July 7, 2019

For those seeking to understand the Little Rascals Day Care case one particularly intriguing question remains: How do the former child-witnesses, now well into their 30s, look back at their central role?

Do they believe today that their testimony was accurate? Or have they come to realize that those bizarre sexual accusations – as well as the accounts of sharks, spaceships and burning babies – were products of sheer fantasy? And that they had been relentlessly manipulated by the prosecution’s therapists?

Last month I sent letters to the Little Rascals witnesses in hopes that they would be ready to talk about their experiences. Here’s what I said:

“I apologize if this letter is unwelcome. For the past eight years I have been researching the Little Rascals Day Care case. I’m writing you because as a child you were a witness for the prosecution in Bob Kelly’s trial in 1991-92. The court records include a passage describing your testimony.

“I blog at littlerascalsdaycarecase.org, and I have worked with Duke Law School to build an archive on the case. My aim is to persuade the State of North Carolina to issue the Edenton Seven a statement of innocence similar to the one given the defendants in the Duke lacrosse case.

“I don’t know how you look back at your involvement in the case, and you are certainly under no obligation to tell me. But if you might be willing to share your recollections – however they might agree or conflict with your testimony – please contact me….”

In the decades since the “satanic ritual abuse” day care prosecutions few child-witnesses have chosen to step forward. One who did so – anonymously – looked back with sadness at the McMartin case: “It is my belief, after years of treatment centers and therapy, that nothing physical happened to me…. Mentally, well, that’s a different story. How about paying attention to the kids that were scarred from this therapy? Do you think that just because there was most likely no physical abuse that we didn’t still suffer?”

After receiving no responses to my letter, I asked Lee Coleman what he would advise those still-silent Little Rascals child-witnesses. Dr. Coleman, a Berkeley, Calif., psychiatrist, has testified in some 800 child sex-abuse cases, of which perhaps 100 involved day-care or preschool allegations. In this YouTube presentation he analyzes the McMartin Preschool case.

He replied to my request with this open letter (condensed) to the Little Rascals child-witnesses:

First, it is now recognized by all parties – prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, academic students of memory and suggestibility in young children being interviewed for possible sexual abuse – that the methods used in Little Rascals had serious potential to influence memory, often creating a mental picture that to the child is indistinguishable from an actual memory of actual events.

This brings us to the very heart of my message to you, as you seriously consider whether justice may be served by your coming forth with what you remember of how you were interviewed and who you spoke to prior to the trial. Remember, it is not your memories of what did or didn’t happen at the school that is important, but your memories of how you were interviewed, and of who you spoke with during the time before the trial. This is the crucial time, and these are the crucial events, that any fair decision about the meaning of what you said during the trial can be best judged.

What I cannot stress enough is that if you testified to things that were not true, that was through no fault of yours, because such false testimony would be the fault of poor and suggestive interview methods, therefore neither lies, nor any indication of your sincerity as a child. If a child says things that he or she believes are true, because interview methods cause the child to accept ideas coming from interviewers rather than the child’s actual memory, then the fault lies with the interviewers and not the child.

To blame the child for misdeeds of poorly trained interviewers is, in my opinion, a kind of child abuse. I have testified about these issues hundreds of times, and most recently spoken about these issues as part of my continuing effort to bring understanding to our nation’s system of bringing justice to the area of sexual abuse of children. Such abuse, when it happens, calls for punishment of perpetrators and support of victims. When unprofessional conduct by prosecutors and their assistants causes children to be victims of suggestions that create false memories, this also calls for a better response from our society.

I thank you for taking the time to reconsider that time in your life and reconsider whether you might bring the best resolution to the efforts of Mr. Powell and others seeking justice in the Little Rascals Day Care case.

Sincerely,
Lee Coleman, MD

Jan. 14, 2016

“Researchers announced this week they have confirmed the plot (in Salem, Mass.) where 19 people accused of witchcraft were hanged in a wave of hysteria that swept this seaside city in 1692.

“Salem plans to mark the ignominious spot, Mayor Kimberley Driscoll said: ‘This is part of our history, and this is an opportunity for us to be honest about what took place.’

“Neither of two previous plans for a memorial there (in 1892 and 1936) went anywhere. Emerson ‘Tad’ Baker, a Salem State University professor who helped pinpoint the location, said the desire by some to forget the witch trials was probably to blame.

– From “Researchers pinpoint site of Salem witch hangings” by Laura Crimaldi in the Boston Globe (Jan. 13)

In Edenton, the “desire by some to forget” still dominates, but should it ever weaken…..

Jan. 17, 2015

Q: Do you have a better understanding of why people act the way they do in certain situations?

A:   ….Whenever the safety of children is perceived to be in question, we run the risk of responding with emotion rather than reason. Certainly in Salem (where three of her ancestors were accused witches) that was the case. And look at the so-called “satanic ritual abuse” pre-school phenomenon in the early 1980s, which is now seen to have been a tremendous miscarriage of justice. Calls for moderation are dismissed with the assertion that the children have to come first — which, of course, they should.

“But it’s also tempting to read these experiences as expressive of a deeper anxiety about childrearing in an uncertain world, with no guarantees of a good outcome. I feel that it comes from a sense of powerlessness that can’t be expressed elsewhere….”

– From an interview with Katherine Howe, author of “Conversion,” a novel based on a mysterious 2012 outbreak of tics and seizures among teenage girls in upstate New York, in the Daily News of Batavia, New York (Aug. 23, 2014)

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.