New York Times revisits McMartin daycare trials

It has long been said, in varying language, that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. You do not have to reach back 200 years to Scotland to find enduring wisdom in …

Evidence of Concealed Jailhouse Deal Raises Questions About a Texas Execution

Mike Graczyk/Associated Press

The New York Times on the Todd Willingham case.

Mr. Scheck said that the Willingham case suggested a fundamental weakness in the justice system: If Mr. Webb’s testimony “was really based on a deal and misrepresentation, then …

In Texas, a New Law Lets Defendants Fight Bad Science

NCRJ President Michael Snedeker is quoted in The Atlantic:

The new statute offers another kind of clarity: “It’s important because a lot of really shaky evidence is clothed in objectivity,” said Snedeker, noting the incalculable impact expert testimony can …

Woody Allen Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt

JoAnn Wypijewski in The Nation

“Trampling on an accused priest’s due process rights doesn’t matter to a lot of people, even civil libertarians. Ordinarily, an overgrown gossip column with pretensions wouldn’t matter either, except that this one, “Mia’s Story,” was …

Woody Allen and the Virtual Lynch Mob…

By Mark Godsey

Director, Center for the Global Study of Wrongful Conviction;
Director, Rosenthal Institute for Justice/Ohio Innocence Project

http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2014/02/13/woody-allen-and-the-virtual-lynch-mob/…

Our misguided child porn laws do little to protect children

(AP Photo/WJLA-TV)

n fact, it is not clear why mere possession of child pornography should ever be grounds for locking people in cages. The Supreme Court’s main rationale for upholding the ban on possession was that demand for this material …

Woody Allen, Feminism, and ‘Believing the Survivor’

Cathy Young, writing in Time, points to the role of feminism in legitimizing false accusations of child sexual abuse. But there are many other social anxieties and criminal policies and practices that enhance people’s tendency to believe such claims. …

Coakley Should Admit Fells Acres Mistakes

The NCRJ does not endorse (or disendorse) political candidates. We are, however, more than convinced that the Amiraults are innocent and that the Fells Acres case was a hysteria-driven witch hunt. We have sponsored this case since 2002.

For this …

Nothing but the Truth

My name is Cornelius Dupree, and I am a sex offender. I paced the narrow aisle between the bunks in my cell, going over the words in my mind, trying to force them to my lips.

Those were the …

Slate reprises the Kellers, satanic panic, and NCRJ’s role in stopping it.

“It sounds laughable,” says Debbie Nathan, an investigative reporter who co-wrote Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt about the panic and is now a director for the National Center for Reason and Justice, …