TheAgitator.com
Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen
Thursday, February 10th, 2011I’m going to write about this case for my column on Monday. It’s yet another bullshit ritual sex abuse prosecution. But I won’t be able to do justice to the entire story in a single column, so you should read the whole thing here. But keep a stiff drink nearby. You’ll need it. The coda to the article, which is what I’ll be writing about, is that the Ohio State Supreme Court recently ordered Smith and Allen back to jail.
We still haven’t uncovered all the damage wrought by the ritual sex abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, as the Tonya Craft case shows, we may not even be completely finished with the panic itself.
I’d argue that it’s the most shameful episode in the history of our criminal justice system. The thing that always throws a chill down my spine with these cases is that the lurid depictions of ritual sexual abuse—stuff like raping infants with knives, forced sex between children and animals, forcing kids to drink blood and urine, human sacrifice, other shit you can’t even fathom—not only never happened, but because they never happened, they could only have come from the imaginations of the cops, prosecutors, and quack child psychiatrists who interviewed the kids. Think about that. The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge. (I’ve recommended it before, but if you haven’t yet, you should watch the movie Witch Hunt, a documentary about the dozens of wrongful sex abuse prosecutions in Kern County, California.)
These cases should be taught as part of the standard criminal justice curriculum in every law school in the country. The same mistakes were made over and over by different public officials in courtrooms all over the country. And judges and appellate courts upheld—and still uphold—those mistakes.
These ritual sex abuse prosecutions were absolutely unbelievable. Both in the allegations and in the resulting convictions.
I would like to see the calibur of criminal defense attorneys appointed go up proportionally to the seriousness of the charges. The first and primary line of defense is competent defense counsel.
These cases should be taught as part of the standard criminal justice curriculum in every law school in the country.
Agreed. And usually in most states new judges (either appointed or elected) get an initial orientation course. These sort of cases should be taught front and center on what NOT to do. And I would suggest the same should also apply to new prosecutor orientations.
“they could only have come from the imaginations of the cops, prosecutors, and quack child psychiatrists who interviewed the kids.”
These kind of people never get called on this very particular kind of BS. There seems to be this primitive switch in people’s heads that turns off reason once the words “child” and “sex” are uttered in the same breath.
The “logic” seems to be that they are coming up with those scenarios out of “good intentions” and therefore they are not like the sick fantasies of those other ugly rapey people.
A witch hunt defines it perfectly. The daycare cases of the 80s and 90s show that people in the U.S. have the same capacity for human cruelty as any other place on the planet. The only difference is that in the U.S. they need to dress it up a little prettier so they can rationalize it as justice. Americans (liberal and conservative) possess an eager willingness to unquestioningly believe almost any accusation or paranoia that involves children and sex. While it destroyed hundreds of lives during the ritual abuse scare, it is by no means a thing of the past. You see it daily in the paranoia about sexting, child porn, pedophiles behind every tree, child sex trafficking, sex offender registries, and perpetual civil commitments for people who’ve already completed their prison time.
In the end, this country didn’t learn a fucking thing from the daycare witch hunts. It’s the one crime category where a mere accusation means life, as you know it, is over. It’s replaced lynching as a socially acceptable blood sport. And it ain’t gonna change anytime soon.
Dave Krueger, I agree with you that there is still a huge problem out there, but we should not throw up our hands and say it will not get better. We need to constantly fight against it. It is not paying attention that allows these sort of abuses to happen.
On the subject of witch hunts and other mob hysterias, I recommend MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It is 160 years old, but the material still holds up (though some of his figures are a little questionable.)
The ritual-abuse panic seemed to have run its course by 1993 with the acquittal of Dale Akiki
Prosecutors, having run the ritual-abuse tactic into the ground but still looking to further their careers then shifted their focus to drug crimes. Aided and abetted by increasingly over-staffed, over-funded police departments, to this day they needlessly ruin lives while crowing how much good they are doing for the community.
How many more people must have their lives, reputations and careers destroyed before the immunity they routinely abuse is rescinded?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by FoxArtCultTech, teaist ats. teaist ats said: Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen http://bit.ly/eGkRuB http://t.tatsn.com/n [...]
Team State does it because they can, and they do it with “tax” dollars violently stolen from you. Think about that — the system steals from people by threat of death, and use those resources to direct FURTHER violence at you. Government = violence
Why do you want to teach these things in law school? Haven’t lawyers found enough ways to stick innocent people into prison for crimes that never happened without that class?
It’s not a mass delusion. Nobody ever believed any of this garbage. Every single person at every step along the way was 100% certain they were sending innocent people to prison for no reason. Nobody believes that witches fly on power Satan gives them from sacrificing rabbits.
