Josh Stein has a chance to right an injustice. Declare the Edenton Seven innocent | Opinion

In the waning days of his term as North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein has the opportunity to acknowledge one of the state’s most flagrant judicial injustices.

Sitting on his desk for more than a year has been a petition signed by 40 lawyers, academics, physicians and therapists seeking a “statement of innocence” for the seven defendants in the Little Rascals Day Care case in Edenton.

The criminal trial of Robert Kelly in the early 1990s remains the state’s longest and most expensive. He served six years in prison before the state Court of Appeals resoundingly overturned his conviction and that of Dawn Wilson. The lives of Kelly, Wilson and the five other defendants — the Edenton Seven — were profoundly harmed over groundless, therapist-induced allegations of “satanic ritual abuse” of children in their care.

For more than a decade, beginning in the 1980s, day-care centers across the United States were victimized by a wave of such wholly unsubstantiated charges. The testimony of child-witnesses, tainted by misguided therapists, resulted in dozens of convictions and incarcerations. In virtually all these cases, charges eventually were dropped, convictions overturned or plea agreements accepted with no admission of guilt. Today there is no dispute among respected psychiatrists, psychologists and social scientists: The defendants were innocent victims of a “moral panic” that bore striking similarities to the Salem witch hunts 300 years earlier.

The award-winning 2021 college textbook “Case Studies in Social Psychology” cites the Little Rascals case as a costly abandonment of rationality. “Like rising floodwaters,” the authors write, “powerful attitudes about child sex abuse swept away critical thinking, lifelong friendships and even established legal standards.” Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University who helped create the 1994 revision of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, has expressed shame for not refuting “satanic ritual abuse” therapy and for not defending “the completely innocent day care workers who were indicted and often convicted of ridiculous charges that could not possibly have any foundation in reality.”

Last year the National Association of Attorneys General, of which Stein was incoming president, released a report acknowledging that the children in the decades-ago McMartin Preschool and Kelly Michaels cases “were interviewed multiple times by parents and different investigators using unreliable and often coercive techniques. In both cases, the testimony of the children at the day cares was often bizarre and was eventually discredited.”

The prosecution of the Edenton Seven clearly belongs in the same category.

Most recently comes the poignant and authoritative “Twenty-One Boxes: Robin’s Story and the Tragedy of the Edenton Seven “ by Betsy Hester and former defendant Robin Couto.

With each passing year, the absurdity of the Little Rascals charges has become more obvious. But no admission of error has ever come from prosecutors, police, interviewers or parents.

Even after all the defendants were released, Assistant District Attorney Nancy Lamb bitterly continued to insist they were guilty.

In 2007, Attorney General Roy Cooper granted the defendants in the Duke lacrosse case a “statement of innocence.” In 2012, Gov. Bev Perdue pardoned the Wilmington 10. But the Edenton Seven have never received exoneration from the state.

Stein may well be inclined to respond, “Not my job.” But one of his predecessors, Michael Easley, did indeed consider it his job to robustly disapprove the overturning of the Kelly and Wilson convictions: “The decision casts no doubt on the credibility of the children or the integrity of the investigation . . . In both cases, the facts supporting the convictions were clear and overwhelming. [The Court of Appeals] disregarded these facts and misapplied the law.”

Easley’s knee-jerk defense of the prosecution should not remain the State of North Carolina’s last word on this case. Justice has yet to be rendered to the Edenton Seven. Mr. Attorney General, declare them innocent.