Nov. 11, 2011

“The first case to raise alarms about predators in nursery schools was that involving the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California…. In 1983, a woman named Judy Jones charged that 25-year-old Ray Buckey, a teacher and grandson of the school’s founder, had sodomized her two-year-old son.

“(Jones) was an alcoholic and subsequently diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

“After her charge against Buckey (who was acquitted in 1990 along with his mother and school owner Peggy McMartin Buckey), she went on to make the same allegations against a member of the U.S. Marine Corps who had, she said, sexually assaulted her dog.”

– From “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness and Other Terrors of Our Times” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (2003)

 When Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the judges cited her series on unjustified child-abuse prosecutions.

Dec. 28, 2016

“The problem of juror pressure on a dissenting juror has long been known by defense attorneys and prosecutors.

“In a National Center for State Courts project on hung juries, researchers surveyed 367 unanimous decisions…. In nearly 40 percent of the cases at least one juror [disagreed] but went along with the majority and made the verdict unanimous….

“Research shows that dissenting jurors often go along not because they are convinced about points of evidence but because they bow to ‘normative pressure’: A lone holdout is under relentless and harsh pressure from other jurors to knuckle under. The pressure from the push for speed, the verbal battering and the threat of ostracism is virtually impossible to resist.

“The problem is made worse [in cases] when it’s impossible for a dissenting juror to say with absolute certainty whether the position of the majority is the right one and when the verdict could do horrible legal damage….”

– From “Why Zimmerman Juror B29 Believed in His Guilt But Still Voted to Acquit” by Earl Ofari Hutchinson on the Huffington Post (July 28, 2013)

Bob Kelly’s jury serves as a sad example of the contaminated chemistry of verdict making.

Nov. 9, 2012

“Did I recognize that child sex abuse existed and was a serious problem? reporters would ask. A strange question, that. The discussion of no other crime would require such a disclaimer. Journalists who have written about false murder charges are seldom asked to provide reassurance that they know murder is a bad thing, and it really happens.”

– From “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness and Other Terrors of Our Times” by Dorothy Rabinowitz  (2003)

March 15, 2014

“In an interview with Entertainment Weekly (True Detective creator Nic) Pizzolato responded to a question about the inspiration for the show: ‘You can Google “Satanism” “preschool” and “Louisiana” and you’ll be surprised at what you get.’

“This is clearly a reference to a 2005 child abuse prosecution in Ponchataoula, Louisiana, that generated lurid international headlines about ritualistic Satan worship inside a church, complete with black robes, animal blood, orgies, and pentagrams.

“This has since led various media sources to report breathlessly on the ‘true story’ behind True Detective. The problem is that this ‘true story’ turns out to be completely false, at least in regard to all the details regarding Satanic ritual abuse.

“These were apparently part of a classic atrocity story, invented by the defendants to garner sympathy from jurors – the idea being that the defendants were victims of an unspeakably evil church-based mind control cult, rather than merely being banally evil and not very interesting child molesters.

“What sort of moral responsibility do artists have not to exploit, and thereby perhaps propagate, moral panics? The aesthetic power of The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will has not absolved their creators for choosing to exploit racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

“Our shameful history of panics and persecutions over the imaginary satanic ritual abuse of children should have been treated by artists as talented as the makers of True Detectiveas a cautionary tale, rather than as an opportunity for further invidious myth-making.”

– From “True Detective’s dangerous lies about satanic ritual abuse” by Paul Campos at The Week (March 12)

I’m surprised to find myself cutting the just-concluded HBO series a bit more slack than Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado. But True Detective’s potential for doing harm in 2014 seems minimal compared with the hysterically alarmist Do You Know the Muffin Man? which aired on Lifetime while arrests were still being made in the Little Rascals case.