June 19, 2013

The Little Rascals parents insisted their children had “disclosed” mostly on their own, rather than a result of persistent interrogation. But this live interview, in the giddy moments after Bob Kelly’s convictions (April 22, 1992), suggests a different pattern:

CNN: How did you find out this happened? You were apparently the first parents to realize something was terribly wrong.

Mark Stever: Kyle, our son, told us in his own way, just different things, like ‘Mr. Bob doesn’t do it anymore. He does it to the other children.’

Audrey Stever: We knew he had a secret, and we knew it happened at nap time, but he couldn’t tell us what it was, and to escape talking about it he would say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t do it anymore, Mommy.’

CNN: And how did you finally bring it out of him exactly what he said had been happening?

Audrey Stever: Well, I approached a friend (Brenda Toppin) who was the investigating officer in the case… and things kind of went from there.

May 31, 2016

“A consensus is building around the need to seriously rethink the role of the prosecutor in the administration of justice. Power dynamics are unbalanced, sentencing guidelines are outdated, and old-fashioned human biases persist. And prosecutors – singularly independent agents in a justice system roiling in turmoil – have been facing growing criticism and public distrust for some time, and that disapproval is about to hit a tipping point.

“It’s time to curtail the power long held by these officers of the court as they promote justice, ensure fairness, and enhance public safety.”

– From “Are Prosecutors the Key to Justice Reform?” by Juleyka Lantigua-Williams in the Atlantic (May 18)

Is the North Carolina Bar ready to take the first step toward holding prosecutors accountable?

March 17, 2016

The award-winning documentary “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” was released in 2006, but of course Hunt’s world-famous exoneration only freed him to face new trials on the outside – most recently divorce and cancer.

Winston-Salem police Wednesday attributed his death to suicide by gunshot.

Amazingly, Darryl Hunt overcame the unspeakable damage done by 19 years of wrongful imprisonment to build a life of righteous achievement. I’m choosing to remember his journey, not its end.

Jan. 8, 2018

“Because [this movement] was about sex and children, hysteria was not far behind. Before long, an industry of feminist and Christian therapists and self-help writers were claiming that virtually every behavioral quirk or emotional trouble could be traced to sexual abuse, even if – especially if – the alleged victim did not remember it. ‘If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,’ wrote poet Ellen Bass and journalist Laura Davis in their massive bestseller The Courage to Heal  (1988). The symptom checklists in it and similar books include everything from arthritis to feeling ugly. Bass’s book launched a battery of unscientific ‘therapeutic’ and forensic interviewing techniques to extract false and ‘recovered’ memories of sexual depredation. …

“A new crusade marched under the banner ‘Believe the Children.’ With the sketchiest of evidence or none at all, child protective agencies removed kids from their parents. Credulous juries sent day-care workers to prison on charges of ‘satanic ritual abuse.’ Adults denounced their aging parents, guilty of nothing more than imperfect love, as sadistic rapists. It took only one accusation to ruin a person’s life. Bus drivers, babysitters, divorcing fathers, and boyfriends at the wrong end of a grudge lost jobs, families, and reputations with one accusation, one newspaper item. In its review of exonerations from 1989 to 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that among convictions for crimes that never occurred, over half involved child sexual abuse: ‘Two-thirds of these cases were generated in a wave of child sexual abuse hysteria that swept the country three decades ago.”

– From “Will Feminism’s Past Mistakes Haunt #MeToo?” (Dec. 8) by Judith Levine in Boston Review