Sept. 28, 2012

As mentioned last week, the preponderance of women among the Edenton Seven was one of many curiosities that apparently failed to burden the prosecution with second thoughts.

Mary DeYoung addresses the issue in “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” (2004):

“By the 1980s… research studies consistently found that child sexual abuse by women was a statistical rarity….To accuse (female day-care workers of ritual abuse), child-savers had the daunting challenge of fashioning folk devils out of quite ordinary women engaged in traditional women’s work, and then persuading the public that evil had lurked unnoticed for so long behind such homely facades…..

“The answer was simple: belief trumps gender. Women who are satanists do what no other women even imagine….”

Jan. 2, 2013

What a bittersweet moment, reading Gov. Bev Perdue’s statement announcing her pardon of innocence for the Wilmington 10.

Surely, for the six surviving defendants, the pardon represents far too little justice, far too long delayed. But so many of Perdue’s words apply poignantly to a more recent “dark chapter in North Carolina’s history” – the prosecution of the Edenton Seven:

“I have decided to grant these pardons because the more facts I have learned… the more appalled I have become about the manner in which their convictions were obtained….

“This conduct (of prosecutor Jay Stroud) is disgraceful. It is utterly incompatible with basic notions of fairness and with every ideal that North Carolina holds dear. The legitimacy of our criminal justice system hinges on it operating in a fair and equitable manner…. That did not happen here. Instead, these convictions… represent an ugly stain on North Carolina’s criminal justice system….

“Justice demands that this stain finally be removed. The process in which this case was tried was fundamentally flawed….”

As noted previously, state government has continued to withhold exoneration from the Little Rascals defendants. In addition to these reasons that the Edenton Seven haven’t matched the Wilmington 10 in capturing the public eye, there is this notable difference in the two cases:

No one involved in prosecuting the Wilmington 10 remains in office, and the current Pender County district attorney has accepted Perdue’s decision without complaint. But two decades after prosecuting the Edenton Seven, Bill Hart and Nancy Lamb remain on the job, no doubt ready to beat down any hint of exoneration.

Feb. 18, 2013

Gov. Jim Hunt was serving his fourth term (1997-2001) when prosecutors dropped the last Little Rascals charges. Although Gary Pearce, Hunt’s longtime adviser and later biographer, doesn’t remember the governor being involved in the case, Pearce experienced his own Edenton moment:

“I actually got called by one of the parents who had heard of me. I met with them and worked with them on a program that UNC-TV did (in 1993 to give parents a chance to respond to “Innocence Lost: The Verdict”). I did it just out of curiosity. It was one of the damnedest things I ever did.

“What the parents were claiming happened was, in the truest sense of the word, incredible. But they seemed absolutely and genuinely and sincerely convinced that it had happened….

“The best word to describe the whole thing is ‘gothic.’”

Defense attorneys were excluded from the program, UNC-TV director Tom Howe explained, because “We’re not really interested in getting into a tit-for-tat about guilt or innocence.”

Dec. 18, 2012

The hands-off-my-guns community is hunkering down, as it did after Columbine, after Tucson, after Aurora, confidently waiting for the storm of outrage to pass.

Just curious: If 20 dead children aren’t enough to start the change process, how many would it take? 100? 500?

But those questions assume that SOME number, however outrageous, would at last open a tiny crack in the massive resistance of the gun lobby.

In reality, no such number exists.

– Lew Powell