April 23, 2012

In 2007, W. Joseph Wyatt, writing in the professional journal The Behavior Analyst Today, looked back at the Little Rascals case:

“Prosecutors appeared to have little appreciation for the possibility, or likelihood, that they were pursuing innocent people. Prosecutorial fervor for the case evidently persisted long after it had become clear that the case had taken a series of wrong turns.

“Despite the disastrous results, one of the prosecutors continues to hold herself out as an expert. As recently as November, 2006, Nancy Lamb, still working as an assistant district attorney, was co-presenter of a training program for professionals titled ‘The Necessary Components of a Legally Defensible Child Sex Abuse Investigation.’ ”

If for no other reason, the Little Rascals case demands continued public attention as long as Nancy Lamb remains at large, presenting her cruelty and deviousness as a model for future prosecutions.

Update: At a 2010 workshop for the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, “Nancy Lamb… presented on how to defend the forensic interview in the courtroom.”

Feb. 12, 2017

“One day after Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb pardoned him for a 1996 armed robbery he did not commit, [Keith] Cooper, 49, said he was grateful to the new governor for doing something his predecessor, Vice President Mike Pence, long had refused to do….

“Cooper spent nearly a decade of a 40-year sentence behind bars before he was released in 2006. Nearly three years ago, after the victims who had identified him as the shooter recanted and DNA evidence pointed to another man, the Indiana Parole Board unanimously recommended Cooper be pardoned. His request, though, sat unsigned on Pence’s desk….

“In response to a request for comment, the vice president’s spokesman did not address the Cooper pardon but said Pence ‘is proud of his record’ as Indiana’s governor.”

– From “Wrongly accused of armed robbery, he says Pence ‘abandoned me‘ ” by Christy Gutowski in the Chicago Tribune (Feb. 11)

It wasn’t easy, but Pence made North Carolina’s former governor seem absolutely eager to rectify a wrongful prosecution.

May 4, 2018

“Only a pedophile would attempt to justify other pedophiles. If you didn’t follow the case in the news at the time or attend the trial,
how do you know they’re innocent? The fact is you don’t and are just saying they are to brush the incident under the rug.
“You should be investigated yourself.”

May 23, 2014

“….The widespread belief that sexual abuse of children is endemic to society is a relatively new notion. In fact, it can be traced to a particular moment in history: April 17, 1971.

“On that day the New York Radical Feminists, a group that at its height boasted no more than 400 members, held a groundbreaking conference on rape. For two days, women held forth on a subject long considered taboo…. A speech given by Florence Rush (was) the highlight of the event.

“Rush was an unlikely star for such a gathering. A middle-aged social worker, who had never been raped, she outlined statistical studies suggesting that sexual abuse of children, including incest, was a more widespread problem than was generally recognized….

“Before Rush’s speech, feminists had given little thought to incest. Author Andrea Dworkin recalled that before the conference ‘we never had any idea how common it was.’ In the decades following Rush’s talk, feminists more than made up for their earlier unawareness, competing with each other in elevating the number of victims….

“Believe the women. Believe the children. These refrains became the mantra of the incest movement. While the women’s movement would be enormously successful in turning sexual abuse – including incest – into a major public issue, women, ironically, would become the chief victims of the hysteria it generated.

“The obsession with this supposedly rampant sexual abuse played out in two ways: ‘Believe the women’ became the repressed memory hysteria. ‘Believe the children’ turned into the day-care hysteria….”

– From “Sex, Lies, and Audiotapes” by Rael Jean Isaac in the Women’s Quarterly (summer 2001) text cache

The road to the moral panic that would sweep up innocent day-care providers from North Carolina to New Zealand was a long one. If Florence Rush’s 1971 speech was one milestone early on, then perhaps the still-contentious 1988 conference of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation could be seen as the beginning of the end – although the allegations against the Edenton Seven weren’t yet even a gleam in a therapist’s eye….