Our 2009 Fund Raising Letter
Dear Friend of the NCRJ,
This year was an exciting one for the National Center for Reason & Justice and those whom our organization serves: people falsely accused or wrongly convicted of crimes against children.
In Massachusetts, Bernard Baran, the first teacher convicted of child sexual abuse in the daycare panics of the 1980s and ’90s, was exonerated after 22 years in prison.
Head Start bus driver Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen (who had never met Nancy) were released from Ohio prisons after 14 years’ incarceration for phantom crimes against five-year-olds.
John Stoll, convicted of sodomizing children and allowing other people to sodomize his six-year-old son and freed (after 20 years) in 2004, was immortalized in the movie Witchhunt. Stoll settled a civil rights case against Kern County, California, for $5.5 million.
None of this could have happened without your support. With your donations—$44,000 of tax-deductible fiscal sponsorship this year—you have helped pay the legal fees for innocent people still in court or in prison. You have made their lives more bearable, with pocket money to buy soap at the commissary, with birthday cards, and with the knowledge that someone out there cares.
And with a donation of $20, $25, $50, $100, or more, you will help us continue to help the people whose letters we receive every week, accused of the most despised acts in our culture, bereft of competent counsel, terrified, and overwhelmed.
NCRJ’s work never lets up. Many innocent people are still behind bars. Equally disturbing, false accusations of crimes against children are spreading into other areas of the law beyond sex—accidental infant deaths through falls or fires, for instance. A few years ago, the state of Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham on conviction of setting fire to his own house and killing his three young daughters, who were trapped inside. Willingham was almost certainly innocent, but Gov. Rick Perry just dissolved a commission to review the case: it would no doubt have shown that the prosecution’s “expert†testimony was riddled with errors and “junk†forensic science. In cases like this one, as in sexual allegations, the mere suspicion of “harm to minors†awakens deep-seated fears that stifle common sense.
Still, there are many signs of hope. Public opinion is turning. The press is growing more skeptical of police and DAs’ claims, editorial boards more vocal, human rights groups more involved, and citizens more outraged. This is particularly true when sex laws turn against those they are intended to protect: recently, teens have been charged as rapists for consensual sex with their peers or arrested as child pornographers for “sextingâ€â€”sending racy images of themselves to friends or lovers by cell phone. So many minors are now among the 170,000 Americans on sex offender registries that citizens this year met in national conventions to organize to reform sex offender laws.
NCRJ is poised to act on this change. We want to make our Website and blog more dynamic to make our voice heard in what is still a confusing and hysterical discourse. We want to link up with our many potential allies, including the growing network of innocence projects, some of which are now ready to take on cases like the ones we deal with, where there is no DNA evidence—indeed no evidence at all, since no crime was committed. We want to travel to conferences to speak to lawyers, activists, journalists, and students about our message.
And we want to keep doing our core work, to buy the toilet paper for our friends behind bars and pay the lawyers to get them out.
Won’t you help us by making a tax-deductible donation of $20, $25, $50, $100 or more? You may also choose our monthly sustainer option. Times are tough—but injustice knows no economic booms or busts. Won’t you help us celebrate next year’s Nancy Smiths and Joseph Allens—and perhaps prevent the brutal fate of another Cameron Todd Willingham?
For Justice,
Mike Snedeker
President, National Center for Reason and Justice
