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Has anyone been following the West Memphis Three?

Rolfe said:
One thing which intrigues me about this is the blackening of the characters of the accused in order to support the accusation. In all the miscarriage of justice cases I've looked at, this has been a constant theme. The accused is said to have been a bad person in this or that way, thus his or her guilt is certain. Sometimes these tangential accusations are true, sometimes not, or much exaggerated.

Look at this one. http://www.justiceforsionjenkins.org.uk/ Jenkins was ludicrously accused of murdering his stepdaugter for no known motive, in the space of about three minutes, within earshot of two of his other children. To support this the prosecution pointed out that he had - exaggerated his educational qualifications in his application for his teaching job several years earlier.

This photo of Barry George, featuring George with a non-functioning replica handgun, was used to paint him as a desperate, terrorist figure. It's quite clearly a photo of an inadequate with a gun fetish playing dress-up. But it got him convicted.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/06/13/barrygeorge460.jpg

It happens time and time again. It shouldn't matter if the suspect has been known to eat babies. If there is no evidence connecting him or her with the ACTUAL CRIME, there should be no conviction. This is one of the worst examples I've come across, but it fits the pattern horribly well.

Rolfe.
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The Knox/Sollecito case has all these things in spades. Seeing as you've been keen on the theme of miscarriages of justice for a while now, I'm a little surprised you've shown no interest in that case. Is there a particular reason you're avoiding it?
 
Slayhamlet said:
The Knox/Sollecito case has all these things in spades. Seeing as you've been keen on the theme of miscarriages of justice for a while now, I'm a little surprised you've shown no interest in that case. Is there a particular reason you're avoiding it?
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A pathological fear of cartwheels?
 
Slayhamlet said:
The Knox/Sollecito case has all these things in spades. Seeing as you've been keen on the theme of miscarriages of justice for a while now, I'm a little surprised you've shown no interest in that case. Is there a particular reason you're avoiding it?
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Life's too short. One can only read up on the minute detail of so many cases at one time. That thread grows faster than I can read it, so if there's one thing not lacking there, it's people interested enough to get aerated about it.

That being so, I plan on waiting for some conclusions to emerge at the other end.

ETA: I also find my interest is most aroused by cases where the miscarriage of justice is blatant and obvious and a howling scandal. The Sion Jenkins case and the Barry George case both fit that criterion. As does the Abdelbaset al-Megrahi case. Others I've been interested in in the past are the Sally Clark/Angela Cannings/Donna Anthony series (ended by the Trupti Patel case, where one of the factors leading to her acquittal and then the entire house of cards falling down was that there seemed to be no muck the prosecution could rake up about her), and the Paul Esslemont one.

If the Amanda Knox case is a clear-cut miscarriage of justice then I have to say it's not coming over that way in the ongoing discussion.

Rolfe.
 
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In that vein, how much does this have in common with the Orkney (and perhaps the Cleveland?) child abuse scandals? There were no murders there, but belief by the authorities that there was some sort of "Satanic ritual abuse" contributed to perfectly content children being torn from their homes in midnight raids, and their childhoods destroyed.

In the Orkney case, children were telling the social workers as clearly as they could that nobody was harming them and the accusations were baseless. However this was taken as proof that they'd been groomed or threatened to force them to conceal the abuse. One of the main social worker culprits is still convinced the accusations were true, on the grounds that it's absolutely typical of such cases that the children will deny it.

The idea that children who had not been abused would also deny being abused isn't something that seemed to cross her mind. There literally seemed to be nothing any of these kids could say that would convince the social workers that the allegations were untrue.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
In that vein, how much does this have in common with the Orkney (and perhaps the Cleveland?) child abuse scandals? There were no murders there, but belief by the authorities that there was some sort of "Satanic ritual abuse" contributed to perfectly content children being torn from their homes in midnight raids, and their childhoods destroyed.

In the Orkney case, children were telling the social workers as clearly as they could that nobody was harming them and the accusations were baseless. However this was taken as proof that they'd been groomed or threatened to force them to conceal the abuse. One of the main social worker culprits is still convinced the accusations were true, on the grounds that it's absolutely typical of such cases that the children will deny it.

The idea that children who had not been abused would also deny being abused isn't something that seemed to cross her mind. There literally seemed to be nothing any of these kids could say that would convince the social workers that the allegations were untrue.

Rolfe.
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In the mid 1980s, right across the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee there was a day-care child abuse scandal that rivalled the McMartin Daycare case in California. It was called the Georgian Hills Daycare case.

