Rascals case in brief
In the beginning, in 1989, more than 90 children at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, accused a total of 20 adults with 429 instances of sexual abuse over a three-year period. It may have all begun with one parent’s complaint about punishment given her child.
Among the alleged perpetrators: the sheriff and mayor. But prosecutors would charge only Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris, Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, Robert “Bob” Kelly, Willard Scott Privott, Shelley Stone and Dawn Wilson โ the Edenton 7.
Along with sodomy and beatings, allegations included a baby killed with a handgun, a child being hung upside down from a tree and being set on fire and countless other fantastic incidents involving spaceships, hot air balloons, pirate ships and trained sharks.
By the time prosecutors dropped the last charges in 1997, Little Rascals had become North Carolina’s longest and most costly criminal trial. Prosecutors kept defendants jailed in hopes at least one would turn against their supposed co-conspirators. Remarkably, none did. Another shameful record: Five defendants had to wait longer to face their accusers in court than anyone else in North Carolina history.
Between 1991 and 1997, Ofra Bikel produced three extraordinary episodes on the Little Rascals case for the PBS series “Frontline.” Although “Innocence Lost” did not deter prosecutors, it exposed their tactics and fostered nationwide skepticism and dismay.
With each passing year, the absurdity of the Little Rascals charges has become more obvious. But no admission of error has ever come from prosecutors, police, interviewers or parents. This site is devoted to the issues raised by this case.
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Todayโs random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
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Todayโs random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
An antipodal view: What would Bronte have thought?
Feb. 10, 2012
โ(The scene ofย children screaming invective at a prison-bound Bob Kelly)ย was… the graphic heart of the documentary….
โThe car pulled away, and they began to giggle self-consciously. A second or two of awkward silence heightened the artificiality of the moment, the sense of a construct that the girls fully understood. Then an older woman (presumably a mother) moved into the silence, and began to clap and cheer. A few others joined in in desultory fashion. โLet’s go get something (to) eat,โ said the mom….
โBy chance, I had just finished reading โThe Professor,โ a minor novel of Charlotte Bronte’s. Like most Bronte novels it was laced with leisurely reflections, and this one struck me powerfully enough to note down: โHuman beings โ human children especially โ seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consists only in a capacity to make others wretched.โ
โAs those children shrieked at Bob Kelly through the glass of the police car window, I wondered if there wasn’t more than a whiff of that pleasure in power in the air.
โAnd then I remembered this town is called Eden, and we’ve known for a long while that the darnedest things happened in Eden.โ
in the Canberra (Australia) Times, Oct. 18, 1998
This time, will NC Bar tell DAs to play fair?
April 20, 2016
โโIf prosecutors have an ethical duty to avoid wrongful convictions, then they should have some sort of ethical duty to remedy wrongful convictions,โ said attorney Brad Bannon of the North Carolina Bar’s ethics committee.
โHe wants North Carolina to adopt a rule recommended by the American Bar Association,ย requiring prosecutors to come forward if they find โnew, credible and material evidenceโ that an innocent person is serving time. Thirteen states have adopted the post-conviction rule. North Carolina isn’t among them.
โThe State Bar rejected the rule several years ago but recently appointed a committee to reconsider….โ
โ From โRule targets prosecutors who don’t reveal innocence evidenceโย by Martha Waggoner of the Associated Press (April 16)
Given prosecutorsโ disproportionate influence on the state bar, to even โreconsiderโ the disclosure rule suggests the recent stream of unbecoming publicity ย hasnโt gone unnoticed.
McCrory tires of Sherlock Holmes impersonation
June 4, 2015
โGov. Pat McCrory on Thursday pardoned two half-brothers who were exonerated of murder after spending three decades in prison.
โThe governor took nine months to make the decision….โ
โ From โGovernor pardons McCollum, Brownโ by Craig Jarvisย in the Raleigh News & Observerย (June 4)
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, both intellectually disabled and now destitute, had been declared innocent last year by a Superior Court judge. But that exoneration, based on DNA evidence from the crime scene,ย wasnโt good enough for the governor, and even now the statement accompanying his pardon of innocence is lukewarm at best:
โIt is difficult for anyone to know for certain what happened the night of Sabrina Buieโs murder…. I know there are differing opinions about this case and who is responsible….โ
McCollum and Brown now qualify for $50,000 for each year they were imprisoned, up to a maximum of $750,000 โ unless McCrory decides that process demands further investigation as well.
Readย more here.
Prosecutors claimed to see ‘coherent package’
July 11, 2012
โAnd what did Doctor (Mark) Everson say what to look for? A coherent package thatโs consistent. You look at the behavior and what the child says…. He talked about sexual acting out, coaxing sexual behavior, masturbation, fears, and anxieties. New fears that come up that arenโt developmentally appropriate for a child that age, such as a fear of men or a particular man, changes in their personality caused by stress like regressive behavior, bed wetting, clinginess, thumb sucking.
โAnd as I name these, I hope that you are sitting there remembering how many of these children so far have had these kinds of behaviors.โ
โ From prosecutor Nancy Lambโs closing argument in the trial of Bob Kelly
โ… What could be expected for ritually abused children? That vexing question prompted everyone involved in the McMartin Preschool case to look for symptoms, and in their urgency, to mistake normal developmentally-based behaviors, quirky idiosyncrasies and even the iatrogenic effects of intimidating interviews for sequelae of ritual abuse. In this nascent moral panic, the widely circulated โsymptom listsโ transformed messy subjectivity into embodied and interpretable texts….โ
โ From “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary DeYoung (2004)
To day-care ritual-abuse prosecutors, what Nancy Lamb called โthese kinds of behaviorsโ embraced everything from bed-wetting to hyperactivity to eating disorders. No dot went unconnected.
Contrary to such handy lists, however, numerous studies have found no โcoherent packageโ of symptoms of child sexual abuse.
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