Rascals case in brief
In the beginning, in 1989, more than 90 children at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, accused a total of 20 adults with 429 instances of sexual abuse over a three-year period. It may have all begun with one parent’s complaint about punishment given her child.
Among the alleged perpetrators: the sheriff and mayor. But prosecutors would charge only Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris, Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, Robert “Bob” Kelly, Willard Scott Privott, Shelley Stone and Dawn Wilson – the Edenton 7.
Along with sodomy and beatings, allegations included a baby killed with a handgun, a child being hung upside down from a tree and being set on fire and countless other fantastic incidents involving spaceships, hot air balloons, pirate ships and trained sharks.
By the time prosecutors dropped the last charges in 1997, Little Rascals had become North Carolina’s longest and most costly criminal trial. Prosecutors kept defendants jailed in hopes at least one would turn against their supposed co-conspirators. Remarkably, none did. Another shameful record: Five defendants had to wait longer to face their accusers in court than anyone else in North Carolina history.
Between 1991 and 1997, Ofra Bikel produced three extraordinary episodes on the Little Rascals case for the PBS series “Frontline.” Although “Innocence Lost” did not deter prosecutors, it exposed their tactics and fostered nationwide skepticism and dismay.
With each passing year, the absurdity of the Little Rascals charges has become more obvious. But no admission of error has ever come from prosecutors, police, interviewers or parents. This site is devoted to the issues raised by this case.
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Little Rascals Day Care Case
This Facebook page is an offshoot of littlerascalsdaycarecase.org, which addresses the wrongful prosecution of the Edenton Seven and other such victims.
Meanwhile in Edenton....
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Allies for our cause!
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The courts have a long history of capriciously pulling the rug out from under Junior's appeals, but maybe this time....
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Today’s random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
Clemency now rare; is it fear of blowback?
Dec. 8, 2013
“Obviously, there’s a modern trend towards more limited use of executive clemency that extends beyond the current president. I speculate that the increased media scrutiny given to pardons and commutations has made presidents reluctant to exercise clemency…..
“The same trend… may be present in North Carolina as well…. Most of Governor Easley’s pardons were in cases in which DNA evidence exonerated the defendant, while almost all of Governor Perdue’s pardons concerned the racially tainted Wilmington 10 cases…. It is too early to tell how much, or how little, Governor McCrory will exercise executive clemency.”
– From “Do Only Turkeys Get Pardons?” by Jeff Welty at the North Carolina Criminal Law blog (Dec. 5)
The chart above, compiled by Welty, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of Government, depicts poignantly the odds faced by Junior Chandler and others pursuing clemency from recent North Carolina governors.
Since Jim Hunt left office in 2001, pardons have become historically scarce, paralleling the drop-off at the presidential level. But that smattering of clemency, as Welty points out, is most like to occur in December, under cover of the Christmas spirit.
There was good reason children weren’t eager to accuse
Aug. 31, 2012
“Children don’t just come running out of their houses screaming, ‘I’ve been molested!’”
– Assistant attorney general Bill Hart, justifying to the Associated Press (Dec. 31, 1989) why the prosecution’s serial allegations were taking so many months to come to light.
In a case typified by overstatement, Hart’s excuse for delay proved to be a most revealing understatement. Those children resisted mightily and at length before being manipulated into “screaming, ‘I’ve been molested!’”
Why we want to forget the panic ever happened….
July 15, 2016
“When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again. Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget, rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early ’80s – the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities….”
– From “The Devil in The Nursery” by Margaret Talbot in The New York Times (Jan. 7, 2001)
In Guilford County, a DA who paid attention
Nov. 27, 2015
“We cannot bring criminal prosecutions based upon what we think the facts might be, out of our love for animals or in response to public pressure. Down that road lies the wreckage of the Duke lacrosse case, the Little Rascals Day Care case and other prosecutorial misadventures…..”
– District Attorney J. Douglas Henderson, explaining his dismissal of animal cruelty charges against the former director of the Guilford County (N.C.) Animal Shelter
An animal shelter isn’t a day care center, euthanasia isn’t “satanic ritual abuse” and Henderson’s decision hasn’t met with unanimous community support, but how encouraging to see a DA who seems to have learned appropriate lessons from two of the state’s most notorious “prosecutorial misadventures.”