Ritual sex, satanic worship, sexual abuse of children. Just like the McMartin case.

When it was all said and done, people had been imprisoned for years, lives and reputations were ruined, yet there was never a single conviction that held-up to judicial appeals.

For some reason, I can't find any references to it on the internet.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ronaldsay_child_abuse_scandal

That's quite a good summary of the Orkney case, though as I recall some of the children were kept apart from their parents for much longer than suggested in the article.

Even at the time, local people ridiculed the allegations. One woman said, of the allegation that the local minister was holding devil-worship orgies in a field which was in plain sight of a road, "look, if there was any possibility something like that was going on, I for one would have crawled barefoot in the ditch to get a look. It didn't happen."

That woman Liz MacLean was interviewed in the 2006 TV programme, trying to justify herself. She was seriously scary - a singleminded zealot who was convinced she was right, and that the childrens' denials simply proved they were hiding something.

Authority figures in full-blown pursuit of their own preconceptions are a frightening spectacle.

Rolfe.
 
John Jones said:
In the mid 1980s, right across the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee there was a day-care child abuse scandal that rivaled the McMartin Daycare case in California. It was called the Georgian Hills Daycare case.

Ritual sex, satanic worship, sexual abuse of children. Just like the McMartin case.

When it was all said and done, people had been imprisoned for years, lives and reputations were ruined, yet there was never a single conviction that held-up to judicial appeals.

For some reason, I can't find any references to it on the internet.
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Retraction: I did find some meager references to the Georgian Hills Day Care case. Unfortunately, there are no details available.

Going from my admittedly faulty memory:

The first complaint of sexual abuse came from a diagnosed schizophrenic woman about her pre-school aged daughter. This daughter was taken to the local health department for examination.

A false positive test for syphilis and a coerced claim of sexual abuse led to the Health Department sending out letters to the owners of Georgian Hills Day Care saying that "one of your sexual partners has tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease (STD)."

In the meantime, the original schizophrenic mother moved her child to a different daycare center - whereupon a whole new series of accusations began.
 
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John Jones said:
In the mid 1980s, right across the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee there was a day-care child abuse scandal that rivalled the McMartin Daycare case in California. It was called the Georgian Hills Daycare case.

Ritual sex, satanic worship, sexual abuse of children. Just like the McMartin case.

When it was all said and done, people had been imprisoned for years, lives and reputations were ruined, yet there was never a single conviction that held-up to judicial appeals.

For some reason, I can't find any references to it on the internet.
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I had never heard about that case. There are some brief mentions here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ab...v_Wq6VY&sig=BTv7byn1KRhOyusbAYaHltJV_pg&hl=en

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/tracking/wellknown.html
 
I'm reading about the McMartin case at the moment.

Sorry if this mention of the child abuse scandals has turned into a derail. The central point about prosecutors railroading cases irrespective of the paucity of the evidence is common to all the examples however.

I notice the part about the alleged cell-mate confession being used against someone is ABSOLUTELY identical to what happened to Sion Jenkins. A serial snitch was put into his cell with him, just before the snitch was due to be released. He then went straight to the press with a story that Jenkins had confessed to him in the time they were in the cell together. This guy had a record as long as your arm for making this stuff up in return for shorter sentences.

Rolfe.
 
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TragicMonkey said:
Nobody got burned at Salem, it was all hangings. And a pressing.
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Don't humor him.

Nineteen men and women were hanged. There was one dog hanged as well. Giles Corey died (a pressing) for refusing to plea one way or the other.
 
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How many juries actually gave verdicts on the West Memphis boys?

Sion Jenkins had two appeals and two retrials. He was freed on the second retrial I think. How did so many people manage to think he was guilty beyond reasonable doubt on that evidence? It beggars belief.

Partly it was the blackening of the character - honestly, we were invited to believe that because he lied about his qualifications on his CV (not even badly, he was still qualified for the job he got), he was capable of a brutal murder. Then his wife turned against him and seemed to believe he'd done it, and started spreading weird stories about violent outbursts, though it seems highly likely these were fabricated.

But another part of it seemed to be a belief by juries that the case wouldn't have been brought if there wasn't "something in it". Why would the police accuse a respectable school headmaster of battering his foster daughter to death on a sudden whim, if they didn't have some reason for that suspicion.

What do you think the factors were in the Memphis example?

Rolfe.
 
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