Sept. 10, 2012

“You saw those initial documentaries, you make a choice: Am I going to watch the thing and go ‘Wow, that’s really horrible,’ and go out and get a milkshake?”

– Johnny Depp, tracing the roots of his advocacy for the West Memphis Three

That could be me talking – except that the eye-opening documentaries for me were “Innocence Lost” rather than “Paradise Lost,” that I’m a retired newspaperman rather than a Hollywood actor and – most crucial – that I went out for a figurative two-decade milkshake run rather than responding immediately to the outrage I was seeing on screen. Hats off to WM3 advocates such as Depp, who moved quickly to challenge prosecutors every bit as recalcitrant as those in North Carolina.

June 19, 2017

“Our criminal justice famously presumes that every accused person is innocent until proven guilty. But once a conviction is obtained, that presumption is turned on its head. Charges were brought, and a jury, which saw evidence and heard from the witnesses firsthand, voted to convict. At that point, finality sets in.

“Prosecutors tasked with defending a conviction against compelling evidence that it was wrongfully secured typically have two choices. They can accept the responsibility for participating — directly or indirectly — in an injustice, or they can insist that nothing went awry or that whatever mistakes may have been made were ‘immaterial’– that is, the jury would have convicted anyway. The justice system strongly pushes them in the latter direction. Ambitious, hard-charging prosecutors know that the way to the top is amassing guilty verdicts, not admitting mistakes. In 47 states [including North Carolina], their bosses – the county district attorney, the state’s attorney general – are elected. Incompetence, or appearing ‘soft on crime,’ can be fatal at the ballot box….

“The refusal to admit a mistake – or even an act of bad faith – holds true regardless of whether the prosecutor defending the conviction had any involvement at the trial level, personally knew the key players or even worked in the same office…. This may be due, in part, to a phenomenon that [Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed] calls ‘the conformity effect.’ Prosecutors… are ‘culturally aligned with that side and tend to defer to their peers who were the original decision makers.’ “

– From “For shame” by Lara Bazelon at Slate (April 7, 2016)

Although examples of such prosecutorial lockstep are legion, most relevant here is N.C. Attorney General Mike Easley’s response to the overturning of the convictions of Little Rascals defendants Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson. Easley, himself a former district attorney (and future governor), laid it on thick:

“The decision casts no doubt on the credibility of the children or the integrity of the investigation…. In both cases, the facts supporting the convictions were clear and overwhelming. [The N.C. Court of Appeals] disregarded these facts and misapplied the law.”

Four months later, throwing in the towel after the N.C. Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeals, Easley managed to find fault not with the prosecutors but with the children.  “All prosecutors know that cases involving children weaken with age,” he said. “A retrial in this matter will be extremely difficult.”

Sept. 21, 2012

“Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit’s ‘child sexual abuse syndrome,’ a 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….”

– From “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax” by Debbie Nathan (Village Voice, January 12, 1990)

The “threatened parents” claim reared its head in this 1995 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.”

Aug. 2, 2013

“The attorney for Dawn Wilson was the late Kirk Osborn, who also represented Reade Seligmann in the Duke Lacrosse Case.

“Osborn told me that after Wilson’s conviction was overturned, Nancy Lamb came to his office… ‘dressed to the nines’ and demanded that Wilson plead out to something. Wilson, who had turned down a plea offer before the first kangaroo trial that would have kept her from prison but would have made her turn state’s evidence – evidence that did not exist – told Lamb there was no way she would plead to anything.

“Kirk said that right before his eyes, Lamb turned into ‘the wicked witch of the West’ and stomped off. She ultimately was forced to drop all charges.

“It was the Little Rascals case that opened my eyes to what prosecutors do in these situations, how they lie, twist evidence, and coerce children. Lamb was the darling of the press when, in fact, she should have been excoriated for lying.”

– From a recollection by William L. Anderson (Oct. 26, 2010) of his correspondence with defense attorney Kirk Osborn