Archive for September, 2016

Opposition to Differential Response Dealt Heavy Blow

Saturday, September 24th, 2016

“Research shows that keeping some families together after children are abused can result in safety for the children and united families, when proper assessment and interventions are made. Even so, the usual suspect ‘child-protection professionals’ scapegoat the approach.”–Debbie Nathan

Read the article by Richard Wexler in The Chronicle of Social Change.

Support the Innocence Project

Thursday, September 22nd, 2016

And help Victor Rosario run the New York Marathon!

-Bob Chatelle

A Syndrome on Trial

Sunday, September 11th, 2016

“Today, scores of other caregivers are accused of in injuring or killing a baby by shaking every year. But some doctors and lawyers believe the syndrome is being diagnosed too frequently and that debate is playing out in courtrooms around the country. Over 200 cases have fallen apart since doctors started challenging the diagnosis, with some defendants released after spending more than a decade in jail.”

From RetroReport. Produced by Miriam Weintraub.

Why Jerry Sandusky May Be Innocent

Friday, September 9th, 2016

Civil lawyers sent potential victims to therapy to help unearth memories. As Howard Janet, a civil lawyer for an alleged Sandusky victim, explained in a CNN interview, victims could “create a bit of a Chinese wall in their minds. They bury these events that were so painful to them deep in their subconscious.”

But that’s not all. The well-known sodomy-in-the-shower story is fictional. When Mike McQueary went into the locker room in 2001, he briefly heard slapping sounds in the shower that he interpreted as sexual. As McQueary later put it, “Visualizations come to your head.”

Read the article by Mark Pendergrast in The Crime Report.

The Father Gordon J. MacRae Story: Injustice in New Hampshire

Monday, September 5th, 2016

“In 2005, I came upon the story of Father Gordon MacRae in a series of articles by Pulitzer-Prize winning writer, Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. This was my first inkling that the case against this Catholic priest, that I and most others thought to be fairly and justly adjudicated, was in fact deeply flawed.

“As I looked more closely, and probed more deeply, it became apparent to me that this priest is a victim of a zealous sex crimes detective, a set of political agendas, and the greed of men pretending to be victims to ride a wave of media coverage of Catholic scandal to commit fraud.”

Read the post by Ryan A. MacDonald in his blog, “A Ram in the Thicket.”

Expanding Incarceration Is Not the Best Way to Fight Rape Culture

Monday, September 5th, 2016

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/AFP/Getty Images

“The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other developed country. The American incarceration rate is roughly 3.5 times as high as the median rate in Europe, according to a 2013 report from the European Council of Annual Penal Statistics. This is not because Americans commit more crimes — victimization rates in the United States are comparable to those in Western Europe. Nor is our outsize prison population solely the product of our drug war. As the Marshall Project notes, 54 percent of the 1.3 million Americans in state prisons are there for violent crimes. Even if we freed every nonviolent offender in an American prison, we would still jail a far higher percentage of our residents than do our European peers.”

Read the article by Eric Levitz in New York magazine.