May 5, 2015

“Its members are, it’s claimed, drawn mainly from a school and church in Hampstead (a North London suburb). They are said to wear shoes made of baby skin, to dance with the skulls of dead babies and to sexually abuse young children. But the (satanic ritual) cult doesn’t exist. The claims are, according to a High Court Judge, ‘baseless’ and those who have sought to perpetrate them are ‘evil’….

“Why, after a police inquiry and a family court judgment which unequivocally rubbished the notion of satanic abuse in Hampstead, are the allegations still proliferating on the Internet and being spread all over the world? We hear from the supposed cult members who have had their personal details and photographs published online and received death threats. And we ask about the welfare of the two children at the centre of it all who were coerced into fabricating the fantastical story….”

– From “The Satanic Cult That Wasn’t” by Melanie Abbott on BBC Radio (April 23)

This half hour of BBC coverage skillfully demolishes every iota of the Hampstead claims, but of course facts aren’t what engage the eagerly gullible. Since video of the 8- and 9-year-old siblings telling their concocted horror stories was uploaded onto YouTube, it has been watched more than 4 million times.

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.

May 10, 2014

“The failure to obtain convictions (in the McMartin Preschool case) combined with massive press coverage during and after, which ‘taught’ the American public various ‘lessons’ about child sex abuse, from child suggestibility to the notion that one must guard against ‘hysteria’ on such issues.

“The Witch-Hunt Narrative (by Ross Cheit) examines the evidence in the McMartin case as well as other widely reported cases, and gathers other sources on the phenomenon, to conclude that the McMartin case and reporting led to a paradigm of treating charges of abuse as a witch hunt rather than legitimate. This book goes a long way to debunk the paradigm, because there was compelling evidence for conviction….”

– From “Book of the Week” by Marci Hamilton at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights

Are we now witnessing the beginning of a belated backlash to the backlash over the “satanic ritual abuse” prosecutions? Contrary to Professor Hamilton’s enthusiastic review, Ross Cheit’s 544-page tome is riddled with inaccuracies, distortions and a shocking number of crucial omissions. Fortunately Debbie Nathan and the National Center for Reason and Justice have responded with a devastating point-by-point refutation – about which more later….

Update: I asked Hamilton, who teaches at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, to read Nathan’s piece and reconsider. Her response: “We will have to agree to disagree.”

May 9, 2012

“A Question of Innocence: A True Story of False Accusation” by Lawrence D. Spiegel was published in 1986, but this passage – lamenting plea-bargains by those falsely accused of assaulting children – applies exactly to Little Rascals:

“The innocent often fall prey to the waiting hands of the prosecutor and plead guilty to a lesser charge, just to put an end to the ordeal and to the separation from a child.

“Prosecutors, as a result of over-zealousness to protect the child, blind ambition to further a career or a number of other reasons, will do ‘strange’ things for a conviction. It is always to the prosecutor’s benefit to get a guilty plea, even to a lesser charge. Sometimes the prosecutor will wait until the accused is emotionally and financially drained, then the plea bargain offer is made….

“Some falsely accused are so battered and beaten, they accept the humiliation and anger and take the deal. Often this occurs with the consent of the victim’s attorney…. The stigma of the bargain will remain forever.”