Jan. 29, 2016

“The release last month of ‘Making a Murderer’ capped a year in which popular culture’s portrayal of the criminal justice system seems to have shifted. Out with the old tropes about truth-seeking investigators and tidy resolutions; in with the disquieting, dysfunctional reality of many courtrooms and police stations….

“Yes, post-conviction DNA testing and the work of Innocence Projects around the country have exonerated more than 1,700 defendants. Those cases heighten awareness of potential errors and demonstrate that wrongful convictions happen. But Americans shouldn’t expect certainty about innocence. Sometimes the focus on finding new evidence to exonerate distracts from the question of whether the old evidence proved guilt….

Read more here. Cached here.

“Fewer than 70,000 federal felonies are prosecuted each year, while roughly 2.5 million felonies proceed through the state courts. Many state cases involve near-simultaneous investigation and prosecution. One rarely finds out ‘what really happened.’

“The prosecutor in Avery’s trial argued in his closing statement that ‘reasonable doubts are for innocent people.’ They are not. And procedural protections like access to defense counsel and freedom from coerced interrogations extend to both the innocent and the guilty. The real contribution of these documentaries is not to ask ‘whodunit’ but to reveal what was done to defendants….

“The United States criminal justice system needs fewer guilt-assuming interrogation tactics, more disclosure of potentially exculpatory information to the defense, expanded oversight units within prosecutors’ offices to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and fuller appellate scrutiny of convictions.

“The moment is ripe for reform, culturally and politically….”

– From by “ ‘Making a Murderer’ Is About Justice, Not Truth” by Lisa Kern Griffin, Duke Law professor and former federal prosecutor, in the New York Times (Jan. 12)

Will this heightened skepticism about the nation’s justice system ever trickle down to exonerate the Edenton Seven and free Junior Chandler?

Oct. 24, 2014

“As Middlesex County (Mass.) district attorney, (Martha) Coakley defended the convictions of Fells Acres day-care center operator Violet Amirault and her two children, Gerald Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave. The Amiraults are now widely recognized as victims of the mass national hysteria in the 1980s over supposed child sexual abuse in day care centers….

“In 2000, as the case against the Amiraults had all but collapsed, Coakley opposed the 5-0 decision by the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Gerald Amirault’s sentence. To this day, Gerald lives with an ankle bracelet and strict probationary conditions, despite a growing number of people who recognize not only that he committed no crime, but that no crime was committed….”

– From “When Prosecutors Seek Higher Office, Questions Often Remain” by defense attorney Harvey Silverglate at Forbes (Oct. 22)

“Coakley… refuses to acknowledge what any rational person should know, that once again (after the Salem witch trials) Massachusetts had indulged in irrational hysteria. Just what we need, a governor who can’t admit she made a mistake….”

– From “Struggling to find the truth behind all the political rhetoric” by Barbara Anderson  in the Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Mass. (Oct. 19)

At the same time voters in Massachusetts will be be deciding whether to elect Martha Coakley governor, those in the First Judicial District of North Carolina will be deciding whether to elect fellow “satanic ritual abuse” prosecutor Nancy Lamb district attorney. Lamb may share with Coakley not only the inability to “admit she made a mistake,” but also the appetite for higher office.

May 26, 2016

“I would like to see more cooperation between prosecutors and defense attorneys in their efforts to achieve justice, particularly when there is a credible post-conviction claim of innocence.  The overloaded, underfunded, and often inefficient adversarial system doesn’t have to be the approach when common sense and a shared interest in justice can more quickly address injustices for the convicted and victims of crime.

“Prosecutorial conviction integrity units around the country have made that clear, but the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys seems to be encouraging less cooperation, not more.”

– Christine Mumma, quoted by the North Carolina Advocates for Justice

Mumma, of course, has famously endured the wrath of prosecutors whose autocracy she challenged.

You can like the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys on Facebook.

Or not.

Jan. 28, 2013

Manhattan Beach, California; Malden, Massachusetts; Christchurch, New Zealand; Maplewood, New Jersey; Sao Paulo, Brazil…. For more than a decade, unfounded allegations of day-care ritual abuse were breaking out all over the planet.

But for sheer cultural anomaly it’s hard to match the emergence of such a case in historic and pristine Edenton, North Carolina, not unreasonably billed as “the South’s Prettiest Small Town.”

Edenton had made lots of headlines before Little Rascals, but almost none since the 1700s.

Among the town’s prominent residents: Joseph Hewes, signer of the Declaration of Independence; Hugh Williamson, signer of the Constitution; James Iredell, George Washington’s youngest appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Penelope Barker hosted the Edenton Tea Party to protest British taxes (that’s her waterfront house in the opening scene of “Innocence Lost”).

Harriet Jacobs, author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” was a native.

You won’t find a Walmart in Edenton (population 5,000 and slowly shrinking), but its trove of civic treasures includes a 1925 moviehouse, a 1939 baseball park and a 1767 courthouse (above right), the state’s oldest.

So why Edenton of all places? How did this charming, 300-year-old hamlet happen to offer all the essential ingredients for a world-class ritual-abuse panic? I wish I knew (and I wish Edenton did too).