April 11, 2012

“Almost always you find the kids are three or four years old.

“The two-year-olds are no good because they can’t speak well enough and are totally unreliable in what they do say. The five- and six-year-olds are already old enough to say, ‘He didn’t do that, lady, and nothing you say is going to convince me of it.’

“But threes and fours are perfect. After they’ve been worked over by a parent or zealous validator, they can be counted on because they believe it and will testify accordingly.”

– Dr. Richard A. Gardner, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia
University, quoted in Playboy magazine (June 1992)

March 30, 2012

Kee MacFarlane is the notorious therapist who led the ritual abuse scare of the late 1980s (and pioneered the misuse of anatomically correct dolls in interviewing children). In just four months MacFarlane diagnosed more than 360 children at the McMartin Pre-School as abused.

In 2005 she declined to be interviewed by CNN but sent a statement:

“We’ve learned a lot in 20 years about how to interview children for forensic purposes and how to manage complex cases such as this one. It would be a sad commentary if we didn’t learn from such painful experience.”

Not much of a mea culpa – but still more than anyone connected with the Little Rascals prosecution has managed.

Dec. 2, 2011

“Videotaped interviews made during the early cases (alleging day care ritual sex abuse) show that when children were allowed to speak freely, either they had nothing to say about abuse or they denied it ever happened to them.

“Once it became obvious that these records would prevent guilty verdicts, prosecutors began advising investigators not to keep tapes or detailed notes of their work.”

– From “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt” by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (1995)

Perhaps the most significant difference in the two largest abuse trials was that McMartin defense attorneys were able to expose to jurors the prosecution therapists’ manipulative interview techniques, while Little Rascals attorneys were stymied by the premeditated unavailability of original documentation.

“After Bob Kelly’s indictment,” according to an article in the ABA Journal, “Bill Hart, a North Carolina deputy attorney general assigned to the case, traveled to Los Angeles to consult with McMartin prosecutors.

“He learned that McMartin jurors had criticized videotapes of therapist Kee McFarlane’s interviews with the children. She asked leading questions and rebuked children who did not tell of abuse….”

Hart could have brought back to North Carolina the lesson that interviewers shouldn’t “(ask) leading questions and (rebuke) children who did not tell of abuse.” Instead, he brought back the lesson that interviewers should leave no evidence of having used exactly those fraudulent techniques.

Nov. 5, 2014

Andrew Womble: 24,357 votes (53 percent)

Nancy Lamb: 21,411 votes (47 percent)

 I’d like to attribute Nancy Lamb’s defeat to her misbegotten role in the prosecution of the Edenton Seven. But  voters in the First Judicial District probably gave more weight to her being a Democrat and to her having allowed a backlog of cases during her time in the DA’s office.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, another unrepentant promoter of the “satanic ritual abuse” day-care narrative, Martha Coakley, was defeated in her race for governor.