Aug. 24, 2014

“The following dialogue is from Daniel Goleman’s article ‘Studies Reflect Suggestibility of Very Young as Witnesses,’ in the New York Times (June 11, 1993). It is an excerpt from 11 interviews of a four-year-old boy, who each week was told falsely: ‘You went to the hospital because your finger got caught in a mousetrap. Did this ever happen to you?’

“First Interview: ‘No. I’ve never been to the hospital.’

“Second Interview: ‘Yes. I cried.’

“Third Interview: ‘Yes. My mom went to the hospital with me.’

“Fourth Interview: ‘Yes. I remember. It felt like a cut.’

“Fifth Interview: ‘Yes.’ (Pointing to index finger….)

“Eleventh Interview: ‘Uh huh. My daddy, mommy, and my brother (took me to the hospital) in our van…. The hospital gave me . . . a little bandage, and it was right here’ (pointing to index finger).

“The interviewer then asked: ‘How did it happen?’

“ ‘I was looking and then I didn’t see what I was doing and it (finger) got in there somehow…. The mousetrap was in our house because there’s a mouse in our house…. The mousetrap is down in the basement next to the firewood…. I was playing a game called “Operation” and then I went downstairs and said to Dad, “I want to eat lunch” and then it got stuck in the mousetrap…. My daddy was down in the basement collecting firewood…. (My brother) pushed me into the mousetrap…. It happened yesterday. The mouse was in my house yesterday. I caught my finger in it yesterday. I went to the hospital yesterday.’ “

– From “Case Study of Implanted Memory” by Martin Gardner in Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1994)

Does this experiment’s series of 11 interviews strike you as extreme? For at least one of the Little Rascals children, Judith Abbott, lead therapist for the prosecution, conducted biweekly sessions for six months!

June 21, 2016

“One of the earliest arguments for financial compensation for the wrongly incarcerated came in 1932, from the Yale law professor Edwin Borchard. In an influential book called ‘Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice,’ Borchard wrote, ‘When it is discovered after conviction that the wrong man was condemned, the least the State can do to right this essentially irreparable injury is to reimburse the innocent victim, by an appropriate indemnity for the loss and damage suffered.’ He noted, ‘European countries have long recognized that such indemnity is a public obligation.’ But it would be many years before the United States began puzzling through what constituted an ‘appropriate indemnity.’ It wasn’t until the first DNA exoneration, in 1989, that most states began to seriously consider compensation.

“There is still no consensus about the value of lost time. Missouri gives exonerees $50 a day for time served, California twice that much. Massachusetts caps total compensation at $500,000. In Maine, the limit is $300,000; in Florida, it’s $2 million. The variation is largely arbitrary. ‘If there’s a logic to it, I haven’t seen it,’ Robert J. Norris, a researcher at SUNY Albany who has studied compensation statutes, told me…. Twenty states have no compensation statutes at all.”

– From “The Price of a Life: What’s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?” by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker (April 13, 2015)

North Carolina exonerees are entitled to $50,000 for each year spent in prison, plus job training and college tuition, up to a maximum of $750,000. However, those statutes apply only to persons “granted a pardon of innocence by the Governor upon the grounds that the crime with which the person was charged either was not committed at all or was not committed by that person.”

As excruciatingly demonstrated in the case of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, not every governor is in a hurry to enable that compensation.

April 5, 2016

At a time when the Little Rascals claims were exposing widespread gullibility, a gritty band of doubters – e.g., Raymond Lawrence, Glenn Lancaster, Jane Duffield, Doug Wiik, Susan Corbett and Dee Swain – was desperately working to keep the defendants from being crushed by public opinion and prosecutorial coercion.

As treasurer for the Committee to Support the Edenton Seven, Swain distributed donations to defendants, facilitated the lowering of Scott Privott’s exorbitant bond and wrote an epic four-page (single-spaced!) letter educating the attorney general’s office on the errors of its ways.

How was it that a propane dealer in Washington, N.C., could see through the fog that engulfed so many professionals?

“It was obvious to me right away that it was hysteria,” he says. “I didn’t get involved until after (Bob Kelly’s) conviction – I had thought surely the jury would see through it….

“I’ve always been a skeptical person, someone who stands outside the box…. Most people thought I had lost my damn mind, defending ‘child molesters’…. I got anonymous phone calls….”

Swain is surprisingly generous to those who bought into the “satanic ritual abuse” stories elicited by prosecution therapists: “There aren’t any villains. They all acted in good faith. They were on a mission. They were going to be heroes….. You could see it all in ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ (by Charles Mackay, 1841).”

And why does he think none have stepped forward a quarter century later to recant? “What they did was too terrible to admit to themselves.”

Sept. 27, 2013

“The children are the big victims (in unfounded sex abuse cases) and are sacrificed….  Can you imagine being a child and being interrogated, being sent to the gynecologist, seeing your mother cry, seeing your father getting into fights, or a person you really like being sent to prison? You actually end up believing that this happened to you, that’s what we called ‘added memory.’

“Those children grow up with the same memories as those who actually experienced child abuse. I found it disturbing and I felt that it had to be told.”

– From an interview with Thomas Vinterberg, director of “The Hunt,” at filmophelia.com (July 11, 2013)

Vinterberg’s sympathy for the children in such cases is well placed – but do they in fact “grow up with the same memories as those who actually experienced child abuse”?

Although reliable follow-up is scarce,  Debra Poole, professor of psychology at Central Michigan University, had this to say about the unfounded claims of child witnesses in the Fells Acres (Amirault) case:

“It has nothing to do with lying and everything to do with the implanting of false memories…. Studies have shown that children will vehemently defend the veracity of implanted memories. They recall reporting them, and those reports produce mental images of the events that these individuals cannot distinguish from their real experiences. But the kids are not responsible for that. The interviews are.”

The Little Rascals child witness I talked with insists she continues to “remember vividly what happened.”