Nov. 23, 2011

“Finally, after eight years, the Little Rascals case is over. We can consign to history what has to be the most bizarre and disturbing episode in the annals of North Carolina law…..

“Never has the state devoted such resources to wrecking lives with such flimsy evidence and unconscionable delays.

“As a case history of mass hysteria, the Edenton story will enrich textbooks for generations. As a cautionary tale of what can happen when otherwise sensible people come under the spell of self-styled victim advocates, one can only hope the memory of Little Rascals will help others stop the next case before it gets out of hand.

“The state’s most effective weapon… was not evidence, but time. By holding (defendants) behind bars month after month, the state managed to inflict enormous punishment… without having to prove a thing.

“As fiction, the Little Rascals story would have strained the combined imaginations of Charles Dickens and Stephen King. As news, it is a chilling example of a judicial system that was unchecked by common sense or common decency.”

– Editorial in the Greensboro News & Record, May 28, 1997

When Gladstone (or whoever) first posited that “Justice delayed is justice denied,” could he have envisioned such a calculated demonstration?

Sept. 30, 2013

Death noted: District Attorney Frank Parrish, 64, who succeeded H. P. Williams Jr. in prosecuting the Edenton Seven.

By the time Parrish took office in 1994, Little Rascals had become almost entirely a Nancy Lamb production. Whatever Parrish actually believed, the prosecutors’ code demanded that he continue to insist that the case was concrete-solid.

But as a growing body of scientific evidence called into question the testimony of child witnesses in ritual-abuse cases, Parrish had to decide how to respond to the overturning of the convictions of Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson. “I’ve gotten an awful lot of guidance, none of it solicited,” he told the Charlotte Observer. “(Research) does not play a part, nor should it. That’s as if because there’s research about the unreliability of eyewitnesses, I should dismiss or not retry an armed robber.”

By 1997 Parrish and Lamb could no longer delay dropping the last Little Rascals charges. And who now might succeed Parrish as district attorney? Unfortunately, you won’t be surprised.

April 25, 2012

“Many questions were repeated (by interviewers in the McMartin Preschool case) even when the children had previously given unambiguous answers.

“For example, after a child responded that he/she did not remember any pictures of naked bodies, the interviewer repeated the question saying, ‘Can’t remember that part?’

“Even after the child again responded ‘no,’ the interviewer persisted, saying ‘Why don’t you think about that for awhile…. Your memory might come back to you.’ ”

 – From “Tell Me What Happened: Structured Investigative Interviews
of Child Victims and Witnesses” by Michael E. Lamb, et al. (2008)

There is every reason to believe this approach typified interviews in the Little Rascals case, but of course prosecutors ensured almost no record of those interviews survived.

Oct. 5, 2016

Richard Wexler’s unequivocal recollection of how the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children promoted the “satanic ritual abuse” day-care panic made me curious about what APSAC might have to say about the subject today.

I was startled to see this description of a presentation at the organization’s most recent (June 21-25) annual colloquium in New Orleans:

“From disco to pet rocks, our past is littered with things which make us wonder, what in the world were we thinking? The field of child maltreatment and interpersonal violence has certainly had its share of misguided ideas, from satanic ritual abuse hysteria to multiple personality disorder treatment centers.  How did this field get so many things so wrong?”

Sorry I missed such a provocative self-examination! [I’ll post APSAC’s video soon.]

I asked Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, whether sanctioning the pet rock analogy might signify APSAC’s tacit disowning of  the “satanic ritual abuse” myth.

“I wouldn’t call it disowning,” he said. “Over the years their position seems to have evolved into ‘Well, yes, some people may have been a little overzealous, but…’  At one point, even Roland Summit, in his ‘Tunnels’ article, no less, tried to cast himself as falling between two extremes in the debate.

“What they have not done, of course, is apologize to the children victimized by the McMartin madness, and withdraw the awards given to Summit and [Kee] MacFarlane.”

Nor, of course, have they apologized to the wrongfully prosecuted defendants in cases such as McMartin and Little Rascals.