May 3, 2014

 As I’ve noted before, the Google Ngram Viewer mines a database of more than 5 million books to track word and phrase frequencies over time.

Too bad it abruptly ends at 2008, but the graph above still plots clearly the rise and fall of not only “(satanic) ritual abuse” but also two other examples of the 20th century’s most misguided ideas.

Let’s hope their decline continues uninterrupted.

March 17, 2015

“Warren Twiddy, 68, father of defendant Betsy Kelly, said he’s been ‘shunned, blocked out’ by some residents and nearly run out of his church.”

– From “Trial rips fabric of community” by Mark Mayfield in USA Today (March 20, 1992)

“Twiddy sold his insurance business and exhausted his retirement savings to pay his daughter’s legal fees. Old friends, he says, won’t even say hello on the street. Clients canceled policies after his daughter was indicted.”

– From  “Town’s pain is revived by TV film” by Andrea Stone in USA Today (July 22, 1993)

“Twiddy admits… some bitterness toward his neighbors, who ignored him at church and at the country club.

“ ‘Before, the bulletin board was full with places we were supposed to be up ’til Christmas,’ he said. ‘After this, nothing, buddy.’ ”

– From “Talk of new trial makes Edenton shudder” by Carol D. Leonnig in the Charlotte Observer (Sept. 10, 1995)

“Our need to matter and our need to belong are as fundamental as our need to eat and breathe. Therefore ostracism – rejection, silence, exclusion – is one of the most powerful punishments that one person can inflict on another.

“Brain scans have shown that this rejection is actually experienced as physical pain, and that this pain is experienced whether those that reject us are close friends or family or total strangers, and whether the act is overt exclusion or merely looking away….”

– From a delanceyplace.com summary of “The Pain of Exclusion” by Kipling D. Williams in Scientific American (January/February 2011)

The misery caused by wrongful prosecution of the Little Rascals case extended far beyond courtrooms and jail cells. Defendants’ family members such as Betsy Kelly’s father endured many years in a hell of ostracism.

Warren Twiddy died in 2012. He was 89.

June 24, 2013

“(I) followed the Little Rascals case closely in the Norfolk and other papers…. Moved by (its) strangeness and patent senselessness, as well as by reports nationwide at the time of what came to be tagged ‘false memory syndrome,’ I wrote and later published a short story inspired by the spectacular miscarriage of justice…. The thrust of my story was popular hysteria and jaundiced, ambitious therapists together with a grievous breakdown of the judicial system….

“I believe that behind the recovered memory and child abuse therapeutic notions of that time, so destructive of the lives of the Edenton Seven and many others, lies Freud’s almost immeasurable popular impact on our now so heavily sexualized culture – though the easy lure of the witch hunt seems to have been all too contagious in Edenton’s fearful, credulous and manipulable parents as well.”

– Historian and writer John L. Romjue of Yorktown, Va., responding to “Remembering the shame of the Little Rascals Day Care case” at North Carolina Miscellany (Oct. 24, 2011)

Although “Witches of Devon,” the title story in Mr. Romjue’s 2002 collection, veers dramatically from the course of the Little Rascals case, it does indeed capture the essence: “It had started as a rumor – and not about molestation, not at first. There had been an ‘assault’ incident at Happy Children (day care). Joanne Jamison had spanked a little girl’s bottom and not suitably apologized to the mother….”

Feb. 8, 2016

“Bob Orr, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice, says it’s time for a comprehensive outside review of the state agency that oversees lawyers.

“Orr… is part of a committee looking at legal professionalism as part of Chief Justice Mark Martin’s recently launched review of the state justice system….

“The call for evaluation comes amid questions about the bar’s aggressive prosecution of three defense attorneys who have worked on Racial Justice Act (text cache) and innocence inquiry cases….”

– From “Former NC Supreme Court justice calls for review of state bar” by Anne Blythe in the News & Observer (Feb. 6)  (text cache)

Right on, Justice Orr. And thanks to the N&O for its continuing attention to the flagrant self-dealing of the Prosecutors Club, most recently this account (text cache) by Joseph Neff contrasting the bar’s two sets of ethical standards:

“For most of 2015, the North Carolina State Bar vigorously and publicly pressed ethics charges against two anti-death penalty lawyers for what were eventually judged to be unimportant inaccuracies in two sworn affidavits.

“During the same time, the bar privately dismissed complaints that three prominent prosecutors – one running for attorney general, another now a Superior Court judge – used a false affidavit in a racially divisive case that has roiled Winston-Salem for more than a decade….”

I’ve even seen it suggested that the situation demands a separate panel specializing in prosecutorial misconduct (text cache).