March 20, 2017

“America saw another record year for the number of prisoners being exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science & Society, University of Michigan Law School, and Michigan State University College of Law.

“For 2016, 166 people were exonerated of crimes and released from prison, 52 of them for murder. Of all the exonerations, 70 cases involved official misconduct of some sort, and in 74 of the cases, convictions came from guilty pleas. And in 94 cases (also a record) it turned out that no actual crime occurred at all. These were mostly drug cases but also some child sex abuse cases. Most famously, the San Antonio Four, four women convicted in 1998 in a fabricated satanic child sex abuse ring scandal, were released in 2016 after it finally became clear the crimes never occurred.”

– From “Decades of exoneration stats show blacks more likely to wrongfully convicted” by Scott Shackford at reason.com (March 7)

Of the Edenton Seven, only Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson, whose convictions were overturned, qualify for the National Registry of Exonerations. As spokesman Ted Koehler told me five years ago, “The Edenton case was a terrible witch hunt. Regretfully, though, [Betsy] Kelly’s and [Scott] Privott’s guilty pleas and the dropped charges against [Robin] Byrum, [Shelley] Stone, and [Darlene] Harris do not fit our definition of an exoneration….”

Nov. 16, 2012

“In North America in the 1980s, the moral panic about organized child abuse arose in a context that included the following scares:

• “a moral panic about satanic activity;
• “a scare about missing and murdered children;
• “great public anxiety about incest, redefined as child sexual abuse during the 1970s;
• “a wave of disputed custody cases in which women accused their former husbands of sexually abusing children during court-ordered visitations;
• “self-help books by women claiming to be ‘survivors’ of incest and ritual abuse;
• “therapists’ claims that many of their adult women patients suffered from multiple-personality disorder as a result of severe childhood sexual and ritual abuse.

“Of particular importance were claims that society was in denial about widespread child sexual abuse…. Thus, claims about organized child abuse by caregivers were made in a context of claims about similar issues, and the effect of claims in one panic was to reinforce claims in another.”

– From “Wrongful Conviction and the Moral Panic About Organized Child Abuse: National and International Perspectives” by Randall Grometstein (2005)

Dec. 17, 2012

“(They) are arrogant and self-centered, and feel privileged and entitled. They have a grandiose, exaggerated sense of self-importance and they are primarily motivated by self-serving goals. They seek power over others and will manipulate, exploit, deceive, con, or otherwise take advantage of others, in order to inflict harm or to achieve their goals. They are callous and have little empathy for others needs or feelings unless they coincide with their own. They show disregard for the rights, property, or safety of others and experience little or no remorse or guilt if they cause any harm or injury to others. They may act aggressively or sadistically toward others in pursuit of their personal agendas and appear to derive pleasure or satisfaction from humiliating, demeaning, dominating, or hurting others….”

The passage above, from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders best describes

A. Psychopaths

B. Prosecutors of ritual-abuse day-care cases

C. Both A and B

July 3, 2013

“(Nancy Lamb) is aware of the naysayers, those who say she ran a witch hunt, gleaning hundreds of charges against (Bob) Kelly and his staff from the children’s accounts, which included trips aboard spaceships.

“ ‘You have to look at the big picture,’ she said. ‘You have to know that there are fantastic elements in children’s accounts of abuse, while they also say things that are quite believable.’ ”

“And believe she did….”

– From “How hard it is to say, ‘Enough’ ” by columnist Nicole Brodeur in the News & Observer (May 28, 1997)

What self-serving speciousness. Could there be a better example of failing “to look at the big picture” than Lamb’s focusing on only those fragments of the children’s manipulated testimony that supported her case?