Debbie Nathan, author of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witchhunt, weighs in with this comment:

These phantasmagoric stories should have been recognized for the myths that they were. Instead, myth was taken literally, particularly by people who truly thought they were rescuing women and children from eons of real abuse in our culture. This tragic mix of good intentions and wild hysteria has its legacy in the countless men and women still imprisoned today because of false child abuse charges.

One of the first big cases was the Rodney King trial. Anyone who watched the complete video on Court TV could see how the facts were manipulated. And to this day, most of the public do not know that the major evidence in the trial was not the video, but the testimony of the man who had been a passenger in King’s car that night.

in the O.J. Simpson trial, The media had Simpson convicted in the public’s eyes within hours. The investigation totally botched by the influencing scrutiny of the media, so that many leads were never investigate due to the fact that the police did not want to look bad for the media. So, to this day the only person that really knows who kills Simpsons wife is the killer, be that O.J. or someone else.

And then there was the case of the daycare, where the operators were accused of child molestation and Satanic rituals in a secret underground room. Many of the accused spent several years in prison, in spite of all the testimonies being proven false.

Here in Nashville, there was a case where a Real Estate attorney was sentenced to life prison for killing his wife, in spite of the fact that it was never proven that she was dead. Her body was never found, there was no sign of a struggle.

Consider the Ramsey family, and all they endured.

The problem is, most oftnen the truth is boring and doesn’t help the ratings.

With such a narrow view of what nature can do, they had no choice but to blame the supernatural for the visions and “possessions”.

I’d like to think that we have a better grasp, now. But apparently human nature doesn’t change.

True, Christmas decorations and Christianity do not cause any of this. It is the inability of people to think outside certain narrowly-defined boxes. The chief problem with a religious approach to jurisprudence is the inability to put some of the principle witnesses on a stand to cross-examine—god and the devil.

My point with the Christmas stuff is that these things come as a package. Most people can certainly make a distinction. But, for better or worse, many can’t and some of those people seem to be in law enforcement. Better to draw a clear line.

All your other points are true enough. We need to try, though, to eliminate those things which can lead to the kind of boneheaded errors that produce witch hunts.

There is an interesting element to the Salem Witch trials which often gets overlooked. It got as bad as it did because a longheld legal tradition which prohibited “noncorporeal testimony” from the courtroom was set aside. In other words, “ghosts” and spirit testimony was, till then, inadmissible. Once that barrier was removed, the insanity took hold.

Is it jucier to cover a trial from that angle of guilt? Or do we have a natural bias to assume the accused is guilty? Why is that bias so hard to shake? It seems to me that similar errors occur even when the crime doesn’t involve some satanist ritual. It seems to me that, Christmas decorations, puritanical belief systems or not, people jump to some terrible, stubborn conclusions.