Feb. 24, 2012

“Samuel Sewall was one of nine judges appointed to hear the Salem witch trials in 1692.

“Five years later he stood up in church in front of the congregation while the minister read out his apology.

“None of his colleagues on the bench followed suit.”

– From “Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming
of an American Conscience” by Richard Francis (2005)

No regret – or even doubt! – has ever been expressed by Judge Marsh McLelland, by prosecutors H.P. Williams, Nancy Lamb or Bill Hart or by the misguided therapists who served not the children but the Little Rascals prosecution team.

Do they ever give a passing thought to the lives they ruined?

Oct. 9, 2016

Paul J. Stern, recently retired prosecutor in Snohomish County, Wash., has long served the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children as a board member and as an instructor on forensic interviewing.

At the least his June presentation to a large audience of APSAC conventioneers promised to be provocative: “What Practices Are We Engaging in Now That 15 Years From Now We’re Going to Look Back on and Think ‘What in the World Were We Thinking?’ ”

But the title paled in comparison with what Stern went on to say about the rap sheet of this ostensibly professional organization – its serial gullibility about “satanic ritual abuse,” “multiple personality disorder” and various other “misguided ideas.”

Click below to watch a video of Paul J. Stern’s entire talk.

He rambles, and the video suffers from not showing his accompanying PowerPoint. But the case he makes is powerful, unmistakable and surely discomfiting to audience members such as President Emeritus for Life Jon Conte and Board Member at Large Kathleen Coulborn Faller.

“I may irritate a few of you from time to time,” he noted as he began.

Some excerpts, edited for clarity:

• “I want to start by going back to the ’60s, the ’80s, the things we cared about then…. Some of the things we’ve grown up from in this field…. What were we thinking back then?… Oy! (clutches head, steps away from lectern)….What the hell were we thinking?….”
• “Let’s get the granddaddy of our ‘Oops!’ out of the way: ‘satanic ritual abuse.’ Individuals and agencies that weren’t skeptical failed to recognize that all of the iceberg that existed was the tip….And that melted pretty quickly…”
• “This matters [because] prosecutors sentenced people to prison based on good, scientific evidence that turned out not to be accurate.”
• “Why does all this happen? Child abuse is both an advocacy field and a political field. We’ve got to energize the base, energize the policymakers, get their attention…. Easy answers manage anxiety, and they get attention. ‘Kids never lie!’ ‘Believe the children!’ Great slogans, great bumper stickers,  but it’s a little more complicated than that….”

Prosecutor Stern continued with a call for APSAC to focus on “evidence-based decision-making,” but I remained stunned by his acknowledgement of decades of APSAC’s cocky, costly wrongheadedness. Yes, innocent defendants such as Bob Kelly did indeed go to prison based on unfounded theories and corrupt interview practices.

Thank you, Mr. Stern, for your candor. Will this moment turn out to be an aberration – or is APSAC finally ready to make amends to the real victims of its “satanic ritual abuse” mythology?

July 5, 2014

“The Burlington judge who has presided over the the Little Rascals Day Care Center case since 1990 resigned in disgust the day after the state Supreme Court refused to review (the overturning of) two convictions.

“D. Marsh McLelland, a retired Superior Court judge, said in a letter dated Sept. 8 that the court’s refusal to review the cases ‘is legally and morally reprehensible.’

“McLelland’s letter to Chief Justice Burley Mitchell said the refusal to review a Court of Appeals order for a new trial raised the term technicality to new heights….”

– From “Judge quits Little Rascals case” from the Associated Press (Sept. 22, 1995)

I imagine that the “technicality” comment was from a direct quote, although I haven’t been able to find either McLelland’s original letter or a more substantial account. It’s no wonder he felt humiliated – the Court of Appeals decision had laid bare his indifference to the rights of the defendants.

Regardless, McLelland’s resignation proved irrelevant, as prosecutors decided not to retry Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson.

April 13, 2015

D. Marsh McLelland, judge in the trials of Little Rascals defendants Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson, died last month in Burlington. He was 94.

This laudatory obituary in the Greensboro News & Record barely mentions the most consequential case in McLelland’s career – “He was brought out of retirement by the state’s chief justice to hear the Little Rascals Day Care child sex abuse case….” – and this one in the Burlington Times-News mentions it not at all.

Had McLelland stayed retired, the prosecution of the Edenton Seven might well have been derailed early on.

The judge originally assigned to the case, L. Bradford Tillery, stepped down under pressure from Deputy Attorney General Bill Hart. Mark Montgomery, Bob Kelly’s appellate attorney, explains why:

“Hart did not like the way Tillery was handling the case.  The final straw was when Tillery ordered Hart to turn over the State’s interviews of those kids who were not the subject of indictments.  He did not order them given to the defense, as he should have done, but Tillery was going to look through them himself.  If he had, he would have seen that most of the kids at the day care, including Hart’s adoptive daughter, had said nothing happened and the jury would have heard about that.

“To prevent that, Hart filed motions accusing Tillery of being biased against the State. Rather than punishing Hart, Tillery took himself out of the case to avoid any appearance of partiality.  Enter McLelland.

“Because Tillery had already ordered the interviews turned over to the court, that was a done deal.  But McLelland never looked at them.  I stumbled across them in the exhibit room of the courthouse and informed the Court of Appeals in my brief.  The failure of the State to turn over to the defense the interviews of kids who said nothing happened was one of the grounds for a new trial for Bob.”

Tillery clearly was stung by Hart’s ploy: “I have served as a judge of Superior Court for over 20 years, and I never found it necessary to take such a step…. Neither have I ever been made to feel before that one side or the other considered me to be not only an adversary but also fair game …. for reckless assertions.”

If only Tillery had responded not by resigning but by sanctioning Hart for withholding evidence.