing in SRA. ‘These allegations are produced by the unrelenting pressure of the therapist,’ says Richard Ofshe, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies cults and thought control. ‘You will eventually come up with bizarre stuff because you run out of all the ordinary stuff.’ ”

– From “Rush to Judgment” in Newsweek (April 19, 1993)

As Newsweek’s secondary headline noted, “America is now at war against child abuse. But some recent cases suggest we may be pushing too hard, too fast.” Among the prosecutions criticized was Little Rascals, but by this time both Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson had been convicted and imprisoned.

Unlike so many others who fomented the ritual abuse/repressed memory/multiple personality mania, psychiatrist Braun actually suffered consequences: He lost his medical license for two years and was among the defendants in a malpractice suit ultimately settled for $7.5 million. He now practices in Butte, Montana.