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Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Dec. 28, 2016

“The problem of juror pressure on a dissenting juror has long been known by defense attorneys and prosecutors.

“In a National Center for State Courts project on hung juries, researchers surveyed 367 unanimous decisions…. In nearly 40 percent of the cases at least one juror [disagreed] but went along with the majority and made the verdict unanimous….

“Research shows that dissenting jurors often go along not because they are convinced about points of evidence but because they bow to ‘normative pressure’: A lone holdout is under relentless and harsh pressure from other jurors to knuckle under. The pressure from the push for speed, the verbal battering and the threat of ostracism is virtually impossible to resist.

“The problem is made worse [in cases] when it’s impossible for a dissenting juror to say with absolute certainty whether the position of the majority is the right one and when the verdict could do horrible legal damage….”

– From “Why Zimmerman Juror B29 Believed in His Guilt But Still Voted to Acquit” by Earl Ofari Hutchinson on the Huffington Post (July 28, 2013)

Bob Kelly’s jury serves as a sad example of the contaminated chemistry of verdict making.

Nov. 30, 2011

“You have to start with the matter of probability. What every one of these (day care sex abuse) cases has in common is that no adult observer has actually seen a molestation in progress.

“Supposedly, these abuses are going on continually over a period of months. Almost always, they supposedly involve a number of adults and many children, with outsiders constantly walking in and out of these centers. Yet we have no corroborating eyewitnesses. None….

“Throughout it all, these children somehow always come home in the right shoes and socks and underpants. Do you have kids? Do you realize how hard it is to dress two kids in a hurry without some kind of mix-up, let alone 10 or 12 or 20 kids?”

– Dr. Richard A. Gardner, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, quoted in Playboy magazine (June 1992)

July 20, 2012

… Little Rascals parents were caught up in a frenzy of panic and misinformation.

… Ill-prepared therapists served prosecutors, not their patients.

… In their zeal for convictions, prosecutors behaved cruelly and unethically.

… 20th century North Carolina never saw a more sweeping injustice.

… Bob and Betsy Kelly, Dawn Wilson, Shelley Stone, Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris and Scott Privott deserve full and unequivocal exoneration.

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)