The Valerie Carlton Case...Again

In 2010, I wrote a number of posts regarding the false charges against Valerie Carlton in Harford County, Maryland, home of the infamous prosecutor Joseph Casilly, who once tried to have a man put into prison for 15 years because he had the audacity to film a cop sticking a gun in his face.

When faced with the reality that Carlton was not guilty of child molestation, Casilly suddenly dropped the charges (after holding Carlton in jail for 13 months), but kept a misdemeanor charge against her for "assaulting a prison guard." Unfortunately, she recently was arrested in New York, which is trying to extradite her to Maryland to stand trial for this misdemeanor.

The video of the alleged assault is shown in this link, but although the images that I saw were not very clear, it is clear that if anyone is being assaulted in this video, it is Carlton, not the guard. (I must admit that I was brought up in an era that men who physically attacked women -- and especially women smaller than them -- were considered to be utter scum. Today, police beat up women all the time and are called "heroes.")

This is a very, very disturbing case on many levels. First, Casilly piled up 28 felony charges against Carlton, having her held on $10 million bond, and then he suddenly dropped all of them, which tells me that he had no evidence at the beginning and simply lied to a judge and grand jury. Second, while she was in jail, Casilly made sure her child was taken away from her and put into foster care. The child then died while in foster care, and this account explains how Casilly made sure that the officials at the Harford County Detention Center furthered the psychological torture of this woman:

Valerie was informed of her baby's death while she was in jail, but the prosecutor arranged that the Chaplain was not permitted to perform this duty; instead it was done by an employee of the Sheriff's office who brutally announced that the baby was dead, and then had Valerie strapped into a medieval torture de!=vice, called a "restraint chair," so that she choked on her own mucus as she wept and tried to pray for her dead baby. The Sheriff's department claimed, in writing, that Valerie was "talking in tongues" because she was praying in Hebrew. An employee of the Sheriff's Department apparently told this nonsense to the ex-husband's family, who spread the rumor that Valerie was insane because of the way she responded to the death of her baby.

So, as you can see, this case is far from over. Once again, we see a prosecutor who knows he will face no sanctions in Maryland for his misconduct. We also see the system turned in its full fury against someone who is not a criminal.

Like it or not, this is the country in which we live, and from what I can see, Americans are quite happy to accept what is happening -- as long as it happens to someone else and not themselves.

Not a Good Day for Prosecutors

Everyone once in a while, even prosecutors have a tough day, and today (Monday, September 27) was one of them. I begin with the dismissal of felony "wiretapping" charges in Harford County, Maryland, in which one of the country's most abusive prosecutors, Joseph Casilly, took it on the chin. A circuit court judge dismissed charges against Anthony Graber, who had recorded a traffic stop with his helmet cam. (Graber was stopped for traffic violations, and recorded the whole proceedings, and then put it on the Internet.)

Casilly, who was responsible for the false prosecution of Valerie Carlton in a case that had a lot of similarities to that of Tonya Craft (except Carlton was jailed for 13 months before Casilly dropped the child molestation charges), had charged Graber under Maryland's vague "wiretapping" law. In my view, this "law" exists solely to protect corrupt government officials from citizens who might secretly record the officials while they are engaging in extortion or worse. After all, if it is illegal to secretly record a government official committing a crime, then that is one more privilege that they have over the "mundanes" who are not employed by the state. Judge Emory A. Pitt, Jr., actually demonstrated some understanding of the law, something that escapes most prosecutors.

On another happy note, Kenneth "The Prize" Kratz, the Wisconsin DA who apparently gets his jollies by "sexting" crime victims, is going to resign. After the Wisconsin state bar refused to discipline him, the state's governor, Jim Doyle, decided to find a way to remove this miscreant and now Kratz is leaving office and his "six-figure" salary.

Can Kratz make it as an attorney in the real world? We shall see. If there were justice, he would be disbarred.