I seem to remember another period during which moronic Americans tortured and ruined people because of idiotic, inherently implausible stories of hexes, satanic rituals, and broom flying. Salem, Mass, anyone?
All given the seal of approval by fucktards like Cotton Mather (the intellectual forefather of arseholes like Yoo and Bybee).
What the fuck is it with you people?
As johnl opined, there is a very good chance that EVERYBODY in the prosecution side knew that the charges were absurd… but careerism and megalomania took over early on. Yet another case for the abolition of prosecutorial immunity (and/or for those robbed of their liberty by same to take matters into their own hands).
That aside, @johnl… you’re right but on the wrong grounds.
The prosecutors need not have believed that witches fly and so forth – they need only to have believed that the DEFENDANTS believed it.
Given that a Pew Poll taken in 2007 shows that 68% of Yanks believe “that angels and demons operate in real life”, there is a non-trivial chance that some dumbfuck existed who DID believe in ritual sacrifice and what-not.
But there is a huge leap – especially evidentiarily – from believing in things that are obviously retarded, to enacting the sorts of B-grade schlock-gore that the accused were alleged to have perpetrated.
Fortunately for the developed world, our sociologists and social workers – while often led by the nose by lunacy emanating from North America – were not able to ram through this specific instance of fucktardery before the whole sham fell apart at its root. Still, they have adopted the ‘kiddie porn’ scare in its stead.
damn radley. i researched those cases for an exoneration database i (and several others) have been working on at u of m law school this past summer. i knew that allen’s exoneraiton was still pending, but i had no inkling at all that something this terrible could happen. is there a link that i can go to to find out more? at the very least, it looks like the master list is going to be a couple names shorter than we had hoped. goddamn government…
Radley, I can’t say it enough: Thank you for all the work you do to call attention to this kind of horrible injustice. Whether it be rationalized as fighting child abuse, drug dealers, terrorism or whatever, this kind of systemic prosecutorial abuse is the biggest and scariest threat to our freedom –– because ANYONE could be the next target.
“Think about that. The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge. ”
“Think about that. The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge. ”
“Think about that. The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge. ”
“Think about that. The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge. ”
Sorry all, felt this needed to be repeated.
Makes one wonder how much “projection” in which the cops, prosecutors, and child psychiatrists were engaged.
http://www.morningjournal.com/articles/2011/01/30/opinion/mj4033156.txt
Buddy;
I gotta wonder what Planet that editorial writer is on. I mean, what a moronic hit job (this guy obviously has some personal issues with this Judge or is just an idiot) – 1st there is no reason why Smith and Allen would be precluded from pursuing any defenses that they may have now as opposed to two years ago (any time bar that exists now, existed 2 years ago; the case is 15 years old). The writer doesn’t even address how their defenses have suffered. He is actually claiming (I assume with a straight face) that the Judge caused them more suffering by giving them 2 years of freedom because it reminded them of what they were missing while they are in jail. Apparently he thinks that they would have been better off if they remained in prison as innocent people rather than have this mean Judge get their hopes up by giving them 2 years out. How the prosecution who appealed his ruling gets off the hook we don’t know.
In his 2nd example of Burge’s misdeeds he argues that the Judge has done a disservice to a guy by giving him life instead of sentencing him to death. Not a disservice to society, but to the guy who the editorial writer has determined would be better off dead.
Last, he claims Burge harmed a kid by sentencing him to Probation with a requirement for mental health treatment but since the state doesn’t have a facility to treat the kid, Burge should have ignored the mental health angle and just sentenced the kid to prison. Again, not because society deserved the harsher treatment of this individual but because the kid would have been better off in prison than in jail hoping for treatment.
I hope Burge is comforted by the stupidity of his detractors.
“I’d argue that it’s the most shameful episode in the history of our criminal justice system. ”
And one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the journalism profession. Newspapers everywhere bought the prosecution side of the stories hook, line and sinker. I was living in San Diego when the McMartin case hit the papers. I don’t recall a single voice questioning the credibility of the accusers (the main accuser was some sort of drug addicted schizophrenic if I recall), the prosecutors or the utterly outlandish stories that started coming out.
[...] been known to send people to prison on the basis of bizarre mass delusional [...]
“Capturing The Friedman’s” ought to be mentioned here. Excellent doc.
“Think about that. The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge.”
No horror movie could be nearly a freightening as this.
It’s amazing what a jury will believe. All it would have taken was one juror that understood logic and reason to point out how pathetic this case was and at least hang the jury. The idea that they proved this beyond a reasonable doubt it preposterous. Like someone mentioned above, once sex and kids are used in the same sentence, all sanity goes out the window.
It is one massive failure of journalism. Which is why blog sites (like this one) are important. They can take a story before anyone is really paying attention, assemble facts and put it in palitable form for lazy journalists looking for a free lunch.
