Jan. 16, 2016

“Joseph Sledge spent 37 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. At his trial, the state paid a lying snitch to testify against him. While he was in prison, (Jon David, the latest Bladen County district attorney) opposed the DNA testing that would eventually prove Sledge’s innocence. And when the long-delayed tests showed Sledge wasn’t the culprit, the state waited another two years to release him from prison.

“Now that Sledge is finally free, the only person being punished is the lawyer who fought to prove his innocence, Chris Mumma. On Thursday, the State Bar found that Mumma violated professional ethics by testing a water bottle for DNA without permission from its owner – all in an attempt to gain an innocent man his freedom against long odds. (The test of the water bottle was inconclusive and had no impact on the final outcome.)….

“In all the cases where Mumma has freed innocent people, no prosecutor has ever faced charges….Instead, the State Bar sent a message that lawyers who expose the system’s misdeeds could be subject to retribution….”

– From “Let’s punish lawyers who put innocent people in prison, instead of those who free them” by Kristin Collins at NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (Jan. 15)

Three years ago I took DA David at his word when he promised:

“I really see us as sharing the goal of making sure (Sledge’s) conviction rests on credible and substantial evidence. I’m going to go where the truth leads in this matter.”

I was naïve. As it turned out, David’s true passion wasn’t for exonerating an innocent man but for punishing his lawyer.

Aug. 17, 2012

“I’ve wondered how the prosecutors (in ritual-abuse day-care cases) could live with themselves.

“Says Debbie Nathan (coauthor of “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”): ‘There was a time – and it lasted eight or nine years – when there was an entire body of expert opinion that these things could happen.’ It was a time, she says, when pseudoscience had raced ahead of science, when best-selling books that had yet to be contradicted asserted that the inability to remember a trauma was the strongest proof of it, when doctors trying to be helpful established as a baseline a model virginal hymen so perfectly smooth and shaped that it allowed any actual hymen to be construed as traumatized.

“ ‘Our culture is still really atavistic,’ says Nathan, ‘but there’s an overlay of science on it. Mix the totally primeval stuff with science and you’ve got this mix that can’t be beat.’ Prosecutors, she says, ‘are just as naive as anyone else, but they also know how to sway people. They have all the techniques down pat. “Suffer the little children.” “Innocence defiled.” “Worse than murder.” ‘

“But why, as science and truth become clearer, is it so hard for so many prosecutors to recant?…  ‘Maybe it’s because the whole process of constructing one of these innocent people as a really demonically evil sexual pervert who sadistically violates lots of kids – the whole process of constructing this character on a real person is torture. You have to be very invasive. It’s a very sadistic enterprise. You become like a torturer.’ ”

– From “Why Can’t They Admit They Were Wrong?” by John Conroy
in the Chicago Reader (Aug. 1, 2003)

Feb. 1, 2013

“The Little Rascals case serves as a good reminder that parents also are part of the child-savers interest group and have as much, in fact probably more, of a vested interest in ‘getting to the truth’ than any of their professional associates….

“From the witness stand, one mother describes how her repeated questioning of her three-year-old son finally confirmed that he, too, had been abused by Bob Kelly…

Mother: First time I questioned him, we were laying on my bed and I was just, you know, ‘Do you like Mr. Bob?’ ‘Has Mr. Bob ever done anything bad to you?’ And as we were talking I got more specific…. ‘Has Mr. Bob ever touched your hiney? ‘Has he ever put his finger in your hiney?’

Attorney: Was that the only time you questioned him?

Mother: No, it went on….

Attorney: Now tell me how it developed that you began to get statements from him that raised a question in your mind about sexual abuse.

Mother: (My son) was being questioned a lot from that first time on, quite often. And then that last week it was probably a few hours every day thing…. I got a response from him. Um, he told me that Mr. Bob had put his penis in his mouth and peed on him….

Attorney: How did he come up with those kinds of statements?

Mother: Because I asked him…. He had been hearing it at least once a week since I first started questioning him and then that last week he was hearing it every day.

“In their empirical research on repeated interviewing, Ceci and Bruck (1995) find that while children do remember more with each additional interview, their reports also become more inaccurate over time.

“Simply put, they recall both more accurate and inaccurate details with each successive interview. Further, repeated interviews signal the interviewers’ bias to the children, cueing them on how to answer in a way that pleases their interrogators.”

– From “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary De Young (2004)

Dec. 18, 2012

The hands-off-my-guns community is hunkering down, as it did after Columbine, after Tucson, after Aurora, confidently waiting for the storm of outrage to pass.

Just curious: If 20 dead children aren’t enough to start the change process, how many would it take? 100? 500?

But those questions assume that SOME number, however outrageous, would at last open a tiny crack in the massive resistance of the gun lobby.

In reality, no such number exists.

– Lew Powell