May 5, 2015

“Its members are, it’s claimed, drawn mainly from a school and church in Hampstead (a North London suburb). They are said to wear shoes made of baby skin, to dance with the skulls of dead babies and to sexually abuse young children. But the (satanic ritual) cult doesn’t exist. The claims are, according to a High Court Judge, ‘baseless’ and those who have sought to perpetrate them are ‘evil’….

“Why, after a police inquiry and a family court judgment which unequivocally rubbished the notion of satanic abuse in Hampstead, are the allegations still proliferating on the Internet and being spread all over the world? We hear from the supposed cult members who have had their personal details and photographs published online and received death threats. And we ask about the welfare of the two children at the centre of it all who were coerced into fabricating the fantastical story….”

– From “The Satanic Cult That Wasn’t” by Melanie Abbott on BBC Radio (April 23)

This half hour of BBC coverage skillfully demolishes every iota of the Hampstead claims, but of course facts aren’t what engage the eagerly gullible. Since video of the 8- and 9-year-old siblings telling their concocted horror stories was uploaded onto YouTube, it has been watched more than 4 million times.

April 5, 2016

At a time when the Little Rascals claims were exposing widespread gullibility, a gritty band of doubters – e.g., Raymond Lawrence, Glenn Lancaster, Jane Duffield, Doug Wiik, Susan Corbett and Dee Swain – was desperately working to keep the defendants from being crushed by public opinion and prosecutorial coercion.

As treasurer for the Committee to Support the Edenton Seven, Swain distributed donations to defendants, facilitated the lowering of Scott Privott’s exorbitant bond and wrote an epic four-page (single-spaced!) letter educating the attorney general’s office on the errors of its ways.

How was it that a propane dealer in Washington, N.C., could see through the fog that engulfed so many professionals?

“It was obvious to me right away that it was hysteria,” he says. “I didn’t get involved until after (Bob Kelly’s) conviction – I had thought surely the jury would see through it….

“I’ve always been a skeptical person, someone who stands outside the box…. Most people thought I had lost my damn mind, defending ‘child molesters’…. I got anonymous phone calls….”

Swain is surprisingly generous to those who bought into the “satanic ritual abuse” stories elicited by prosecution therapists: “There aren’t any villains. They all acted in good faith. They were on a mission. They were going to be heroes….. You could see it all in ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ (by Charles Mackay, 1841).”

And why does he think none have stepped forward a quarter century later to recant? “What they did was too terrible to admit to themselves.”

Sept. 23, 2013

There’s a bit of an update out of Raleigh on Junior Chandler’s prospects for clemency.

Billy Chandler, Junior’s brother, received this email last week from Pat Hansen in the Governor’s Clemency Office:

“Attorney Mark Montgomery filed a commutation request with this office at the end of Governor Perdue’s term in office.  However, due to the volume of requests received, the request was not ‘officially reopened.’  Currently, we are working on all of the cases held over from the Perdue Administration.  Unfortunately, I cannot tell you when your brother’s case will be reviewed.”

In North Carolina the governor’s clemency power covers both pardons and commutations. Here’s the stated distinction:

“Commutation – whereby an individual presently incarcerated and serving an active sentence has their sentence commuted or reduced by any number of years, months, or days, or to make parole eligible, or to time served which would release the individual immediately.

“Pardon – may be granted to those individuals who have maintained a good reputation in their community, following the completion of their sentence for a criminal offense.  Ordinarily, an applicant must wait to apply until at least five years have elapsed since the applicant was released from State supervision (including probation or parole).  A Pardon is merely an official statement attached to the criminal record that states that the State of North Carolina has pardoned the crime. A Pardon does not expunge or erase a criminal record….”

As much as the facts of Junior’s case call for a pardon, a commutation seems not quite as steep a challenge. However great “the volume of requests received,” Junior Chandler’s surely deserves to be at the top of the stack.

Jan. 4, 2017

“[Richard Beck’s ‘Believe the Children’] is perhaps most poignant on the subject of the damage to the young people who acted as witnesses. ‘Children as young as three and almost never older than nine or ten,’ Beck writes, ‘children who previously understood their time in day care as essentially normal, whether happy or not, had their lives reorganized around the idea that they were deeply and irrevocably traumatized.’ ”

– From “Our Panics, Ourselves” by Rebecca Onion in Boston Review (Sept. 22, 2015)