Sept. 11, 2016

“I honestly don’t understand not only how the Attorney General’s Office felt it was necessary to fight us through a full week of hearing in this case, but how they could stand up at the end of that hearing and say they thought Johnny should stay in prison.

“That is not a minister of justice. A minister of justice should be objective enough to evaluate the evidence in a fair way and there was no way anybody could look at the evidence that came out in that hearing and say Johnny Small should be in prison.”

– Chris Mumma of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, quoted in “Johnny Small free after murder charge dismissed” in the Wilmington Star-News (Sept. 8)

I would’ve expected, before my apprenticeship on the exoneration watch, that district attorneys would be less willing to having their fingers pried loose from wrongful convictions than their allies in the attorney general’s office. It’s the DAs, after all, who have to ‘splain their misfeasance to the voting public.

But this often seems not to be the case, as exemplified by Assistant AG Jess Mekeel’s misplaced concern for “the stability and reliability of our justice system.”

How much of this institutional resistance to exoneration owes to a tradition of prosecutorial blood-brotherhood? And how much springs directly (if not via email) from Attorney General Roy Cooper?

If Cooper took heed of Mumma’s thoughtful plea for “more cooperation between prosecutors and defense attorneys in their efforts to achieve justice,” evidence of it has yet to surface.

Feb. 13, 2012

“It is evident that, although mistakes were made in the handling of the (Little Rascals) case, these children definitely were sexually abused by one or more individuals at the day care center. To suggest otherwise is to revictimize these smallest victims.

“As a professor of social work at UNCG whose specialty is child abuse, I would like the public to be aware that research has shown that 97-99 out of 100 children who report that they have been sexually abused are telling the truth. When a child tells you that an unauthorized adult is ‘playing doctor’ with him/her, it is highly likely that he/she is describing some sort of abuse.

“If you do not believe the child, you become part of the victimization of that child. If you believe that detection and prosecution of child abuse cases are witch hunts, then you protect child molesters and allow them to continue to traumatize children. I cannot imagine that the responsible people of this state want to put themselves on the side of criminals who abuse children.”

Elisabeth Porter Hurd, Greensboro

– From a letter to the editor of the Greensboro News & Record, June 9, 1997

Does Dr. Hurd still believe that the Little Rascals children “definitely were sexually abused”? And that to doubt the prosecution’s case was to “protect child molesters and allow them to continue to traumatize children”?

Last week I asked Dr. Hurd whether she might have changed her mind – so far no response.

Feb. 27, 2015

“…. A social worker from North Carolina informed the group (the Society for the Investigation, Treatment and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse) that in the day-care sex-abuse case she was investigating, she thought she remembered the kids talking about black helicopters. She said she would look into it.”

– From “Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia: Notes from a Mind-Control Conference” by Evan Harrington in the Skeptical Inquirer  (September-October 1996)

The “ritual and cult abuse” conference took place in Dallas in March 1995, several years after the trials of Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson (and just a couple of months before the North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned their convictions). But I wouldn’t be surprised if the social worker chatting with Dr. Harrington was a prosecution therapist still eagerly accumulating and broadcasting claims … this one perhaps.

Sept. 8, 2015

“Jennifer (a pseudonym) reached out to me after seeing an interview I gave about the McMartin Preschool trial…. She said she had been involved in a similar case as a child and that her experiences with the police, the judicial system, and a series of therapists mirrored those of the McMartin children. Now an adult with a career and family of her own, she agreed to speak with me about her experiences during the trial and in the decades since….

“Jennifer’s experiences illustrate the consequences of the misguided ‘belief’ in children that so many therapists, parents, and cops professed during the 1980s….”

– From “Moral Panic and the Myth of Recovered Memory” by Richard Beck at Literary Hub (Aug. 18) 

Although Beck presents more as a historian than a journalist, his interview with Jennifer is a significant addition to the sparse roster of recanting (or not) child-witnesses. Not surprisingly, her account offers numerous parallels not only to McMartin but also to Little Rascals:

• “lots of phone conversations and meetings” among parents
• an interviewer with “anatomically correct dolls”
• her initial insistence that “nothing had happened”
• “a tour of the jail” arranged by the therapist to assure her that the supposed molester was safely behind bars
• her capitulation in the face of endless therapy sessions, leading her to “finally just start… making stuff up.”
• the eventual overturning of her day-care teacher’s conviction

Might Jennifer’s coming forward, however tentatively, lead the way to more recantations by child-witnesses?