I agree with you, Radley, but I would also add that, as a private detective I encountered two cases in which Satanic ritual abuse allegations arose back in the early 90s. Both times, they grew out of domestic cases.
In the first, a father seeking custody of his kids claimed that the mother’s boyfriend was ritually abusing them. As “evidence”, he had the report of a psychologist who’d interviewed his kids. Unfortunately for him, I found the reports of the other three psychologists who’d seen through the lies he’d fed his kids, and advised his attorney accordingly.
In the second, what started as an “I think my husband is cheating on me” turned into “I think my husband sacrifices babies to the devil in the basement of our church”, apparently with the help of a Christian marriage counselor, who had originally brought me in. When I started asking questions about the plausibility of the accusations and the evidence, they thought they might want someone more “open-minded” to take over the case.
So yes, this stuff does come from the minds of the folks in charge, but it also comes from parents who will do anything to claim their kids from their exes, and, in the second case, from people looking for an excuse to divorce despite strong beliefs that divorce is wrong.
“These cases should be taught as part of the standard criminal justice curriculum in every law school in the country. ”
Indeed. The last chapter of ‘Actual Innocence’ makes the same point – when a Cessna flies into a mountain, we spare no effort to find out what happened and do everything possible to make sure it doesn’t happen again, but when someone is exonerated after years in prison, we don’t go back to the trial and sift through the wreckage to find the proximate cause so we can stop making the same mistakes.
Just look at the runaway Toyota situation – everyone gears up, NASA is pulled in, new regulations are proposed, and on and on. But hundreds of exonerations … ho, hum.
I remember learning about the Salem witch trials and thinking “gosh, how backwards/crazy people were back then, thank goodness we’ve learned a few things since.”
Growing up sucks sometimes. You come to realize that we progress (humans, not our technology) in tiny increments if at all. That crazy awful witchhunting past isn’t entirely gone.
If a minor child is not subject to perjury laws, then the minor child’s testimony should be inadmissable in a court of law. Ties up that loose end.
johnl, I understand your anger and contempt, but you’re wrong. Oh, I agree, this nonsense could not continue to the extent that it does without the connivance of people who don’t believe it for a minute. But I assure you that there are people, widely treated as sane, who seriously believe this swill. Nor is this set of incredible beliefs all that singular. There are people who seriously believe that George Bush ordered the controlled demolition of one or more of the World Trade Center buildings, and somehow nobody noticed until it was too late. There are people who seriously believe that Wife/Girlfriend abuse peaks every Superbowl Sunday, despite years of contradiction by emergency rooms and police departments. Lots of people, many of whom pride themselves on not believing anything as silly a ‘religion’, believe all kinds of unfounded cr*p.
I only emphasize this because dealing with the fallout of a deliberate conspiracy and dealing with the fallout of a widespread hysterical delusion coupled with occasional opportunists are two very different problems, and the solution for one will not necessarily work on the other.
The scales of justice have become ridiculously tilted in favor of the government. I think it’s time to do away with “qualified immunity” for prosecutors and judges. Using the powers of prosecution or jailing maliciously should be a criminal offense.
Unfortunately the only people to adjudicate such crimes are……other prosecutors and judges. My guess is that even if Q.I. were eliminated, they would band together to protect their own, just as the few good cops rarely ever out the dirty ones lest their own ass be on the line someday.
I think there’s something more involving human nature in all these cases. The thought processes gone through by the adults in these cases is very similar to the thought processes of people who get swept up in some grand conspiracy theory. At some point, confirmation bias and related mental bugs kick in; your mind seizes on each new piece of evidence *for* the implausible story, but ignores other evidence. And so, piece by piece, you build up a fantastic story that you’d never have believed, if it had been presented to you up front. This is worth noticing, because we’re probably all susceptible to doing it.
I strongly suspect something similar happened with the torture scandal. Start beating answers out of people, and they’ll find a way to tell you what you want to hear. If you expect movie-plot terrorist conspiracies, they’ll soon work out that this is what they need to say to get the electrodes off their nuts for awhile. (Didn’t KSM disclose *dozens* of plots, which overwhelmingly don’t seem to have existed?) And the torturers in that situation are very likely to convince themselves they’re onto serious, real information. (Sometimes they will be, too. But it’s hard to check, since everyone confesses and starts handing over their terrorist co-conspirators and plots sooner or later.)
