Sept. 7, 2012

Having met with less than overwhelming interest earlier in the week in front of the bustling Charlotte Convention Center, I narrowed my focus.

Thursday I situated my “Exonerate” placard at the entrance to the peripheral and unhurried Crowne Plaza hotel, convention headquarters for the North Carolina Democratic Party, and our message was well received (except for an overly territorial security guard).

Not only did several delegates express support for the Edenton Seven, but also a dozen or so more took cards with the site address. And I was able to bend the ears of reporters from Greensboro, Rocky Mount and the Outer Banks, as well.

Yes, the delegates are mostly ordinary folks, not influential officials – I didn’t see Gov. Perdue – but I’m grateful they will take home a greater awareness of this shameful injustice, still unaddressed, in their own state.

Sept. 28, 2012

As mentioned last week, the preponderance of women among the Edenton Seven was one of many curiosities that apparently failed to burden the prosecution with second thoughts.

Mary DeYoung addresses the issue in “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” (2004):

“By the 1980s… research studies consistently found that child sexual abuse by women was a statistical rarity….To accuse (female day-care workers of ritual abuse), child-savers had the daunting challenge of fashioning folk devils out of quite ordinary women engaged in traditional women’s work, and then persuading the public that evil had lurked unnoticed for so long behind such homely facades…..

“The answer was simple: belief trumps gender. Women who are satanists do what no other women even imagine….”

March 2, 2012

In 1995 John Money, professor emeritus of medical psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, asked:

“What happens to these kids who have been programmed to believe a delusion?…. What on earth are we doing to this generation of children who are carrying the lies for us?”

For those alleged child-victims who testified in day care abuse cases, the urge to forget and to stay silent must be strong indeed. Who wants to believe he was so misused by his own parents, not to mention by therapists and prosecutors? Who wants to summon the courage to look back at the ugly truth and to take it public?

One exception was Kyle Zirpolo, who came forward in 2005 to apologize for his role in the McMartin Pre-school case.

April 6, 2015

A team from the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic recently traveled to Buncombe and Madison counties to collect documents from court clerks’ offices, to interview witnesses and to inspect locations where Junior Chandler allegedly abused children who rode his day-care bus.

Billy Chandler, Junior’s brother, and Clayton Rice, his lifelong friend, guided the Duke investigators (and me) along Junior’s daily route. The narrow, twisting backroads led us to the sites along the French Broad River where prosecutors claimed Junior had repeatedly committed the most bizarre sexual crimes imaginable.

The photo at the right shows a typical vantage. It has always seemed incredible to me that Junior – as described in Mark Montgomery’s amended petition for writ of certiorari – “would drive off his route to a parking area next to the French Broad River, strip the clothes off the toddlers, troop the naked children down to the river, put them on a rowboat, proceed to insert various objects into their anuses and vaginas, bring them back to the bus, put their clothes back on and deliver them home.”

Actually visiting and walking around the supposed crime scenes, which are completely open to neighbors and passersby, only reinforces my impression: The allegations against Junior are simply inconceivable.

So where do things stand as Junior Chandler approaches his 29th year in prison? Clinic co-director Theresa Newman provided this cautious update: “The Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic has spent the past few months studying the file passed to them by previous post-conviction counsel, researching the developments in the relevant medical and psychological science since the mid-1980s, and otherwise trying to master this complicated and complex case. We are now moving into the next phase of our typical investigation….”

The title of Newman’s illuminating TEDx talk at Elon University couldn’t be more apt: “Waiting is a Beast.”