Oct. 17, 2011

The two largest ritual-abuse day-care cases – Little Rascals in Edenton and McMartin in California – bore many similarities but McMartin resulted in not a single conviction.

I asked Mark Montgomery, who in 1995 successfully argued Bob Kelly’s case before the North Carolina Court of Appeals, why that might have been:

“Each state has its own criminal laws, rules of procedure and evidence, etc. … Several features of the law in North Carolina gave prosecutors an advantage.

“First, the prosecution interviewed all the children attending Little Rascals Day Care. Most said they had seen no abuse. The law allowed the prosecution to withhold those interviews from the defense. And the defense was not allowed to interview the children. So all the jury heard were the stories of the 12 children who were the subject of indictments.

“Second, the law allowed the state’s expert witnesses to testify that they believed the children’s claims.

“Third, the defense was not allowed to conduct its own physical or psychological examinations of the children.

“Fourth, North Carolina had (and has) very liberal rules for the admission of hearsay by children in these cases. Almost anything a child says out of court can be used by the jury as substantive evidence of guilt. An effective prosecution strategy was to enlist the parents to elicit allegations of abuse. For months, parents, who were told their children had been abused, pleaded with their children to ‘disclose.’ Some eventually did. The prosecution then called the parents as witnesses to testify to what their children said, even if the children themselves did not testify.”

Aug. 24, 2015

“(Richard) Beck is generally restrained in his narrative, letting the details pile up to a well-deserved indictment of the many players in the ‘moral panic.’ But in explaining how these fever dreams managed to seize the national imagination, he does a little witch-hunting of his own. The frenzy, he tells us, was a backlash by family-values conservatives to the social changes around them. It was a period of ‘an intense reactionary antifeminism.’

“This is an inexcusably partial interpretation. From Beck’s own evidence, feminists themselves were vital players in the hysteria. Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation, and Ms. Magazine ran a 1993 cover article ‘BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists,’ even though, by that time, the general public had grown increasingly skeptical of the idea.

“In part because of her aggressive pursuit of child abusers – and conviction of a number of people later exonerated – a relatively unknown Dade County state attorney named Janet Reno was picked by President Clinton to become the nation’s first female attorney general. According to Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, the authors of ‘Satan’s Silence,’ (Kee) MacFarlane had been a lobbyist for NOW before she set about terrifying the children of Manhattan Beach.

“With his partisan recounting of the child abuse panic of the 1980s, Beck turns what could have been a careful history about one facet of the nation’s exhausting culture wars into one more illustration of them.”

– From “ ‘We Believe the Children,’ by Richard Beck” by Kay Hymowitz in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (Aug. 21, 2015)

I’m posting this criticism of Beck’s book – from an otherwise laudatory review – mostly for archival purposes. My own interest lies less in the tangled roots of the day-care panic than in its results: defendants wrongfully incarcerated, children profoundly misguided and therapists and prosecutors unjustly unscathed.

Sept. 4, 2013

In her appreciative review of “The Hunt,” the new Danish movie about a kindergarten teacher wrongfully accused of child sexual abuse, Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times writes:

“If you were in Los Angeles in the 1980s, it is impossible not to be reminded of the McMartin preschool case that dominated headlines for nearly a decade and still remains a question mark in so many minds.”

Linking “The Hunt” to the day-care ritual abuse panic is certainly apt – but in whose minds does McMartin “remain…. a question mark”?

In the mind of law professor John E.B. Myers, perhaps. But what credible social scientist today will argue that cases such as McMartin and Little Rascals were grounded in anything but therapist-created fiction?

March 12, 2012

After reading thousands of pages of Little Rascals coverage, shouldn’t I have become inured to the prosecution’s gratuitous brutality?

Not yet.

On August 11, 1993, Dawn Wilson, serving a life sentence for child sexual abuse, went back to court to seek release under house arrest. In six days she would give birth to her second child.

Nancy Lamb and Bill Hart could’ve responded with any number of temperate legal arguments against her release. Instead….

“She made a quite irresponsible decision in 1992 to become pregnant early in her trial,” Lamb said. “She was thinking only of herself….”

“Dawn Wilson… simply has no character…,” added Hart. “Is she the kind of mother figure who ought to be bonding with a second out-of-wedlock child?”

Judge Marsh McLelland granted Wilson’s request, but delays in paperwork and payment of a $250,000 bond kept mother and son in women’s prison another month.

In 1995 the N.C. Court of Appeals overturned her conviction. And then of course the prosecutors rushed to apologize to Dawn Wilson for their disgraceful vilification.