May 15, 2013

“As one of the lead prosecutors, (Elizabeth Lederer) helped lock up five young people (the Central Park Five) based on false confessions, no DNA evidence and media hysteria, for a collective 30 years….

“Lederer never apologized. Today, she still serves as an assistant district attorney and teaches at Columbia Law School, one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. While those wrongfully convicted lost years of their lives, her efforts to imprison them had no negative consequences for her…. People like Lederer whose failures cost livelihoods should be held accountable for their actions….

“Defending Lederer’s role in the case as an aggressive lead prosecutor, (New York Times columnist Jim) Dwyer dismissed that as: ‘Mistakes were made.’ That’s the standard public relations line used when trying to deflect blame. But what kinds of mistakes? What were their effects?”

– From “For Central Park Five, wrongful conviction meets false equivalence” by Raymond Santana and Frank Chi at Salon.com (May 3)

You know where I’m going with this: the Edenton Seven were locked up for some 15 years, and the “aggressive lead prosecutor” in their case remains ensconced on the state payroll, still unrepentant – and always available to share her expertise on “how to defend the forensic interview in the courtroom.”

Perhaps, however, the notoriety she achieved as Little Rascals prosecutor helps explain why she hasn’t risen to district attorney or to district court judge.

Even if so, of course, that consequence wouldn’t begin to atone for the horrors she inflicted over a nonexistent crime.

June 19, 2013

The Little Rascals parents insisted their children had “disclosed” mostly on their own, rather than a result of persistent interrogation. But this live interview, in the giddy moments after Bob Kelly’s convictions (April 22, 1992), suggests a different pattern:

CNN: How did you find out this happened? You were apparently the first parents to realize something was terribly wrong.

Mark Stever: Kyle, our son, told us in his own way, just different things, like ‘Mr. Bob doesn’t do it anymore. He does it to the other children.’

Audrey Stever: We knew he had a secret, and we knew it happened at nap time, but he couldn’t tell us what it was, and to escape talking about it he would say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t do it anymore, Mommy.’

CNN: And how did you finally bring it out of him exactly what he said had been happening?

Audrey Stever: Well, I approached a friend (Brenda Toppin) who was the investigating officer in the case… and things kind of went from there.

Feb. 9, 2015

The Little Rascals Day Care case has often been likened to the Salem Witch Trials, but this lengthy list from “Understanding The Crucible: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents” by Claudia Durst Johnson and Vernon Johnson (1998) drives home the point:

• Both involved children as accusers.
• Convictions were determined almost solely on the basis of the children’s testimony.
• Everything escalated rapidly – the number of children involved, the number of the accused, and the different kinds of charges.
• The minds of the children were in both cases manipulated by adults.
• Charges were instigated by adults who held grudges against the accused.
• There was an absence of corroborating evidence.
• “Fanciful” testimony was regarded seriously. In Salem, it was spectral evidence. In the twentieth-century cases, it included children’s stories of spaceships, sharks, and ritual murder.
• Community hysteria arose from the feeling that evil – witches and sex abusers – had access to their children.
• “Poppets” or dolls were involved. In the Salem trials, little dolls were immediately seized upon as poppets used by witches to pierce with pins with the object of inflicting torture. In sexual abuse cases, “anatomically correct” dolls were used by psychologists to coach details from the children.
• There were charges that satanic rituals were conducted.
• The prosecution showed a single-minded determination, by threat or bribe, to get the accused to confess.
• The prosecution showed a single-minded determination, by threat or bribe, to get children to disclose more and more details of misconduct without regard to truth.

Dec. 8, 2015

“It is over 20 years since the rash of allegation that rituals of devil worship, including the sexual abuse of children, the sacrifice, and (sometimes) eating, of animals, children and even babies as well as other extreme acts of depravity were being conducted across the U.K. In 1994 I reported to the Department of Health that in the 84 cases in England and Wales that were the basis of my research, I could find no supporting evidence for the existence of such a satanic cult.

“The allegations have not stopped however, although they no longer get the publicity they used to have as, officially, satanic or ritual abuse no longer exists. It is not mentioned in guidance to social workers on the subject of abuse of children. However, a particularly unpleasant case that occurred in Hampstead in 2014 has recently been widely reported in the press….

“The persistence of these allegations into the 21st century repeats the questions that I thought I had answered at the end of the 20th! This is, first: how is it that ‘victims’ can tell stories of gruesome experiences that they never had? Secondly: how is it that adults, many of them sensible, educated people, believe these stories?….”

– From “Jean La Fontaine on Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic” at the British False Memory Society (Nov. 19)