The weird thing w.r.t. the weird recovered memories cases from a few years ago was that, at the same time, there really was a decades-old consipracy of silence and coverups involving widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. At the same time we were using hypnotists to “recover” memories of massive satanic rituals involving dozens of people and human sacrifice, there was this large pool of people who had been sexually abused, knew it, but either didn’t talk about because they figured nothing could be done about it, or did talk about it and couldn’t get anyone to listen. And that abuse was (like most crime) rather mundane–the priest diddles the teenaged boy who comes to him for guidance, a scandal arises, and the hierarchy transfers him to another parish and hushes things up with the family and community–not any kind of spectacular horror-movie-worthy satanic rituals. But that’s because the Church abuse actually happened, and wasn’t created in the minds of suggestible people under hypnosis at the behest of therapists who were looking for the worst thing possible.
The phenomenon I find most galling is the arrogance of the prosecutors who hide exculpatory evidence and manufacture false evidence.
In the day care cases, they did this by using classic behavioral modification techniques to get impressionable children to say, and ultimately believe, horrific things about their parents and other caregivers. In other cases, they offer jailhouse informants who claim the defendant (a total stranger) spilled his guts to them.
I don’t really understand why prosecutors have absolute immunity. I believe that prosecutors should be immune from criminal or civil liability for negligent acts, but grotesque miscarriages of justice like the day care cases are often founded on deliberate acts by investigators and prosecutors that would be deemed perjury or obstruction of justice if anybody other than the state did it.
A wrongful (as opposed to merely unsuccessful) prosecution should result in the state reimbursing the defendants for all costs of defense, bail, and all consequental damages (loss of income, loss of employment and business opportunities, damage to reputation). If it results in conviction, the prosecutor should serve the amount time stolen from the innocent defendant in the same manner (including pretrial detention in local jail, incarceration in prison, probation with monitoring, etc.).
@#12 GT: Actually, the Salem trials have been shown to be the result of a grab for property by some of the “leading families” of the area, so the accusations of witchcraft and subsequent vile idiocy of the trials, torture, and executions are exactly like these ritual abuse cases. People who want to “shape the narrative” to gain their aims pick the type of story most likely at the time to blow up into a mindless panic, then reinforce it once it starts by engaging religion in the process.
What it shows is that people who want power (or have it and want more) are often remorseless scum who act as clear sociopaths to get it.
@GT, in McMartin, the state was claiming the defendants had supernatural powers, such as flight, not that they believed that they had them. And I don’t believe that anyone believes in witches. They might claim to believe in witches so they can steal their stuff but they don’t believe it.
Re: #24 from Joe:
Garbage in, garbage out. At least in this arrangement, even if mass-media hacks continue to use shitty craft and ethics, the end result will be a lot better. I.e., it won’t be horrific, destructive slander. So I’m all for it.
What I fear is that the hacks are mainly interested in flattering cops and prosecutors. With luck, they’re also interested in flattering defense attorneys. They aren’t interested in flattering other journalists who adhere to better craft and ethics than their own.
The hacks are happy to let some substance seep into their reporting if it contributes to their theatrical performances, but they absolutely won’t let substance impede a good show. Hence they’re at the mercy of the ethics and judgment of the authorities, with predictably awful results.
Journalists don’t offer the glamor and immediacy that the hacks demand. If Radley wants to get through to these people, he may have to go to law school or police academy first.
Re: absolute immunity:
The victims of wrongful and malicious prosecution should sue inflammatory journalists and their employers instead. NBC has been sued at least once over “To Catch a Predator,” by the surviving sister of a sting target who had committed suicide.
This should happen more often. As a matter of course, however, the plaintiffs should steadfastly refuse to settle. Instead, they should drag the defendants through as thorough a legal process as they can compel. This would serve several purposes: discovery in furtherance of the plaintiffs’ defense in related criminal trials; public exposure of the defendants and their associates for callous, predatory behavior in the guise of journalism; deterrence of similar behavior in the future; and the establishment of an official paper trail documenting not only the defendants’ misdeeds but those of their associates, likely including police officers and prosecutors acting under color of authority.
Any journalist or media outlet that smears the innocent with hysterical allegations of ritual satanic abuse or comparable nonsense should be hammered in civil court. The message should be consistent and unmistakable: play with that fire and get burned.
Wait a doggone second. Are saying there are journalists involved with “To Catch a Predator”? Or at NBC for that matter? If so, then real journalists need to pick a new term of themselves.
As I’ve mentioned here before once or twice, when these sorts of posts occur, Kathy Lyons’ book, of the same name, “Witchhunt”, is valuable as well. It details what is perhaps the largest imaginary “Sex Ring” in American history, in Wenatchee, WA. The parallels to the Smith/Allen case, and all the other cases typical of the era and the trend, and indeed all false sex-crime allegations as a whole it seems, are chillingly similar. The more things change, and all that…
[...] Of Control Balko – "The twisted, hellish fantasies came from the minds of the people in charge" &raqu… Posted 7 hours ago from bookmarklet Tagged: justice, . A euphemism for [...]
It’s a pity that we no longer have governors with the courage to end this sort of travesty.