March 21, 2015

I spent several hours Friday at Duke University Law School listening to experts detail “Evolving Trends in Forensic Science.”

Fascinating. Topics ranged from the effects of sleep deprivation on jurors’ decision-making to the use of cell tower evidence to determine suspect location. But I was wedged into an auditorium otherwise full of lawyers to hear pediatrician Cynthia Brown and defense attorneys Mark Montgomery and Lisa Miles outline the latest standards for medical exams in cases of suspected child abuse. The good news – if you’re being wrongfully prosecuted in 2015 – is that those standards have become dramatically more specific and sophisticated.

If, however, you were wrongfully prosecuted in 1987, then the fruits of that scientific progress remain maddeningly out of reach.  Waiting for me when I returned home Friday was a letter from Junior Chandler:

“April 15 will be 28 yrs – nearly half my life, all because of lies when I did no crime. It’s a shame & disgrace to the whole N.C. justice system, not only to do this but never to be willing to say they were wrong….”

Oct. 22, 2015

North Carolina isn’t the only state that has failed to mitigate – however little and late – the injustices it inflicted during the “satanic ritual abuse” era.

In Massachusetts, the Fells Acres Day Care case of 1984 resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of Violet, Gerald and Cheryl Amirault. Even more than in other such cases, the prosecution was gratuitously and unceasingly hateful. In 2002, at the urging of District Attorney Martha Coakley, Acting Gov. Jane Swift refused to sign the parole board’s unanimous recommendation of commutation. (At least voters managed not to rewardCoakley, with either a Senate seat or the governorship.)

In 2004, Gerald became the last of the three Amiraults to be released, but his parole carried numerous restrictions.

Barbara Anderson, a longtime advocate, provides this update:

“Gerald’s parole conditions became more burdensome over the years as real sex crimes were committed in the commonwealth: polygraph exams; exclusionary zones (towns he isn’t allowed to enter); a ban on leaving the state without a permit that must be voted on each time by the parole board (and then for no more than two weeks). For years his monthly GPS surveillance fee was $380; this has been dropped to $80 for parole supervision.

“The harshest provision seems to be the ankle bracelet, which keeps him from wearing shorts in the summer or ski boots in the winter, from swimming at the beach with his grandchildren. He has to keep a log of everywhere he goes outside his house.”

During last year’s gubernatorial campaign, Republican candidate Charlie Baker told Anderson that if elected he would address Amirault’s plight. Baker narrowly defeated Coakley, but so far he hasn’t followed through.

Anderson again calls on Baker “to remove the bracelet from Gerald’s ankle, to drop his curfew, to allow him to get a job and to start helping his wife earn money to pay the mortgage acquired during his defense.

“Just call the Sex Offender Board and ask to have him re-classified from Level 3 to Level 1 to ease his restrictions. Or ask them to vote to take him off parole…. Otherwise he’ll be suffering unfair indignities until 2024.

“Clearly there is no way for Massachusetts to make up for 30 years of injustice. ‘Pardon’ is the wrong word, since the Amiraults did nothing wrong, but it may be the only remedy since governments don’t usually do ‘apology.’ “

If Gov. Baker should belatedly rouse himself to unshackle Gerald Amirault, might his fellow Republican governor in North Carolina – or that governor’s would-be successor – take notice? The Edenton Seven may not suffer the continued punishment still visited on Amirault, but their lives too were forever and indelibly damaged by the state.

March 28, 2016

“I was thinking about recent public panics and started listing a few of them in my mind. This is just off the top of my head:

• Crack babies
• Super predators
• Lehmann/AIG/Countrywide etc.
• Mad cow
• Deepwater Horizon
• Daycare child molesters
• Ebola
• ISIS/Syrian refugees

“I’m not saying that none of these were justified. Big oil spills are no joke. Ebola was certainly a big deal in Africa. The financial collapse of 2008 wasn’t mere panic.

“And yet, generally speaking it seems as if public panics are either completely unjustified or else wildly overwrought. Am I missing any recent examples where there was a huge panic and it turned out to be wholly justified? HIV would have been justified in the early ’80s, but of course we famously didn’t panic over that — other than to worry about getting AIDS from toilet seats. Help me out here….”

– From “Do We Panic Too Much? (Spoiler: Yes We Do)” by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones (March 24)

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)