‘Outright Fabrications’

A superior court judge ruled last week that prosecutors withheld favorable evidence from a Madison County man’s trial on child sexual abuse charges, including summaries of interviews with the alleged victims that contained “outright fabrications.” 

But the judge ultimately upheld the man’s conviction, saying none of that evidence would have made a difference in the jury’s decision. 

As we wrote in August, Junior Chandler was one of more than 150 people caught up in a flurry of child sexual abuse cases in the 1980s. Prosecutors alleged Chandler abused children he transported to daycare. His attorneys with the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke University School of Law say the medical evidence used against him is antiquated, and that the children were likely manipulated into making false statements.

Chandler was initially charged with 21 counts of child sexual abuse, and tried by prosecutors with the Madison County District Attorney’s Office and the N.C. Attorney General’s Office. A jury convicted him of 12 counts of child sexual abuse in 1987, and he is currently serving two life terms, plus 21 years. Chandler has maintained his innocence and has appealed his conviction multiple times in the last 37 years. 

Superior Court Judge Gary Gavenus held a three-day evidentiary hearing last August on his latest appeal, filed in 2019. In his February 8 decision, Gavenus largely agreed that prosecutors violated their obligation to turn over evidence that could have helped Chandler’s defense, including summaries of interviews with five children and the transcripts of those interviews. Linda King, a social worker for the Madison County Department of Social Services, wrote the summaries, and then she and two medical experts testified from those summaries at trial. 

Gavenus wrote that the summaries “included outright fabrications of details from the original interviews.” Some omitted instances where the children either denied any abuse happened, or that Chandler 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 to 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 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.” Also missing were statements from witnesses who rode the bus but didn’t see any abuse, witnesses who lived near a dam where authorities said some of the abuse happened but never saw Chandler’s van there, and one witness who said Chandler was never late in getting her child home. 

Gavenus noted that prosecutors didn’t turn over statements from investigators who mentioned the possibility that some of the children might have been abused by family members, not Chandler. 

But Gavenus said prosecutors’ failure to turn over evidence isn’t enough to overturn Chandler’s conviction, and that the testimony from the three witnesses may have left out some context but was not false. He also said that prosecutors presented enough evidence for the jury to convict. 

Jim Coleman, director of Duke’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic and one of Chandler’s attorneys, said he was astonished at the ruling. 

“When you read the order, until you get to his final conclusions… one would think we had won,” he said. 

Jamie Lau, who also represented Chandler, said it frustrates him that Gavenus could ignore overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. But he still believes that there is a chance to exonerate Chandler, who plans to ask the N.C. Court of Appeal to review Gavenus’ ruling. 

“Once we get a judge who understands the law and applies it, we’re optimistic and confident that Junior Chandler’s innocence will be recognized and his freedom gained.”

—Michael Hewlett

---

Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here to get our weekly courts newsletter.

---

AG’s Race Heats Up

North Carolina has never had an attorney general who isn’t white and male, a fact that is certainly not lost on Durham District Attorney Satana Deberry.

“Why is it always a few white guys who get to decide what happens to the rest of us?” asked Deberry, who is Black and queer. 

Deberry is running in the Democratic primary for AG against U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson, who was redistricted out of his congressional seat late last year. Jackson has raised significantly more money and attracted high-profile endorsements—not to mention his 3.5 million TikTok followers who are already gunning for him to run for president.

As far as name recognition goes, Jackson is about as formidable a candidate as one could encounter in a state primary. But that hasn’t deterred Deberry.

Prosecutorial Discretion

Satana Deberry became Durham’s DA on promises to bring progressive policies to criminal justice. Her bid for the Democratic attorney general nomination tests how far that can take her. 

Deberry was elected Durham’s DA in 2018 as part of the wave of “progressive prosecutors” around the country, bringing her background in criminal defense and housing law to bear in the new role. As she seeks higher office, she’ll have to explain the choices she’s made in Durham to a much larger audience. 

---

If The Suit Fits

N.C. Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. has taken a different tack in addressing a request that he recuse himself from a rehearing on the long-running Leandro case.

Instead of making the decision himself, as he did in 2022 when asked to recuse himself from the three-decades-old lawsuit over K-12 education funding, Berger is seeking a decision from the full state Supreme Court.

The question is whether Berger Jr. has a conflict of interest hearing a case in which his father Phil Berger Sr., president pro tempore of the state Senate, is a party to the suit.

That was the allegation made in a motion filed November 23 by attorneys representing the Hoke County Board of Education and others arguing that schools have been so inadequately funded that it violates the state constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic education.”

In 2022, Berger decided himself that he could be impartial in the case, even though his father was named.

The case has had many twists and turns over the decades. It can be dizzying to keep up with all the rulings and various iterations of the lawsuit.

One key decision was made November 4, 2022, when Democrats held a 4-3 majority on the state’s high court. The justices decided along party lines that lawmakers must fund two years of a $1.7 billion comprehensive remediation plan ordered by a Superior Court judge.

Now that the seven-member bench has a Republican majority, that decision is being revisited with a hearing scheduled for February 22.

GOP legislative leaders have argued that the General Assembly, not the courts, holds the purse strings for the state budget. In their appeal that launched the rehearing, they argued the court did not have jurisdiction to make the 2022 ruling.

In his February 5 order asking for input from his colleagues, Berger Jr. explained his different route in a case the Supreme Court agreed to rehear nearly a year after Republicans gained their 5-2 majority.

Berger said “there has not been a change in the circumstances, the law, the Code of Judicial Conduct, or the administrative orders of this court since denial of the previous motion that would warrant a different outcome here.”

Despite that, Berger Jr. said, “this Court should strive to fortify public trust, and unilateral action in this matter could undermine public confidence.”

If the court breaks along party lines and the four other Republican justices rule that Berger Jr. can be impartial, he might curry favor among some for allowing his colleagues to have a say.

And if the full court decides it’s best for him to recuse himself, that could have implications on other cases in which his father, one of the most powerful Republican lawmakers in the General Assembly, is named.

Berger Jr. is not the only justice to face a recusal request in the Leandro case.

Berger Sr. and other GOP lawmakers who asked for the rehearing have asked Justice Anita Earls, one of two Democrats,  to step aside because she was briefly involved with the case in 2005 as one of several attorneys representing a group of public school students, their parents, and the Charlotte branch of the NAACP. She was asked in 2022 to recuse herself and did not..

In a 13-page order entered January 31, Earls said she was “confident” that her work would “not impair my ability to impartially decide this appeal.” She said that while she did sign complaints, she did not “personally participate in that case,” appear in court for the intervenors, or “make any important business decisions about the litigation.”

—Anne Blythe

---

Have any suggestions for improving this newsletter or stories we should look into? Email us at courts@theassemblync.com.

---

Around the State

---

---