July 8, 2013

“As the parents made their case to the (North Carolina Parole Commission), prosecutors and defense attorneys continued sparring over whether the state had reneged on the plea bargain by trying to block (Betsy) Kelly’s parole.

“Kelly’s attorney, Joe Cheshire V, says prosecutor William Hart promised not to contest her parole if she agreed to the no-contest plea. Hart says the state never made such a pledge.

“Hart and assistant prosecutor Nancy Lamb attended the hearing to support the parents. They say it would be inappropriate for Kelly to be released, because she continues to publicly proclaim her innocence.

“ ‘The parents know she is guilty,’ Lamb told reporters before the hearing. ‘They know what their children have gone through.’

“Cheshire, continuing to maintain his client’s innocence, said Hart should have tried Kelly in court if he wanted to show she was guilty.

“ ‘He was afraid to do that,’ Cheshire said. ‘And now he’s running around saying that since she won’t admit her guilt, she should not get paroled. I think that’s pretty pathetic.’ ”

– From “Parents oppose parole for Little Rascals operator” in the News & Observer (April 12, 1994)

Pandering, bullying, grandstanding, double-crossing – in thwarting Betsy Kelly’s parole, the Little Rascals prosecutors scored a grand slam of misfeasance.

Here’s what Joe Cheshire recalls about that brutal day:

“Simply taking that plea was distasteful to me, but when the awesome power of government meshes with the awesome power of the judiciary and neither want to find the truth, but instead to consummate a decided outcome, the individual gets ground up in the process.

“Betsy was desperate to come home and did not trust anyone, nor should she have.  I am not a fool; I would not have agreed to such a plea if it did not insure her freedom.  The only (apparent) risk was the Parole Board.  The prosecutor had agreed to not oppose her parole, but then he reneged.  He knew that our only alternative was to move that the plea be set aside and that we would not be in a position to do that.

“Yes, in retrospect I should not have trusted him….  But he was not willing to put it in writing, and (insisting on that) would have ended the negotiations….”

Little Rascals prosecutors seemed perversely unable to let any defendant go home without administering a final cheap shot. When Scott Privott was released under a no-contest plea deal in 1994, they added a last-minute stipulation that he undergo psychiatric evaluation as part of his five-year probation.

“I saw them weekly for about two months,” Privott recalls, “and then they reported that I was normal. My probation officer told me (Bill) Hart was pissed… and that was that.”

Dec. 21, 2013

As noted here and here, News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers was among the too-few voices of skepticism about the Little Rascals case. Today Rogers is mostly retired, but he continues to lament the state’s failure to take responsibility for its willful prosecution of seven innocent defendants:

“North Carolina has a sad reputation for misguided justice. There is no better example than the plight of the Edenton Seven. The government destroyed lives and families in its fevered rush to find wrong where there was none.

“It takes political courage to right painful and embarrassing wrongs from 25 years ago. The case of the Edenton Seven offers those who would claim the mantle of leadership in our state an opportunity to demonstrate that they are the kind of people we need in Raleigh.

“Silence in the face of such obvious injustice is cowardice.”

March 4, 2013

“What did Mark Everson, Dr. (Jean C.) Smith, Dr. (Desmond K.) Runyan, Dr. (Doren D.) Fredrickson… all say about behaviors of children who are sexually abused?”

 – From Nancy Lamb’s closing argument in the trial of Bob Kelly (March 23, 1992)

Although Lamb was understandably pleased with her parade of expert witnesses, their testimony brought only discredit to themselves, to their professions and to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially its School of Medicine.

The prosecution called on psychologist Mark “Where there’s smoke….” Everson to explain away the child-witnesses’ wild inconsistencies and on pediatricians Smith, Runyan and Fredrickson to serve as “educators of the jury” about the case’s dubious physical evidence. (As detailed in this article in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, the pediatricians overreached but at least testified with less enthusiasm and more caution than Everson.)

One Chapel Hill faculty member, however, wasn’t fooled by the funhouse mirrors. I’ll be writing about sociologist Anthony Oberschall in Wednesday’s post.

Nov. 7, 2012

“Mass hysteria always makes perfect sense when we are trapped in it. It can take decades – or even longer – before the crazed irrationality of a particular episode shows itself for what it was.”

– From “When Mass Hysteria Convicted 5 Teenagers” in The New York Times (October 27)

Thanks to a new documentary by Ken Burns, the Central Park Five – all convicted of a widely publicized 1989 rape and beating – will soon return to the spotlight. According to the Times,
Burns depicts “the forces that led citizens, politicians, the media and the criminal justice system to brush past yawning gaps in the evidence in the case.”

Beyond a shared year on the timeline of wrongful prosecutions, these urban teenagers, black and Hispanic, seem to have borne few similarities to the Edenton Seven. But I could never read  the  words “yawning gaps in evidence” without thinking of a Little Rascals prosecution built almost entirely on the resolutely manipulated, deceitfully paraphrased testimony of children.