Aug. 17, 2012

“I’ve wondered how the prosecutors (in ritual-abuse day-care cases) could live with themselves.

“Says Debbie Nathan (coauthor of “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”): ‘There was a time – and it lasted eight or nine years – when there was an entire body of expert opinion that these things could happen.’ It was a time, she says, when pseudoscience had raced ahead of science, when best-selling books that had yet to be contradicted asserted that the inability to remember a trauma was the strongest proof of it, when doctors trying to be helpful established as a baseline a model virginal hymen so perfectly smooth and shaped that it allowed any actual hymen to be construed as traumatized.

“ ‘Our culture is still really atavistic,’ says Nathan, ‘but there’s an overlay of science on it. Mix the totally primeval stuff with science and you’ve got this mix that can’t be beat.’ Prosecutors, she says, ‘are just as naive as anyone else, but they also know how to sway people. They have all the techniques down pat. “Suffer the little children.” “Innocence defiled.” “Worse than murder.” ‘

“But why, as science and truth become clearer, is it so hard for so many prosecutors to recant?…  ‘Maybe it’s because the whole process of constructing one of these innocent people as a really demonically evil sexual pervert who sadistically violates lots of kids – the whole process of constructing this character on a real person is torture. You have to be very invasive. It’s a very sadistic enterprise. You become like a torturer.’ ”

– From “Why Can’t They Admit They Were Wrong?” by John Conroy
in the Chicago Reader (Aug. 1, 2003)

July 29, 2013

“Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed the ability to implant mice with false memories. The memories can be easily induced and are just as strong as real memories, physiological proof of something psychologists and lawyers have known for years.

“The findings are a serious matter. According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness testimony played a role in 75 percent of guilty verdicts eventually overturned by DNA testing after people spent years in prison. Some prisoners may even have been executed due to false eyewitness testimony. It was not because the witnesses were lying. They were just wrong, said Susumu Tonegawa, a molecular biologist and the lead author in the MIT study.

“In the longest criminal trial in American history, the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in California, was charged with multiple incidents of child abuse. After seven years and $15 million in prosecution expenses, some charges were dropped and the defendants were acquitted of others when it became clear some of the accusations were based on false memories, some possibly planted by childrens’ therapists.”

– From “Scientists Produce False Memories In Mice” by Joel N. Shurkin, Inside Science News Service (July 25, 2013)

The same day’s Guardian of London adds this response from Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London:

“Memory… is a reconstructive process which involves building a specific memory from fragments of real memory traces of the original event but also possibly including information from other sources.”

“Information from other sources” – that is, from prosecution therapists – was what contaminated the memories of child witnesses in cases such as McMartin and Little Rascals.

Aug. 15, 2012

The North Carolina Supreme Court won’t release its next batch of opinions until August 24, but its recent decision on a 2009 child sex abuse case could augur well for Junior Chandler.

On June 14 the court upheld the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ overturning of Patrick Loren Towe’s conviction in Surry County. Here’s the crucial part of the opinion:

“Under the North Carolina Rules of Evidence, a qualified expert may testify as to her opinion in her field of expertise if the testimony will assist the jury in understanding the evidence. An expert may not, however, testify as to the witness’s credibility or state that she believes the defendant is guilty.

“In sexual abuse cases involving child victims, an expert may not testify that sexual abuse has occurred without physical evidence supporting her opinion. An expert may not testify that the child has been ‘sexually abused’ if the testimony is based solely on the interview with the child-victim.”

In Patrick Towe’s case, only one expert witness so testified – in Junior Chandler’s it was six.

Without such a parade of “expert vouching,” Junior surely would have spent the past 25 years back home in Madison County instead of behind bars. How can the North Carolina Supreme Court now fail to acknowledge this?

Nov. 8, 2015

“The latest obstacle to Gerald Amirault’s freedom came without fanfare. A three-member panel of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections has now decided that, since the prisoner has refused participation in treatment programs for sex offenders, he was considered to be ‘in denial.’ Permission for him to appear before the Board that could grant early parole would therefore be denied.”

– From “How to Extort a Confession” in the Wall Street Journal (April 22, 2002)

Steadfast in his supposed “denial,” Amirault wouldn’t be paroled until 2004 – 18 years into his 40-year sentence.

Compared with Junior Chandler, however, he was lucky. Chandler’s two consecutive life sentences have made him ineligible for parole. For a brief moment during his long and maddening appeals process, in 2008, it seemed those life sentences would be made concurrent – thus qualifying him for parole consideration. But a switch in judges, orchestrated by the attorney general’s office, vaporized that prospect.

A footnote: The North Carolina Department of Correction has its own Sexual Offender Accountability and Responsibility program. “Through psycho-educational modules, behavior techniques and empathy training,” its website says, “S.O.A.R. participants learn that sexually abusive behavior is both controllable and manageable.”

Junior Chandler recalls having been invited to participate, but …. “They said I had to admit I was guilty. I told them I couldn’t do that, because I hadn’t done anything….  What would you do?”