Damned Kids

In Brief

What do the Supreme Court, the Elian Gonzales debacle, and witch-fearing seventeeth century New England have in common? They all cede outrageous credibility to what comes from the mouths of babes.

Party On

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The News

5/8/2000 On May 2nd 2000, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn the sex abuse conviction of Scott L Carmell on ground that change in Texas law had made it easier for prosecution to prove its case than at time crime was committed. A victory for part I.9.3 of the US Constitution -- small consolation to the victim.

The U.S. Supreme Court just announced (1 May, 2000) you can't make laws up concerning a case after the crime as committed, better known as ex post facto laws. This was not exactly a new concept; ex post facto law prohibition is in the original Articles of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Clause 3, to get picky about it), but what made it different this time around is that the law in question concerned testimonial.

Usually, ex post facto means that if we wear a nudie ties on Friday and they're made illegal next Monday, we can't get arrested. The Supreme Court now says that if a poodle saw us on vandalizing a tie shop on Friday and on Monday poodles were suddenly given power to testify in court, that particular poodle wouldn't be allowed to finger us, because we committed the crime on Friday, back when poodles got no respect from the law.

What really happened is that the glorious State of Texas said that sex-offense criminals could be put away solely on the testimony of the victim, provided the victim was younger than 14. After 1993, they bumped it up to 18, and one slimy guy tried to argue that since his crimes involved a 15-year old prior to 1993, he should be let off the hook.

Trusting the Kids with the Keys and the Matches

Hey, we're all for convicting sex offenders. But wait a minute - a conviction based solely on the testimony of somebody under 14? Are they nuts? This past month we've been treated to testimonial from a six-year-old who's been so brainwashed he probably doesn't know Disneyland from a rotting mango: Elian Gonzalez. Would you trust him to testify about anything? The kid watched his mom die, has an entire community telling him his homeland sucks, and was subjected to the indignity of a Good Morning America interview[1] wherein he was asked what he likes about Cuba: "Nothing." How about Miami? "Nothing." He also claimed "My mother is probably somewhere in Miami, but she has lost her memory and does not know I am here." Poor, confused kid. As child psychologist[2] Robert R. Butterworth noted,

When relatives fight over custody, they are obviously not going to tell the child that their other parent is wonderful, still loves them and wants to see them. On the contrary, in many cases, the children are told that their other parent is bad, who has abandoned them and could see them at any time if only he wanted to.

It's pretty easy to coerce a child into false testimony. It's also pretty easy for the child to do it himself without very much prompting. Look at, say, Puritanical New Englanders in the seventeenth century. Four unruly kids there, children all of Boston stonemason John Goodwin, wailed and thrashed about in the fall of 1688, complaining loudly of pain situated in various body parts. However, as contemporaries put it, "when the pain is over, they eat, drink, walk, play, laugh as at other times [and] they are generally well at night." Considering that the youngsters were probably beaten soundly on a regular basis,[3] this might be a wholly reasonable way for children to retaliate. Why not freak out? Plenty of grown women did it in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The only reason not to is that overly indoctrinated Puritans might interpret these behaviors as something a little more sinister.

Spooked Handwringers 1, Town Drunks 0

Of course, that's exactly what happened. Whatever Puritan dogma has to say about idle hands (generally bad things), the locals found plenty of time to misinterpret childrens' babbling for attention. Religious types figured these kids were possessed by witches or the devil, and the kids kept acting crazy because it granted them much-needed attention. They'd even put on a goodact in court. It was a right jolly game until the ministers started stringing up local ne'er-do-wells and malefactors by the dozen for no good reason, other than kids out for a lark. Indeed, Goodwin's children received a visit from Cotton Mather, who had a rather significant role in the Salem witch trial a few years later. Mather summarily executed a nearby Irish washerwoman for the tykes' misdemeanors.

Can we expect different behavior from today's kids, who frequently have to deal with two working parents, or perhaps a single-parent household? It seems to us here at History House that children might react in all sorts of unpredictable ways to stress, and trying to interpret those as truth might cause some problems. Kids can give acceptable testimony, but testimony itself is already subjective without passing a pliable toddler's lips. It's bad enough that twenty folks got killed a few hundred years ago based on child testimony in Salem. What's up with laws dooming people through the Texas penal system doing the same?

Footnotes

1. This interview prompted the New York Daily News to write, "As if poor little Elian Gonzalez did not have enough problems, he has now been afflicted with Diane Sawyer."
2. He is also the husband of a prominent maple syrup magnate. What, you've never heard of Mrs. Butterworth?
3. Puritan society filled itself with public impoliteness. The 1648 Lawes and Liberties dictated that public verbal abuse was a crime, and when the din of domestic disputes reached neighbors' ears the case was frequently taken to court. Lawes and Liberties also made it a felony for children to cuss out their parents, whereas yellings and beatings in the reverse direction were perfectly acceptable, even sanctioned. In such an environment, you'd expect kids to freak out.

 
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