March 1, 2016

“It would be hard to imagine a more glaring judicial conflict of interest than the one the Supreme Court considered in a case out of Pennsylvania on Monday.

“In 1986, Terrance Williams was convicted of killing a man named Amos Norwood with a tire iron when he was 18. Prosecutors in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office sought the death penalty, and got it….

“A state court found that the prosecutors had lied, and vacated Mr. Williams’s sentence. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously reversed that ruling. The court’s chief justice at the time, Ronald Castille, wrote a concurring opinion criticizing the lower court’s ruling for ‘condemning’ the prosecutors.

“The problem was that Mr. Castille himself led the district attorney’s office when it prosecuted Mr. Williams, and personally authorized seeking the death penalty in that case…. Nevertheless, he refused to recuse himself from Mr. Williams’s case….”

– From “Should a Judge Rule on His Own Case?” editorial in the New York Times (Feb. 29)

Meanwhile in North Carolina, prosecutors yet again show great interest in maintaining their conviction rate and little if any in ensuring justice has been done (text cache).

Dec. 10, 2012

I’ve been surprised – naively, I suppose – by the refusal of professional journals such as Nursing Research, Child Abuse & Neglect and Relational Child & Youth Care Practice to retract articles that supported the moral panic of ritual abuse in day cares.

The editors’ common justification is that they published no “specific errors,” such as citing the Little Rascals case by name. This seems to me a narrow and disingenuous view. These articles are wrong to the bone, as wrong as if they had been based on cold fusion or the Protocols of Zion.

Here’s what the Charlotte Observer, my former employer, had to say in 2006 about how it had contributed to the infamous Wilmington coup d’etat of 1898:

“An apology is inadequate to atone for the Observer’s role in promoting the white supremacist campaign. But an apology is due….

“We apologize to the black citizens and their descendants whose rights and interests we disregarded, and to all North Carolinians, whose trust we betrayed by our failure to fairly report the news and to stand firmly against injustice.”

Newspapers, as “the first rough draft of history,” enjoy and deserve some leeway in reaching their standards of accuracy. But the editors at the Observer (and other participating North Carolina dailies) didn’t quibble over “specific errors.” They addressed the root defect in their coverage. Is it too much to expect the same from the editors of professional journals?

Oct. 5, 2012

Because today’s North Carolina Supreme Court decision on Junior Chandler’s appeal comprised three separate parts, I didn’t fully comprehend it.

“Is this good news or bad?” I emailed Mark Montgomery, Junior’s appellate lawyer.

“The worst,” he replied. “We’re out of court.”

Yes, this is the worst – the absolute, inexcusable, shameful worst.

The justices have denied Junior Chandler, probably the last still-imprisoned victim of the multiple-offender, multiple-victim ritual-abuse day-care panic, his final chance for a new trial. After 25 years behind bars – more than all the Little Rascals defendants combined! – he faces only more of the same.

If I were a lawyer, maybe I could understand how the North Carolina Supreme Court arrived at its decision.

How it was unmoved by Junior’s feeble representation early on.

How it was uninterested in the epochal progress made in limiting expert testimony.

How it was all too eager to find petty justifications for validating a prosecution rotten at the core.

But probably not.

June 12, 2014

“He thinks the continued treatment of these cases as a modern-day episode of mass hysteria does disservice to children and even puts them in danger.

“ ‘We have, over the last 20 years, discounted the word of children who might testify about sexual abuse,’ he writes. ‘We have become more worried about overreacting to child sexual abuse than we are about underreacting to it.’

“If that were the legacy of the day-care cases, it would be a damning one. But when I spoke to psychologists in the field – those Professor Cheit cites respectfully, as well as those he attacks – they gave a different account of the science at the heart of this history….”

– From “Abuse Cases, and a Legacy of Skepticism” by Emily Bazelon in the New York Times (June 9)

Thank you, Ms. Bazelon. In the category of “fat books in desperate search of a reason to exist,” Cheit’s “The Witch-Hunt Narrative” belongs right up there with William D. Cohan’s contemporaneous “The Price of Silence,” an account of the Duke lacrosse case that sympathizes not with the railroaded (and later exonerated!) defendants but with District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was disbarred and briefly jailed for conspiring to rig the case against them.

At the core of each book is the unsubstantiated contention that something surely must have happened, either at a Durham party house and at countless day cares. Fortunately, Cohan and Cheit can only gratuitously smear the reputations of innocent defendants, not put them in prison – unlike Little Rascals expert witness Mark “where there’s smoke there’s fire” Everson.