Additional Varieties of Temporal Relations

Sometimes it can be of vital importance to ask on what day of the week an event had supposedly occurred. The alibi case (chapter 27) is a good example. Of course, fallible recollections after a long period would not often prove much. But Betsy's recollections were tested within days and weeks.

In the underground case the mother said that, when Vessela was 4-6 months old, the father had repeatedly and in the mother's presence threatened to perform sexual intercourse with the baby. Despite this story, the mother also said that she could give no reason for her feeling that Vessela had been abused when she was 5 years old. Indeed, the mother did not even suspect the father of sexual abuse when Vessela lived with him for 7-9 months immediately after the divorce.

A dangerous variant of temporal relations occurs when a judge interrupts the cross examination of a witness. In the fortune-teller case the judge who was the chairman of the court did acquit the defendant. It was nevertheless his fault that the three lay judges voted for conviction. The psychiatrist who was also Malvina's psychotherapist committed perjury. He did retract his false information, when the defence counsel threatened to report him for perjury. But because of the interference of the chairman, none of the lay judges detected this retraction despite its length and its clear content.

Moreover, when she was questioned, the social worker realised that she had made a serious mistake in her affidavit [though in good faith according to my assessment]. She was on the wedge of correcting this piece of faulty information, when the judge forbade further comments on this topic.

Concerning temporal relations I shall also point out the strange function of March 1st in the morphological case. Originally Inga-Lisa told to the police that the sexual abuse stopped on this date. When later reminded of it by the police officer, she thought at first that she had made a mistake about the date. But later she recalled that something else happened on March 1st. Her stepfather had called her friend "Damned moron!" The girls had considered whether to report this to the police, because Inga-Lisa wanted to "Hit back".

It is curious that no police officer, prosecutor or judge noticed anything strange about this inclusion in the abuse narrative about a date that clearly belonged to a completely different pattern of events.

The reader may for him- or herself juxtapose and scrutinise many other temporal relations in the above brief summaries of other cases included in chapter 27-35.

But one pattern which was mentioned in chapter 35, needs to be repeated here, together with the fact that many judges will repeatedly encounter it. The child was in excellent health during the period when sexual abuse (allegedly) occurred. But the child got manifestly ill when sexual abuse (allegedly) stopped. This pattern is particularly prominent in the Californian McMartin Case, the Elvira case, the above mentioned virus case, and in many others.

I take for granted that few readers will criticise me for not having provided an exhaustive analysis of the evidence of the Danish Vadstrupgård case. Like the United States, Denmark is a country in which the rights of defence counsels are curtailed in so many ways that a first-rate defence is often impossible.

It is a well-known pattern in many countries that a preschool teacher can be convicted of physically impossible acts because of a mass media craze, rather than on the strength of legal evidence. This was what happened to a teacher at a preschool in Vadstrupgård. Some critical analyses of this case have been published, notably Blädel (1999) and Held (2006). But Rantorp (2000) was also occasioned by this trial, and her book reveals that the labour union of which the convicted man was a member supported him and the facts, rather than the prejudices of the case.

However, the legal system in Denmark is very secretive. The personnel at the preschool knew which teacher was convicted. But the personnel never learned what children had [allegedly] been abused. They have publicly regretted that, because they thought that if they had known it, they might give these children some specific help.

At the very same time the parents of those children who were supposed to have been abused, asserted that they had repeatedly complained to the preschool about signs of sexual abuse (e.g., red and swollen anuses).

This is a unique feature, which I have so far only encountered in the Vadstrupgård case. If the parents had continually complained about exactly those children, then it is impossible for the staff to remain ignorant of the identity of the children who were classified as abuse victims.

It would rather seem as if the parents had in retrospect changed their recollections of what had happened, just like Arthur Janow in the preceding chapter.



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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida