Nov. 23, 2011

“Finally, after eight years, the Little Rascals case is over. We can consign to history what has to be the most bizarre and disturbing episode in the annals of North Carolina law…..

“Never has the state devoted such resources to wrecking lives with such flimsy evidence and unconscionable delays.

“As a case history of mass hysteria, the Edenton story will enrich textbooks for generations. As a cautionary tale of what can happen when otherwise sensible people come under the spell of self-styled victim advocates, one can only hope the memory of Little Rascals will help others stop the next case before it gets out of hand.

“The state’s most effective weapon… was not evidence, but time. By holding (defendants) behind bars month after month, the state managed to inflict enormous punishment… without having to prove a thing.

“As fiction, the Little Rascals story would have strained the combined imaginations of Charles Dickens and Stephen King. As news, it is a chilling example of a judicial system that was unchecked by common sense or common decency.”

– Editorial in the Greensboro News & Record, May 28, 1997

When Gladstone (or whoever) first posited that “Justice delayed is justice denied,” could he have envisioned such a calculated demonstration?

Aug. 20, 2015

“In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile.

“A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about ‘boobies and dicks’ and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis.

“The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of ‘Moby-Dick.’ What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.

“Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate.

“Dicks? That child knew the word ‘dicks’? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!…”

– From “A Very Model Moral Panic” by Carol Tavris in the Wall Street Journal (Aug. 7)

Feb. 2, 2019

First of two parts

The name of Dr. Roland Summit, key supporter of the McMartin Preschool prosecution, no longer resonates in psychiatry, but the “child sexual abuse syndrome” he conjured up did a lifetime’s worth of damage to its countless victims.

As described by Debbie Nathan (Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1990), “[Summit’s] theory about incest… argues that if there is evidence of sex abuse and a child denies it, this is only further proof that it happened and a therapist should use any means necessary to help the child talk…. If they later recant, that means they are under family pressure to protect the father and their turnabout is further proof of the crime.

“So no matter how much coercion was used to get an accusation and no matter if a child later retracted it, once Summit’s incest theory was applied, a charge of abuse became irrefutable. Child protection workers ignored the fact that this logic had little to do with day care. After all, why would children staunchly defend abuse to protect an adult who wasn’t part of the family? And if they had been so brutally attacked at school, why wouldn’t they tell their parents?

“Therapists and investigators came up with all sorts of rationales. One was the teachers threatened them by slaughtering animals and warning that the same thing would happen to their parents if they told….”

Summit wasn’t among the expert witnesses in the Little Rascals Day Care case, but his supposed syndrome warped therapists’ interpretation of every child-witness interview. And those imaginary “threatened parents” showed up in this 1995 open letter from Little Rascals parents: “Many [children are now] old enough to realize that Bob Kelly can’t work his threatened evil to kill their families.”

Next: Collusion by psychiatrist and patient

Oct. 24, 2011

It’s almost obscene to consider the Edenton Seven as lucky, but at least they eventually went free.

Mark Montgomery, the Durham appellate lawyer who represented Bob Kelly, cites two clients still in prison after being convicted of bizarre sexual abuse during the decade of moral panic, 1984-94.

“Junior Chandler was a driver for a (Madison County) day care. The prosecutor (the same who prosecuted Bob Kelly) alleged that Junior would drive off his route to a park by a river, strip the children of their clothes, troop them down to the river, put them in a rowboat, commit various sexual acts, put them back on the bus and take them home.

Based almost exclusively on hearsay and expert ‘vouching,’ Junior was convicted in 1987, and sentenced to two life sentences.

“Pat Figured was supposed to have driven from North Raleigh to Smithfield over his lunch hour to stick a screwdriver into the anal openings of his girlfriend’s two children. (UNC Chapel Hill) psychologist Mark Everson testified that the children ‘had been abused by Mr. Pat Figured.’ Pat was convicted in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison.”

Here is the North Carolina Supreme Court’s 2010 decision that kept Andrew Chandler Jr. a/k/a Junior Chandler in prison.

And here is a thorough history of Pat Figured’s case.

The fate of Chandler and Figured is surely appalling. However, Montgomery adds, “For each defendant who went to trial and was convicted of sexual abuse, dozens more pled guilty to a lesser charge in order to avoid trial for crimes that are difficult to defend against and carry draconian penalties.”