February 12th, 2010

I had the pleasure of doing another interview today with Mike Thomas at KWRE in Warrenton, MO. His program is entitled Livewire and I always enjoy being a phone-in guest on the broadcast. He’s read the book before we start and can ask pointed questions. I like that in an interviewer. Valentine’s Day is Sunday and one of my happier childhood memories is selecting just the right v-day card for the boy in class I liked. The card had to convey my true feelings without being too forward. In 2nd grade I selected a card with a little girl shaking hands with her puppy. The message read, “I paws to tell you Happy Valentine’s Day.” Oh, I wish Dale Thoeni knew how I agonized over that card. Romance wasn’t blooming in downtown El Paso, Texas on this day in 1882 when two local characters got into an arguement over an actress. Doc Cummings was drunk and mouthing off to Jim Manning at a variety show. It came to a shoot out and Doc was killed. I received some information from one of the doctors who has been helping with the research of the book I’m working on about my brother. It’s interesting and very sad. In Montana v. Harts (State of Montana v. Harts, 1993), the State’s child protective services workers had performed the first several evaluations of two children, ages 3 and 5, who had alleged sexual abuse by their great-grandparents, ages 78 and 81, who had no documented history of previous criminal behavior or of sexually inappropriate behavior. Child protective services workers and police rewarded the children with praise when they provided affirmative responses to their questions. When one child reported something that the other could not at first remember, pressure applied until the child could remember it. No effort was made to verify the physical possibility or impossibility of the allegations. The children were sent to a therapist who insisted that the children elaborate on this abuse by asking them to “draw a picture of your rectum” and “draw a picture of how you feel about Pa’s genitals.” These drawings were submitted to the county attorney over the next two years as evidence of abuse. Other grossly inappropriate “therapeutic techniques” were also used to extract confirmation from the children that bizarre and violent sexual abuse had been perpetrated against them. The 5-year-old boy was put into treatment sessions with a 9-year-old boy who was a confirmed sexual abuse victim. The therapist typically saw the children in her home for up to 6 hours at a time. The therapist forbade anyone to talk to the children, including their grandparents, unless they promised not to express any doubt as to the children’s allegations, or unless the therapist was present. When the children tried to say that their reports were “just dreams” or had never been true, these statements were discounted. The therapist asked the children to draw something and when they did not, she produced the drawing, labeled it as the child’s, and sent it to the county attorney. The therapist collected crime victim’s compensation funds for the children’s treatment, long before an unbiased investigation was performed, reinforcing the necessity from the therapist’s perspective that the crime be confirmed even if it had not occurred. Through disorderly and biased procedures, these children were induced, albeit unintentionally, to report ever more heinous acts of sexual abuse against them. Deposition testimony indicated that upon re-evaluation the children’s statements did not meet credibility criteria when the procedure, “Statement Validity Analysis” (Raskin & Esplin, 1991) was applied. Re-evaluation also indicated that initial evaluation procedures had been faulty. The county attorney filed a brief to quash this challenging testimony at trial, maintaining that SVA and the other procedures described above were inadmissible as expert testimony due to major disagreements and lack of consensus among experts in the field. A review and analysis of the literature identified eight core similarities among the major approaches to such evaluations. Expert testimony was offered that these eight similarities, used as the foundation for the investigation of the sex abuse allegations, do meet evidence admissibility requirements. The judge allowed the challenged testimony, ruling that investigative procedures utilizing these eight core similarities were scientifically acceptable and admissible as evidence. Prior to trial a Statement Validity Analysis was performed enabling further expert testimony to the effect that the children probably had not been abused, but had been led to believe that they were, based on suggestive, coercive, and biased investigative and therapeutic conduct. The Judge ultimately ruled that the alleged sexual offenders were “not guilty.”