May 6, 2013

When last we left Junior Chandler, his former appellate defender, Mark Montgomery, had asked North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services to look into the case.

But NCPLS requires the prisoner himself to request help, and that hasn’t happened. “Like a lot of the old-timers, Junior does not think they (NCPLS) are worth much,” Montgomery says. “There was a big shake up there a few years ago, and they are now very aggressive and as effective as anybody in post-conviction cases. I am going to encourage Junior (again) to ask for their help….”

Meanwhile, he has pitched Junior’s case to Christine Mumma at the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence.

Here’s the essential “evidence of actual innocence” that Montgomery offered Mumma:

“Lathern Hensley (a.k.a. Buddy Norton) was one of the adult mentally retarded riders on Junior’s bus. He and another woman testified that Junior did stuff, and they helped. They each got probation-only plea deals. I found Hensley, but his guardian wouldn’t let me talk with him. The Actual Innocence folks (with powers granted by the state) could insist on talking with Hensley. I think he would say that he was pressured into lying on the stand.”

This is just the latest long shot in overturning Junior’s wrongful conviction, and even if the Center on Actual Innocence agrees to take the case, the process is anything but swift. As the Center’s website cautions, “We counsel patience to inmates and their families during the investigative phase as the process of gathering additional documentation; identifying, locating and interviewing witnesses; and completing many other investigative tasks can take several years.”

Sept. 12, 2014

Edenton has been the scene of many historic events – the Edenton Tea Party, the escape of Harriet Jacobs, etc. – but surely nothing happened there in the entire 20th Century more significant than the Little Rascals Day Care case.

So why is the case not even mentioned on Edenton’s Wikipedia page?

On Sept. 28, 2013, a rogue editor abruptly removed a passage similar to this one:

“Edenton achieved international notoriety for the Little Rascals Day Care sexual abuse trial, the subject of journalist Ofra Bikel’s award-winning trilogy of documentaries….”

Wikipedia entries are intentionally easy to edit, but the process leaves fingerprints.
The person whose name is attached to the Little Rascals deletion turns out to be an innkeeper in Edenton. He ended our exchange with “I did not remove anything or post anything on that site…. must have been my competitor from across the street.”

I have restored the deleted passage – let’s hope it proves innkeeper-proof.

March 15, 2014

“In an interview with Entertainment Weekly (True Detective creator Nic) Pizzolato responded to a question about the inspiration for the show: ‘You can Google “Satanism” “preschool” and “Louisiana” and you’ll be surprised at what you get.’

“This is clearly a reference to a 2005 child abuse prosecution in Ponchataoula, Louisiana, that generated lurid international headlines about ritualistic Satan worship inside a church, complete with black robes, animal blood, orgies, and pentagrams.

“This has since led various media sources to report breathlessly on the ‘true story’ behind True Detective. The problem is that this ‘true story’ turns out to be completely false, at least in regard to all the details regarding Satanic ritual abuse.

“These were apparently part of a classic atrocity story, invented by the defendants to garner sympathy from jurors – the idea being that the defendants were victims of an unspeakably evil church-based mind control cult, rather than merely being banally evil and not very interesting child molesters.

“What sort of moral responsibility do artists have not to exploit, and thereby perhaps propagate, moral panics? The aesthetic power of The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will has not absolved their creators for choosing to exploit racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

“Our shameful history of panics and persecutions over the imaginary satanic ritual abuse of children should have been treated by artists as talented as the makers of True Detectiveas a cautionary tale, rather than as an opportunity for further invidious myth-making.”

– From “True Detective’s dangerous lies about satanic ritual abuse” by Paul Campos at The Week (March 12)

I’m surprised to find myself cutting the just-concluded HBO series a bit more slack than Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado. But True Detective’s potential for doing harm in 2014 seems minimal compared with the hysterically alarmist Do You Know the Muffin Man? which aired on Lifetime while arrests were still being made in the Little Rascals case.

Dec. 28, 2011

“Throughout the trial, prosecuting attorneys (in the Little Rascals case) repeatedly pursued their hunches without an apparent desire to test an alternate theory. This resulted in a rather spectacular false admission by 6-year-old Andy, who had been a 3-year-old at the time of the alleged sexual abuse by Bob Kelly.

“ ‘Prosecutor: Do you remember a time where you ever had to do anything to Mr. Bob’s hiney with your mouth?

“ ‘Andy: No, ma’am.

“ ‘Prosecutor: Do you remember telling Dr. Betty that one time you had to lick Mr. Bob’s hiney? Did that happen? Did you ever have to do that, that you didn’t want to do it?

“ ‘Andy: Yes, ma’am.’

“In reality, the prosecutor had made a mistake, thinking that the charge was that Andy had sodomized Bob Kelly, rather than the other way around. The state dropped this charge after it realized Andy had admitted to the wrong charge.

“This ought to have sensitized the prosecution to the very real dangers of pursuing a single hypothesis in the relentless manner we have described, but unfortunately it did not appear to have done so.”

– From “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony”
by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck (1995)