July 15, 2014

“I realize I’m a little flip when I say 80 percent of the evidence is trash, but it is.

“I thought sooner or later some editorialist was going to write, ‘That sorry judge should have done something.’ And yet if I stopped it, it would have been a problem in an appeal….”

– Judge Marsh McLelland, in an interview published April 1, 1992, in the Greensboro News & Record, shortly after the jury began deliberations in the trial of Bob Kelly

Given that McLelland had been overseeing the Kelly case for more than 17 months – and still had Dawn Wilson’s trial ahead of him – I suppose he deserved to grumble a bit about the tedium.

But what an odd comment about wanting to avoid “a problem in an appeal” – did he believe only the defense was responsible for producing “trash” evidence?

May 30, 2015

Ofra Bikel’s eight hours of “Innocence Lost” were surely powerful, but the narrowness of PBS’s audience limited their impact. What if the Little Rascals Day Care case had also inspired a major theatrical release? What if several million moviegoers had watched the dramatic nobody-dunnit even as the real-life Edenton Seven were languishing in jail or standing  trial?

For a brief moment, that seemed possible.

Kurt Luedtke, screenwriter for the ’80s hits “Out of Africa” and “Absence of Malice,” was outraged after seeing the initial “Innocence Lost” in 1991. “You can’t hold people that long without presenting the evidence,” he told the Charlotte Observer.
Now retired and living in Michigan, Luedtke recalls his “indignation mounting and (thinking) I had to do something about the preposterousness of what was going on….”

Alas, his idea apparently made it no further than a preliminary meeting in New York with Bikel and “Frontline” founder David Fanning: “I can’t remember why we didn’t go forward; maybe I had another job.”

June 11, 2015

“In (the upcoming movie) Regression, Ethan Hawke plays a detective investigating accusations by a woman against her father. There’s a twist: The father has admitted wrongdoing, though he has no recollection of what happened – and a psychologist is summoned to help him recover his memories….

“The trailer is opaque in its rendering of what crime the father may have committed, but it’s probably meant to echo the Satanic witch hunts that gripped parts of America in the 1980s and early ’90s….  The daughter’s haunting memories include ‘chanting,’ ‘robes’ and a ‘black mask’….

“So it’ll be interesting to see (director Alejandro) Amenábar’s take in Regression: Does he present the case as a real, Satanic experience that actually occurs within the world of the story, or will the film be a larger commentary on the horrific fallout of unfounded hysteria?

“Here’s hoping it’s the latter…. We’ll find out when Regression opens in August.”

– From “Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson Battle Satan (Maybe) in the Trailer for Regression”
by Aisha Harris at Slate (June 10)

Also arriving in August – but much less ambiguously: “We Believe The Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s” by Richard Beck. According to a starred review in Publishers Weekly, “Beck marshals extensive research into an absorbing dissection of a panic whose tremors still affect us today.”

Feb. 8, 2016

“Bob Orr, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice, says it’s time for a comprehensive outside review of the state agency that oversees lawyers.

“Orr… is part of a committee looking at legal professionalism as part of Chief Justice Mark Martin’s recently launched review of the state justice system….

“The call for evaluation comes amid questions about the bar’s aggressive prosecution of three defense attorneys who have worked on Racial Justice Act (text cache) and innocence inquiry cases….”

– From “Former NC Supreme Court justice calls for review of state bar” by Anne Blythe in the News & Observer (Feb. 6)  (text cache)

Right on, Justice Orr. And thanks to the N&O for its continuing attention to the flagrant self-dealing of the Prosecutors Club, most recently this account (text cache) by Joseph Neff contrasting the bar’s two sets of ethical standards:

“For most of 2015, the North Carolina State Bar vigorously and publicly pressed ethics charges against two anti-death penalty lawyers for what were eventually judged to be unimportant inaccuracies in two sworn affidavits.

“During the same time, the bar privately dismissed complaints that three prominent prosecutors – one running for attorney general, another now a Superior Court judge – used a false affidavit in a racially divisive case that has roiled Winston-Salem for more than a decade….”

I’ve even seen it suggested that the situation demands a separate panel specializing in prosecutorial misconduct (text cache).