March 25, 2013

“I really see us as sharing the goal of making sure this conviction rests on credible and substantial evidence. I’m going to go where the truth leads in this matter.”

– Jon David, district attorney in Brunswick, Columbus and Bladen counties,
responding to a request from the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence
to review DNA evidence in the case of Joseph Sledge

Mandy Locke’s account in the News & Observer will inspire confidence in neither the competence nor the good faith of North Carolina justice. Sledge, imprisoned 34 years for a double murder, has encountered unspeakable frustrations in his pursuit of exoneration.

Like Willie Grimes, however, Sledge is at last benefiting from a district attorney unimpaired with willful blindness toward his office’s past failures.

If the Edenton Seven are ever able to achieve true exoneration from the state, it likely won’t be with the acquiescence of the prosecutors, much less their assistance.

Nov. 14, 2011

Raymond Lawrence, then director of chaplains for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, attended Bob Kelly’s trial on several occasions and founded the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven.

This passage is excerpted from a memoir I asked him to write for littlerascalsdaycare.org:

“One Monday morning on arriving at my office I noted a special delivery overnight package in my mail pile. Just as I walked in, my secretary buzzed me to say I had a long distance call asking whether I had opened the package. I told her to get the number and I would call back.

“Instead, the caller said he would call back. I assumed it was the kind of crank call which often comes to chaplains.

“When I finally turned to the special delivery package, I found inside cashier’s checks made out to various defendants in an amount of about $450,000.

“Finally the donor called back, but he didn’t want his name disclosed to the secretary or anyone else. He felt the case was a witch hunt, and he was in solidarity with the accused. He was a businessman who had made a fortune in the emerging computer industry. A year later he gave another $300,000.

“When I flew to Ohio to meet him, he told me he had a terminal illness, and some years later he died. He was a humble, unassuming man. I was in awe of his sensitivity and generosity.”

June 3, 2017

How did prosecutors let go ‘16 psychotic, baby-killing pedophiles’?

“An early indicator of the bizarre and fickle nature of the [Little Rascals] prosecution was that in all, 23 Edenton residents were named by the children (via counseling) as having engaged in essentially the same abominable acts as those indicted.

“Yet the county DA’s office arbitrarily pared the case to seven, leaving, one assumes, 16 psychotic, baby-killing pedophiles to walk freely on the streets of their small city….”

– From “A ‘Frontline’ documentary on child abuse hysteria shows how good TV can be” by Brian Lambert in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (May 27, 1997)

Among the lucky 16: the mayor and sheriff.

Nov. 21, 2012

“The child abuse field has always been one that felt like there was not enough public policy attention, so the narrative reflected that: It’s at crisis proportions; it’s getting worse every year; it’s an epidemic….”

– Mark Chaffin, professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center

Dr. Chaffin’s observation wasn’t specific to the ritual sex abuse era, but he sure captures its ever-more-breathless conjuring of villains and victims.