Court of Appeals Hears Junior Chandler Case

On Tuesday, prosecutors argued that a Madison County man’s conviction on child sexual abuse charges should be upheld, despite a judge finding that favorable evidence that could have helped his defense nearly 40 years ago was withheld. 

Junior Chandler, 68, is serving two life terms, plus 21 years, after a jury convicted him in 1987 of five counts of first-degree sex offense, six counts of taking indecent liberties with a child, and one count of crimes against nature. Chandler has maintained his innocence. 

Superior Court Judge Gary Gavenus held a three-day evidentiary hearing in August 2023. He issued a ruling six months later upholding the convictions. But Gavenus found that prosecutors had withheld significant favorable evidence from Chandler’s defense attorneys and allowed testimony from interview summaries with alleged victims that contained “outright fabrications.” 

As we wrote in 2023, Chandler is one of more than 150 people who were caught up in a nationwide flurry of child sexual abuse allegations, many at child care centers. At least 70 people were convicted, including in North Carolina’s most high profile case at Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton. But just as quickly as those convictions racked up, most fell apart, either through exonerations or dismissals. 

Chandler is one of the only people who remain in prison. 

Linda King, a social worker with the Madison County Department of Social Services, wrote the summaries of interviews with five alleged victims used at trial, and she and two medical experts testified from those summaries Gavenus found that neither the  summaries nor the full transcripts of those interviews had been turned over to Chandler’s defense attorneys. 

Gavenus wrote that the summaries “included outright fabrications of details from the original interviews,” and had omitted instances where the children either denied any abuse happened or that it was Chandler who abused them.

“Some of the facts that the children were supposed to have provided appear for the first time in the summaries, despite no occurrence in the original transcripts,” Gavenus wrote. “At other points, the witnesses told the jury about statements the children made without prompt, but which the transcripts reveal to be products of the interviewers’ questions.” 

Chandler’s trial attorneys also never got the evaluations of two mentally disabled people who were charged in the case and later entered guilty pleas, which said that the two strongly denied abusing the children and that one was confused while the other was “highly suggestible.” Statements from several other witnesses were also missing. 

“Some of the facts that the children were supposed to have provided appear for the first time in the summaries, despite no occurrence in the original transcripts.”

Superior Court Judge Gary Gavenus

James Coleman, one of Chandler’s current attorneys, has said that Chandler’s previous representation never received an investigative report from the State Bureau of Investigation on a man accused of sexually abusing his three children, including one of the alleged victims in this case. That report was not turned over until 2016. 

Gavenus, however, ultimately ruled that prosecutors still had sufficient evidence to convict Chandler at trial. He also ruled that the testimony from three state witnesses, including King, may have left out some context but was not false. 

The question at the heart of the hearing Tuesday morning was whether the undisclosed evidence would have made a difference at trial. 

Special Deputy Attorney General Sherri Lawrence’s answer was no. Not only did prosecutors have sufficient evidence to convict Chandler, she said, but King and the other two experts testified to exactly what the children said about their abuse. She also pushed back at the idea that the summaries contained fabrications. 

“If the allegation is that these prosecutors and medical experts fabricated these statements, they didn’t do a very good job of it,” Lawrence said. 

Coleman said the full transcripts contained information that was not in the summaries. They also showed how social workers and investigators dominated the interviews with leading questions and pushed the children, who were all under age 5 at the time, to implicate Chandler. 

An SBI agent who investigated the case concluded that at least two of the victims had likely been sexually abused by family members, Coleman said. 

Lawrence also argued that another key piece of evidence was that the therapists who worked with children and their parents noted behavioral changes that indicated abuse. 

At Tuesday’s hearing, North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Donna Stroud said that doesn’t necessarily mean the children were abused. Young children are suggestible, making it possible that after being questioned, they may have come to believe they were abused, she said. 

“I don’t remember my 3rd birthday, but I’ve been told about it many times,” she said. “I think I remember it.”

It’s not clear when the appeals court will render its decision.