June 8, 2012

“The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.”

– American Bar Association

“The primary responsibility of prosecution is to see that justice is accomplished.”

– National District Attorneys Association

“If you were playing poker, would you be playing with your full hand
showing?”

– Bill Hart, special deputy attorney general, defending his unwillingness
to share evidence with the Little Rascals defense

Dec. 26, 2012

By 1993 the moral panic was at last retreating from therapists’ offices, courtrooms and the media. That timing gives “Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help” a peculiar place in its genre.

Although the pseudonymous “Margaret Smith” is a supposed “survivor and researcher of ritual abuse,” her advocacy lacks the blind certitude of a “Nursery Crimes: Sexual Abuse in Day Care” (1988) or a “Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse” (1990).

“If there is even a small chance that one ritual abuse claim is true,” Smith begins, “we owe it to all potential victims to explore the problem of ritual abuse in greater depth.” Such unexpected tentativeness!  Is she doubting even her own claim of victimhood? Or did an editor at HarperSanFrancisco awaken just in time to insist on at least a façade of rationality?

Unfortunately, the rest of the book alternates Smith’s first-person accounts of her ritual-abuse-caused “multiple personality disorder” with a predictable rollout of junk statistics. Could anyone be surprised, for instance, that among “adult survivors of ritual abuse,” fully 84 percent reported having witnessed “mutilation or killing of animals/humans”?

July 5, 2013

“RALEIGH – During a hearing at the state Court of Appeals, Chief Judge Gerald Arnold repeatedly asked a state prosecutor about the fairness of testimony by (Bob) Kelly’s former attorney in Edenton. Arnold said the attorney had, in effect, testified that he believed in Kelly’s innocence until he learned his child had been abused.

“ ‘How can you argue that it was not extremely prejudicial?’ the judge asked.

“Associate Attorney General Ellen Scouten argued that Chris Bean did not divulge confidential information and did not violate an attorney-client relationship with Kelly. She said Bean testified as a parent and a crime victim.

“Arnold said Bean, now a district court judge, had gone beyond describing what he had seen and witnessed as a parent.

“ ‘This boils down to the most fundamental questions of fairness,’ Arnold said. ‘When you have an attorney testifying that “I was Mr. Kelly’s attorney and I believed in him very strongly until I learned the truth, that is to say that he’s guilty, and then I was shattered.” How can there be more prejudicial, stronger evidence put before a jury than to have a former attorney, the defendant’s attorney say that?’

“Scouten said that because the defense had contended that accusers in Edenton were hysterical people on a witch hunt it was fair to allow the state to show the type of people involved.

“ ‘Mr. Bean and his wife were reputable, respected thoughtful, educated people – not the type of people that would be swept up by community hysteria,’ she said.”

– From “Appeal of 2 defendants in Little Rascals case draws a crowd” in the News & Observer (Jan. 10, 1995)

Given this line of questioning, it came as no great surprise when four months later the Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of both Kelly and Dawn Wilson.

Bean’s unfettered opinionating was only one of three major defects cited by the court, the others being the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors and the testimony of parents as expert witnesses.

The prosecution got off light – the brief filed by appellate defender Mark Montgomery claimed no fewer than 222 potentially reversible errors.

March 19, 2012

In “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life” (2011), Robert Trivers briefly addresses the causes and costs of the ritual abuse mania.

I asked Trivers, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University, about the role played by prosecutors in such cases:

“Prosecutors are notoriously vulnerable to tunnel vision – i.e., once a suspect has been identified, others disappear from sight; they also need to justify themselves in retrospect.

“I was told by (Innocence Project cofounder Peter J.) Neufeld that even after incontrovertible DNA evidence, 75 percent of the original detectives who came up with (and helped convict) the wrong person still say they believe they got ‘the right man.’ ”