My last note deals with the suicide of a federal prosecutor, someone who was part of the crooked prosecution last year of the late Ted Stevens, then a U.S. Senator from Alaska. Nick Marsh, a DOJ lawyer with the misnamed "Public Integrity" office, was one of the prosecutor under investigation for alleged criminal conduct in that case, and apparently he killed himself last weekend.

I hate to say it, but the "strain" of what surely will be a whitewashed "investigation" is NOTHING like the strain that prosecutors put on innocent people every day. Marsh was out to destroy Sen. Stevens, and did not care if he had to lie to do it, and I find it ironic that he was not able to withstand what many Americans have had to endure because of people like Marsh. As I noted on a post on the Lew Rockwell blog, had the guy showed integrity a year ago, he would not have been in this situation.

Yes, I guess I feel sorry for his family, although Marsh's suicide to me is like the suicide of Adolph Hitler or Joseph Goebbels. The world is better off without people like that. And, yes, I mean it when I include Marsh in that mix, for Marsh was part of a governmental regime that has declared war on decent, honest people. He believed he was immune to the law, and I guess he was wrong.

Tonya Craft and Valerie Carlton in Perspective: The Media

[Update, Wednesday, July 7, 9:25 AM]: We are on the road again this morning, but I do need to make one important point, and that was that the coverage of the local media in the Chattanooga area (minus Channel 9) was pretty darn good, especially when one compares the coverage with that of the Baltimore area on Valerie Carlton.

So, what does that tell us? Maybe the people of Chattanooga "learn more" than the supposedly more "sophisticated" people of the Baltimore-DC area. Point to ponder.
[End Update]

In 1995, economist Robert Lucas won the Nobel Prize in economics for his promotion of the theory of Rational Expectations, which is based upon a belief that people change their behavior and their expectations when events prove that original worldview incorrect. (Because "RadEx" is mathematically-based, the changes come instantaneously and not slowly over time.)

At one level, I can appreciate the theory, although I do think it has its own set of flaws. Nonetheless I have observed partial "RadEx" in the way that true professionals handle accusations of child sexual molestation. After the disasters of the 1980s and 1990s, in which "therapists" and "investigators" used highly-suspect interviewing techniques to draw lurid stories of molestation that should have been suspect on their face. After numerous innocent people were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, and after the appeals and state supreme courts overturned most of those convictions, the professionals, such as Dr. William Bernet and Dr. Nancy Aldridge, worked hard to develop consistent and truth-based standards to try to avoid the false accusations and to find if actual molestation really occurred.

However, there is one institution that, like the Bourbons of France who "learned nothing and forgot nothing," continues to jump on the accusation bandwagons: the media. In Tonya Craft's case, we saw the local media (and especially WTVC, Channel 9) continue to run right over the cliff as soon as the accusations against Ms. Craft were made public.

(WRCB, Channel 3, was a notable exception in its coverage, but that was because the news team had some good leadership that was familiar with how false accusations are made, and took a much more even-handed approach, something that angered the prosecutors, Len Gregor and Chris Arnt.)

In other words, at least until the trial, when the state's case was shown to be an empty box, most of the local media pretty much repeated what the police and prosecutors were saying. Unfortunately, what we saw in Chattanooga is the rule, not the exception.

Valerie Carlton was charged with a number of sexual abuse crimes in a case that in many ways paralleled that of Ms. Craft. (You can read the parallels in this link.) Unlike Ms. Craft, the 28 counts disappeared before she was to come to trial, and you can read more about her case from a supporter here. Of course, this was not before "Head State’s Attorney Joseph Cassilly of Harford County, Maryland, gave lurid state­ments to the press a year ago describing Carlton as a dangerous neighborhood female pedophile."

Not surprisingly, the Baltimore-based television media jumped on the story and echoed the prosecutor's claims as though they were issued ex cathedra. WBAL-TV declared this:

The Harford County state's attorney's office said Carlton has lived in the Joppa community for 15 years and the office is concerned there could be more victims.

