March 21, 2015

I spent several hours Friday at Duke University Law School listening to experts detail “Evolving Trends in Forensic Science.”

Fascinating. Topics ranged from the effects of sleep deprivation on jurors’ decision-making to the use of cell tower evidence to determine suspect location. But I was wedged into an auditorium otherwise full of lawyers to hear pediatrician Cynthia Brown and defense attorneys Mark Montgomery and Lisa Miles outline the latest standards for medical exams in cases of suspected child abuse. The good news – if you’re being wrongfully prosecuted in 2015 – is that those standards have become dramatically more specific and sophisticated.

If, however, you were wrongfully prosecuted in 1987, then the fruits of that scientific progress remain maddeningly out of reach.  Waiting for me when I returned home Friday was a letter from Junior Chandler:

“April 15 will be 28 yrs – nearly half my life, all because of lies when I did no crime. It’s a shame & disgrace to the whole N.C. justice system, not only to do this but never to be willing to say they were wrong….”

Jan. 25, 2017

“Why is there such a cultural bias toward stories of abuse – and especially toward grotesque and absurd tales, even when there is no reliable evidence that any crime occurred in the first place?

“The very people we count on to protect our society – prosecutors, police, social workers, jurors, even parents – are eliciting fantasies from children that express our worst collective fears. ….

“The libel that our society has imposed on child-care workers is a kind of projection of guilt for the damage that we ourselves have done, as parents and as a society. We have given our children to strangers to rear, and it makes us uneasy and fearful. Is it any wonder we have a bad conscience?…. ”

– From “Child-care Demons” by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker (Oct. 3, 1994)

June 14, 2018

“America has a long history of episodic moral panics in which self-styled experts, sensationalistic journalists and public officials used emotionally charged language and a barrage of (often distorted) statistics to portray a particular social problem as widespread and urgent….

“The 1980s brought [a] moral panic precipitated by unease about double-income families and the supervision of children by strangers at day-care centers….

“All these scares produced unexpected political alliances. Conservatives concerned with moral purity, law-and-order and Christian values joined forces with feminists worried about victims of sexual trauma and liberals in favor of strong government regulation. When forces from the right and left converge in a moral panic, their causes possess greater appeal to the public. We see this today as women’s rights advocates join the sex-trafficking fight along with the religious right. The result is a runaway train with no real political force left in opposition….”

– From “President Trump signed a new law that aims to fight online sex trafficking. Here’s why that’s bad.” by Sascha Cohen in the Washington Post (April 12)

Jan. 17, 2015

Q: Do you have a better understanding of why people act the way they do in certain situations?

A:   ….Whenever the safety of children is perceived to be in question, we run the risk of responding with emotion rather than reason. Certainly in Salem (where three of her ancestors were accused witches) that was the case. And look at the so-called “satanic ritual abuse” pre-school phenomenon in the early 1980s, which is now seen to have been a tremendous miscarriage of justice. Calls for moderation are dismissed with the assertion that the children have to come first — which, of course, they should.

“But it’s also tempting to read these experiences as expressive of a deeper anxiety about childrearing in an uncertain world, with no guarantees of a good outcome. I feel that it comes from a sense of powerlessness that can’t be expressed elsewhere….”

– From an interview with Katherine Howe, author of “Conversion,” a novel based on a mysterious 2012 outbreak of tics and seizures among teenage girls in upstate New York, in the Daily News of Batavia, New York (Aug. 23, 2014)