April 4, 2012

“An appeals court Thursday overturned the conviction of six people accused of participating in a pedophilia ring in northern France five years ago, unraveling one of the most mismanaged cases in French judicial history and leaving the nation asking how the court system could have gone so awry.

“ ‘I apologize to the acquitted and their families,’ Justice Minister Pascal Clement said at a news conference after the verdict was announced in Paris.

“He ordered a triple investigation of the police, judiciary and social services involved in the case…. ‘I want the French people to know that I will get to the bottom of this,’ he said.

“Paris’s chief prosecutor, Yves Bot, had personally asked the appeal court to acquit the six, calling the case a ‘true catastrophe’ and demanding an investigation into who was responsible for such a gross miscarriage of justice. ‘We must do what is necessary to make sure this doesn’t happen again,’ Bot said.

“But others were heartened by the appeal, saying that it showed that the courts were capable of self-criticism and self-correction.

“ ‘That’s indispensable in a democracy,’ said Dominique Wolton, a sociologist at France’s National Council for Scientific Research.

“The case began in 2000 in the town of Outreau after a number of children told a teacher that they had been abused.

“It was marred by deep doubts from the beginning, said Yves Jannier, France’s attorney general.

“He noted that the investigative report by the police in July 2002 found ‘more doubts than certainties’ in the accusations, but said, ‘No one had enough critical sense to stop the machine.’ ”

– From the International Herald Tribune, Dec. 2, 2005

Thanks to lawyer-neighbor Lou Lesesne for steering me to this account of the Outreau Affair.
Although the case differs in numerous significant ways from such U.S. ritual-abuse prosecutions as Little Rascals and McMartin, I was most struck by the readiness of French officials to acknowledge and apologize for a justice system gone crazy.

Soon after, president Jacques Chirac wrote letters to 13 acquitted defendants and to the widow of a defendant who committed suicide in prison awaiting trial: “Justice is the soul of the republic. We have the imperative duty to draw all the lessons from the immense sufferings endured by all the accused whose innocence has now been established.”

How to explain the French state’s humane response to its costly misdeeds, while our own prosecutors, attorneys general, governors, et al., keep silent?

Why aren’t they too “capable of self-criticism and self-correction”?

Why don’t they too recognize “the immense sufferings endured by all the accused”?

Jan. 31, 2015

“ ‘You need to try to rectify whatever error you made,’ says Santa Clara County, California, Special Assistant District Attorney David Angel. ‘But it needs to really shift from this kind of highly moralistic, punitive view. Maybe it’s a cause for embarrassment, but it’s not a cause for shame.’

“He believes prosecutors have drawn the short straw in language, noting that defense attorneys who err are called ‘ineffective’ and judges are ‘reversed,’ while prosecutorial error alone is labeled ‘misconduct,’ with all the attendant negative connotations.

“Angel believes that most prosecutors are willing to admit to mistakes but that ‘people are very hesitant to admit to something that’s called “misconduct,” because it makes you feel like you did something morally wrong.’ ”

– From “Why can’t law enforcement admit their mistakes?” by Sue Russell at Pacific Standard (via Salon, Oct. 21, 2012)

The concept becomes trickier, however, the longer prosecutors cling to their fallacious and costly narratives. At some point – oh, let’s say 25 years later – might “mistakes” have toxified into “misconduct”?

July 23, 2012

“ ‘Don’t focus on the question, focus on the answer,’ (District Attorney H. P. Williams Jr.) said, referring to the defense argument that children were asked leading questions.”

– The Associated Press, March 28, 1992

Did prosecutors know all along that the interview process was corrupt at the core and that their case was in essence (if not in the strict legal sense) fruit of a poisonous tree?

Or had they, too, simply lost their bearings in the hysteria?

Oct. 4, 2013

“The essence of counterknowledge is that it purports to be knowledge but is not knowledge. Its claims can be shown to be untrue, either because there are facts that contradict them or because there is no evidence to support them. It misrepresents reality (deliberately or otherwise) by presenting non-facts as facts….

“The media were pushing the circulation of counterknowledge long before the public hooked up to broadband. Consider, for example, the satanic ritual abuse scare….”

– From “Counterknowledge: How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history” by Damian Thompson (2008)