Nov. 25, 2011

“In the prototypical witch hunts in Europe and in the Massachusetts colony, the accused were often scapegoats for some calamity – disease, bad harvests, the birth of a deformed child.

“In the witch hunts of the ’80s, there was no such injury to be avenged or repaired. There was, however, a psychological need to be fulfilled. Our willingness to believe in ritual abuse was grounded in anxiety about putting children in day care at a time when mothers were entering the work force in unprecedented numbers.

“It was as though there were some dark, self-defeating relief in trading niggling everyday doubts about our children’s care for our absolute worst fears – for a story with monsters, not just human beings who didn’t always treat our kids exactly as we would like; for a fate so horrific and bizarre that no parent, no matter how vigilant, could have ever prevented it.”

– Margaret Talbot, writing in The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 7, 2001

Feb. 2, 2019

First of two parts

The name of Dr. Roland Summit, key supporter of the McMartin Preschool prosecution, no longer resonates in psychiatry, but the “child sexual abuse syndrome” he conjured up did a lifetime’s worth of damage to its countless victims.

As described by Debbie Nathan (Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1990), “[Summit’s] theory about incest… argues that if there is evidence of sex abuse and a child denies it, this is only further proof that it happened and a therapist should use any means necessary to help the child talk…. If they later recant, that means they are under family pressure to protect the father and their turnabout is further proof of the crime.

“So no matter how much coercion was used to get an accusation and no matter if a child later retracted it, once Summit’s incest theory was applied, a charge of abuse became irrefutable. Child protection workers ignored the fact that this logic had little to do with day care. After all, why would children staunchly defend abuse to protect an adult who wasn’t part of the family? And if they had been so brutally attacked at school, why wouldn’t they tell their parents?

“Therapists and investigators came up with all sorts of rationales. One was the teachers threatened them by slaughtering animals and warning that the same thing would happen to their parents if they told….”

Summit wasn’t among the expert witnesses in the Little Rascals Day Care case, but his supposed syndrome warped therapists’ interpretation of every child-witness interview. And those imaginary “threatened parents” showed up in this 1995 open letter from Little Rascals parents: “Many [children are now] old enough to realize that Bob Kelly can’t work his threatened evil to kill their families.”

Next: Collusion by psychiatrist and patient

March 1, 2016

“It would be hard to imagine a more glaring judicial conflict of interest than the one the Supreme Court considered in a case out of Pennsylvania on Monday.

“In 1986, Terrance Williams was convicted of killing a man named Amos Norwood with a tire iron when he was 18. Prosecutors in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office sought the death penalty, and got it….

“A state court found that the prosecutors had lied, and vacated Mr. Williams’s sentence. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously reversed that ruling. The court’s chief justice at the time, Ronald Castille, wrote a concurring opinion criticizing the lower court’s ruling for ‘condemning’ the prosecutors.

“The problem was that Mr. Castille himself led the district attorney’s office when it prosecuted Mr. Williams, and personally authorized seeking the death penalty in that case…. Nevertheless, he refused to recuse himself from Mr. Williams’s case….”

– From “Should a Judge Rule on His Own Case?” editorial in the New York Times (Feb. 29)

Meanwhile in North Carolina, prosecutors yet again show great interest in maintaining their conviction rate and little if any in ensuring justice has been done (text cache).

Jan. 29, 2016

“The release last month of ‘Making a Murderer’ capped a year in which popular culture’s portrayal of the criminal justice system seems to have shifted. Out with the old tropes about truth-seeking investigators and tidy resolutions; in with the disquieting, dysfunctional reality of many courtrooms and police stations….

“Yes, post-conviction DNA testing and the work of Innocence Projects around the country have exonerated more than 1,700 defendants. Those cases heighten awareness of potential errors and demonstrate that wrongful convictions happen. But Americans shouldn’t expect certainty about innocence. Sometimes the focus on finding new evidence to exonerate distracts from the question of whether the old evidence proved guilt….

Read more here. Cached here.

“Fewer than 70,000 federal felonies are prosecuted each year, while roughly 2.5 million felonies proceed through the state courts. Many state cases involve near-simultaneous investigation and prosecution. One rarely finds out ‘what really happened.’

“The prosecutor in Avery’s trial argued in his closing statement that ‘reasonable doubts are for innocent people.’ They are not. And procedural protections like access to defense counsel and freedom from coerced interrogations extend to both the innocent and the guilty. The real contribution of these documentaries is not to ask ‘whodunit’ but to reveal what was done to defendants….

“The United States criminal justice system needs fewer guilt-assuming interrogation tactics, more disclosure of potentially exculpatory information to the defense, expanded oversight units within prosecutors’ offices to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and fuller appellate scrutiny of convictions.

“The moment is ripe for reform, culturally and politically….”

– From by “ ‘Making a Murderer’ Is About Justice, Not Truth” by Lisa Kern Griffin, Duke Law professor and former federal prosecutor, in the New York Times (Jan. 12)

Will this heightened skepticism about the nation’s justice system ever trickle down to exonerate the Edenton Seven and free Junior Chandler?