June 28, 2013

“Children can lie, but research shows that they do not fabricate detailed descriptions of adult sexual acts unless they have experienced or witnessed them. Studies also show that children have good memories and that even preschoolers can remember key events like sexual abuse. One problem is that repeatedly molested children have great difficulty distinguishing one act of abuse from another and linking abuse to specific dates….

“In the McMartin case, we learned… to minimize the use of leading questions during interviews…. While the verdict comes as a disappointment to the children in the case, their courage and willingness to testify for weeks on end has been a catalyst for change that will protect countless other children.”

– From Believe the Children adviser Civia Tamarkin’s interview with John E. B. Myers, professor at McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, in “The McMartin Nightmare” (People magazine, Feb. 5, 1990)

As his faculty bio notes, Professor Myers has long been “one of the country’s foremost authorities on child abuse,” especially in tracing its historical context, but he seems to have been excruciatingly slow to recognize the fraudulence of  “satanic ritual abuse” claims. Although he stopped short of declaring the McMartins guilty, Myers clearly stationed himself in the “child saver” camp, more sympathetic toward serial interviewer Kee MacFarlane than toward the defendants whose lives she devastated.

In a journal article five years later, Myers would acknowledge “growing skepticism regarding children’s credibility,” at the same time warning of a “real danger that the pendulum will swing too far in the direction of disbelief.”

More recently, Myers addressed McMartin in “Child Protection in America: Past, Present, and Future” (2006), crediting it with raising the standard for interviewing, but concluding that “In the final analysis, we will never know what happened at the McMartin Preschool. From the outset, the case divided people into ‘true believers’ and skeptics….”

In “The Backlash: Child Protection Under Fire” (1994) Myers had added a most curious footnote: “I have no opinion regarding the guilt or innocence of any of the McMartin defendants.” How could he – a law professor! – acknowledge the corruption of the child-witnesses’ testimony, yet doubt the defendants deserved a “not guilty” verdict?

Almost 20 years later, I wondered whether Myers might have formed an opinion.

His emailed response: “No idea about guilt or innocence.”

July 5, 2014

“The Burlington judge who has presided over the the Little Rascals Day Care Center case since 1990 resigned in disgust the day after the state Supreme Court refused to review (the overturning of) two convictions.

“D. Marsh McLelland, a retired Superior Court judge, said in a letter dated Sept. 8 that the court’s refusal to review the cases ‘is legally and morally reprehensible.’

“McLelland’s letter to Chief Justice Burley Mitchell said the refusal to review a Court of Appeals order for a new trial raised the term technicality to new heights….”

– From “Judge quits Little Rascals case” from the Associated Press (Sept. 22, 1995)

I imagine that the “technicality” comment was from a direct quote, although I haven’t been able to find either McLelland’s original letter or a more substantial account. It’s no wonder he felt humiliated – the Court of Appeals decision had laid bare his indifference to the rights of the defendants.

Regardless, McLelland’s resignation proved irrelevant, as prosecutors decided not to retry Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson.

Nov. 11, 2011

“The first case to raise alarms about predators in nursery schools was that involving the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California…. In 1983, a woman named Judy Jones charged that 25-year-old Ray Buckey, a teacher and grandson of the school’s founder, had sodomized her two-year-old son.

“(Jones) was an alcoholic and subsequently diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

“After her charge against Buckey (who was acquitted in 1990 along with his mother and school owner Peggy McMartin Buckey), she went on to make the same allegations against a member of the U.S. Marine Corps who had, she said, sexually assaulted her dog.”

– From “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness and Other Terrors of Our Times” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (2003)

 When Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the judges cited her series on unjustified child-abuse prosecutions.

Nov. 26, 2019

I’ve previously cited here and here Elle magazine’s deeply reported 1993 article on the Little Rascals case. You can read it here.

But I had somehow overlooked this response to Greensboro journalists Edward Cone and Lisa Scheer from assistant attorney general Bill Hart. It has not aged well.

Dear Ed and Lisa,

I have read your recent article in Elle Magazine, “The Demons of Edenton.”

I found it interesting that you chose to leave out the fact that Chris Bean, now a District Court Judge, had initially represented Bob Kelly as his lawyer, until he found out that his son had been abused.

I also found it interesting that you chose not to include the fact that Bob Kelly’s jury had the full benefit of the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of both Maggie Bruck and William Kenner through their testimony at his trial.

Notably absent from your article was any balancing psychological viewpoint to the Bruck/Kenner/Ofshe propaganda. You had access to the testimony of Mark Everson, a psychologist who testified for the state at Bob Kelly’s trial, but did not quote him. You criticized Roland Summit, but did not quote him….

Sincerely,
William P. Hart
Special Deputy Attorney General

I won’t use this post to address all of Hart’s claims, but….

– Chris Bean’s role in the case, far from being culpatory for Bob Kelly, actually provoked stinging criticism from the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “This boils down to the most fundamental questions of fairness,” Judge Gerald Arnold said. “When you have an attorney testifying that ‘I was Mr. Kelly’s attorney and I believed in him very strongly until I learned the truth, that is to say that he’s guilty, and then I was shattered.’ How can there be more prejudicial, stronger evidence put before a jury than to have a former attorney, the defendant’s attorney say that?” Further, Bean was among those parents whom prosecutors inappropriately but persuasively presented as de facto experts on child psychology.

– Mark Everson, UNC psychologist, was tragically influential with a “coherent package” of misconceptions he clung to long after they had been exposed by updated research. And of course there’s his jaw-dropping “where there’s smoke there’s fire” argument….

– Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit, a key player in the McMartin Preschool trial, tried too late to shed responsibility for the many defendants wrongfully convicted by his “child sexual abuse syndrome” theory.

Bill Hart’s letter didn’t mention it, but I have to wonder whether this was the Elle passage that actually got under his skin most annoyingly:

“[Hart] is emotionally involved in the Little Rascals case to a startling degree. Last year he married Patricia Kephart, the mother of a Little Rascals child, who Hart had become romantically involved with during his prosecution of the case. ‘If anything it’s made it more difficult on me,’ he says of his entanglement in the investigation.”

There are huge and obvious problems with Hart’s behavior, but his “difficult” personal consequences don’t rank high on the list.