Sept. 18, 2017

Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University, has been generating lots of attention with his provocative and important new book, “Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.”

What better time to look back at Dr. Frances’s 2014 call to correct the “egregious injustice” committed by the State of North Carolina against Junior Chandler.

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)

Dec, 4, 2016

“The testimony [in the Salem witch trials] is full of tall tales, unless you happen to believe – as one woman confessed, having vowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – that she flew on a stick with her church deacon and two others to a satanic baptism, and that she had, the previous Monday, carried her minister’s specter through the air along with her, having earlier conferred in her orchard with a satanic cat….”

– From “The Witches: Salem, 1692” by Stacy Schiff (2015)

April 5, 2015

William L. Anderson, professor of economics at Frostburg (Md.) State University, writes widely in opposition to big government. He has a particular aversion to overreaching prosecutors such as Mike Nifong and Nancy Lamb.

Anderson recently spoke to a North Carolina State University audience on “The Economic Calculation of Prosecutorial Abuse,” and afterward he shared these thoughts on how justice goes bad:

“The real problem is that people in the courts and law enforcement don’t have ‘fences’ that limit their behavior and also increase their liability. If the chances that they will face any meaningful sanctions for lying and lawbreaking are almost nil, then we can expect two things:

1. People in those lines of work are going to cut corners, to lie (even if they really do believe the person is guilty) and to manufacture ‘evidence,’ and
2. The kind of people who are most likely to cut corners are going to self-select into these lines of work…..

“Take Nancy Lamb, for example. While she narrowly lost the DA election last year, nonetheless she has ridden the Edenton fame for years and has done well in her career. It helped her gain money and what the late Murray Rothbard described as ‘psychic profit.’ She suffered no consequences that I know despite the horrendous train-wreck damage she caused not only the defendants, but also the taxpayers of North Carolina…. Lamb is protected by prosecutorial immunity and also by a media and legal culture that bows down to prosecutors and judges….

“A society that accepts and honors this kind of dishonest and destructive behavior is doomed. There is no other way to put it. The people from Edenton could never get back their lives; Betsy Kelly pleaded nolo contendere because she knew the North Carolina ‘justice’ system was utterly and hopelessly corrupt….”

Also seemingly immune to appropriate consequences: Chris Bean, who went on to a long career on the bench despite having provided flagrantly prejudicial testimony against former client Bob Kelly.