"Since the victims are from her neighborhood, there may be other victims in the neighborhood we haven't identified yet or haven't come forward. It's more of a precautionary matter," said county state's attorney Joseph Cassilly.

The parents of one of the girls spoke with 11 News just in case there were other victims out there.

"(We're) hurt, furious, revengeful, that's about all I can say," the parent said. The parent's name is being withheld to protect the victim. (Emphasis mine)

WJZ (Baltimore's CBS affiliate) was no better. Its original broadcast screamed out the same damning material:

A 40-year-old mother of a young girl has been indicted for 28 counts, including sexual child abuse, attempted child kidnapping and extortion of two girls, ages five and six. One victim is a relative. She is also charged with reckless endangerment for allegedly providing tainted breast milk to a newborn baby.

The state's attorney says this is an unusual case, since the defendant, Valerie Carlton, and the two victims are all females.

"I'm so angry. This is disgusting. This is disgusting that this woman can do that to two children," said Barbara McNamara.

"It was a shock, because it's somebody's mom, more than anything else. 'Cause normally it's a dad thing," said Carla Slunt.

Slunt and other neighbors knew about the allegations from other parents. Her daughter was not allowed to go near Carlton or her house. The investigation has been going on for at least six months.

Investigators believe all of the abuse happened in Carlton's home. The reason this investigation was launched is a neighbor called the child advocacy hotline with a complaint and a school official noticed that one of the young girls behaved strangely in the classroom.

Carlton is accused of committing the offenses from January 2008 through April 2009 at her home.

"It's difficult to say with a child, how much they remember, how much they associate but we are aware that at least one of the victims was having issues with respect to dealing with this," said Harford County State's Attorney Joe Cecilly.

Prosecutors believe there could be other victims. (Emphasis mine)

Notice that not one time do the reporters use the proper term "alleged victims," as though it was a foregone conclusion that Ms. Carlton was guilty of all charges (and maybe even more). More telling is the fact that a search of the websites of those TV station sites does not have a single mention of the charges being dismissed.

In other words, the media was quite happy to declare Ms. Carlton to be guilty, but did not have even the decency to report on the aftermath. (Then the mainstream media [MSM] people wonder why the rest of us hold them in such contempt.)

I don't have any good answers as to why this is the case, except to say that the MSM is a product of the Progressive Era, and the modern MSM is populated with people who fit that category. In that view, government officials (as long as they are from the "correct" political party, or have "Progressive" attitudes) can do no wrong. All too often, MSM "news" is little more than a government press release, and the Carlton case demonstrates that very sad fact.

For all of the "watchdog of government" we hear from journalists and the J-school crowd, the MSM is a partner of government, and some of the worst victims of this unholy alliance are those who are falsely accused of crimes. Yes, there are heroic exceptions, such as we saw from much of the Chattanooga-area media during the Craft trial, when reporters refused to be stenographers for the prosecution (with the exception of Channel 9), but the general rule is that the media will run over the cliff when false accusations come about, and especially false accusations about child molestation.

As one who followed the MSM during the infamous Duke Lacrosse case, it really has hit me that unlike the real professionals who interview children, most journalists (like the "interviewers" of the Children's Advocacy Centers around the country) simply learned nothing from what happened two decades ago. Thus, they are ready to jump on the most lurid and unbelievable stories and ask no hard questions of the authorities. (It seems that no one in the Baltimore-area media is willing to question the prosecution tactics and how these false charges came about in the first place. And then people wonder why we have so much prosecutorial and police misconduct.)

Of course, as we have seen with the media in the Carlton case, few journalists even have the decency to follow up when the facts don't fit the original allegations. I guess we can be thankful for what we saw in Chattanooga, but that was the exception to the rule, and a sad exception it is.

So, a woman is falsely accused and spends more than a year in jail, is subject to beatings and other humiliations in large part because the media didn't care about the truth.