President: Michael Snedeker, Esq., is a criminal-defense lawyer who has successfully handled the appeals of several ritual-abuse cases in California. He is the author of the California State Prisoners Handbook and is co-author, with Debbie Nathan, of Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt.
Treasurer: Francis X. Kane is a retired accountant who spent over 30 years doing financial management and internal auditing for GTE Sylvania. He became involved in false accusation issues in 1991, when an adult daughter was pressured by a therapist into "recovering" memories of being sexually abused as a baby. The daughter left therapy and got better, retracting her accusation, and making media appearances with her father. Mr. Kane did volunteer work for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation , and is currently their Massachusetts contact person. For years he has provided personal support for the falsely accused and their families -- both in Massachusetts (the Amiraults, the Souzas, Bernard Baran, Robert Halsey, Bruce Clairmont) and elsewhere (Rocco Ellis, Bruce Perkins, the Kellers, Frank Fuster, Paul Ingram, the Wenatchee defendants, etc.).
Clerk: Hugo S. Cunningham, formerly a military intelligence analyst and software developer, currently maintains web sites on Soviet history http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/ and false accusations at http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/witch/. Mr. Cunningham is a long time supporter of the Amirault family and of Bernard Baran.
Directors
Dr. Emily Horowitz
is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, NY. She has worked as a researcher at The New York Academy of Medicine, where her work focused on racial and ethnic disparities in the use of hospitals, and at the Center for Court Innovation, where her research focused on the study and evaluation of alternative-to-incarceration programs. She is currently teaching a course on wrongful convictions and working on a textbook on the subject.Judith Levine is a journalist, essayist, and author who has written about sex, gender, and families for over two decades. Her work has appeared in Ms., nerve.com, and My Generation. She is a founder of the National Writers Union and the feminist group, No More Nice Girls. She is the author of My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men, and the Dilemmas of Gender and Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex. Harmful to Minors won the 2003 Los Angeles Times book prize in the current-interest category.
Debbie Nathan is a journalist who received the Free Press Association's H.L. Mencken award for her reporting of the daycare hysteria in The Village Voice and elsewhere. Nathan was the first journalist of national stature to write critically about the daycare cases. She is the author of Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border and co-author, with Mike Snedeker, of Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt.
Mark Pendergrast is an independent scholar and writer. He is the author of Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives; For God, Country and Coca Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It; Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed the World ; and Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair With Reflection. Victims of Memory is an in-depth account of the devastation caused by false memories of sexual abuse and recovered-memory therapy. It also covers the day care hysteria cases. Mr. Pendergrast lost contact with his two adult daughters, based on "recovered memory" therapy, and became determined to understand the social phenomena that was destroying so many families. Scientific American called Victims of Memory "an impressive display of scholarship [which] demonstrates a laudable ability to lay out all sides of the argument."
Susan P. Robbins, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work. She holds licenses as an advanced clinical social worker (LMSW-ACP) and licensed chemical dependency counselor (LCDC) in Texas and a Diplomate in Forensic Social Work from the American Board of Forensic Social Workers. Working on a contract basis with the Texas Protective Services Training Institute, she provides training for protective service workers, supervisors, lawyers and judges on False Allegations of Sexual Abuse and also serves as a consultant and expert witness in this area. She has also given presentations on this topic to the National Association of Social Workers, Texas Chapter and to the National Defender Investigator Association. She is a well-published author whose articles about false allegations based on recovered memories appear in the Encyclopedia of Social Work, the Social Workers' Desk Reference and in Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Service.
Advisors
Donald S. Connery is a Harvard-educated author and independent journalist who worked around the world for such leading news organizations as Armed Forces Radio Service, United Press and, principally, Time & Life magazines. After years of foreign correspondence from New Delhi, Tokyo, Moscow and London, he returned with his family to the U.S. in 1968. Connecticut's landmark Peter Reilly wrong-man case in 1973-77 shifted his focus from international affairs to miscarriages of justice. He has since investigated and reported a series of false-confession cases from Alabama and Virginia to Connecticut and and Illinois, where he serves on the advisory board of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School. He is the author of The Scandinavians, The Irish, One American Town, Guilty Until Proven Innocent, The Inner Source and Convicting the Innocent. A work-in-progress will relate his encounters with "America's criminally unjust criminal justice system."
Dr. Robyn Dawes is the Charles J. Queenan, Jr. University Professor of Psychology in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and a widely recognized researcher on psychological evaluation and decision making. He is the author of Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Based on Myth, and Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally. In 1990, Dr. Dawes won the William James book award for Rational Choice from the American Psychological Association.
Dr. Evan Harrington is a social psychologist specializing in the areas of forensic and health psychology. He has taught at New York University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and is currently writing a textbook on forensic psychology. While a graduate student at Temple University Dr. Harrington became interested in the debate over recovered and false memories of child abuse. He conducted extensive research at the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia, which he presented at the 1995 NATO Advanced Studies Institute international conference on traumatic memories. Dr. Harrington has written and lectured on beliefs in conspiracy theories among members of far-right organizations and also conducts research on the nocebo effect (the negative placebo). He is the author most recently of The Social Psychology of Hatred, an article to be published shortly in the Journal of Hate Studies.
Dr. Richard Leo is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and an Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Leo is widely recognized as a leading national and international authority on the subjects of police interrogation practices, Miranda requirements, coercive persuasion, false confessions, and miscarriages of justice. In the last decade, Dr. Leo has authored more than two dozen publications on these subjects and published them in a variety of leading academic journals, including The Journal of Criminology and Criminal Law, The Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, The American Sociologist, The Minnesota Law Review, and The Michigan Law Review.
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California - Irvine. She holds appointments in the Departments of Criminology, Law & Society and in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior. Dr. Loftus is an internationally acknowledged expert in memory and eyewitness testimony. She is the author or co-author of several books -- including Eyewitness Testimony, Memory, Cognitive Processes, Witness for the Defense, and The Myth of Repressed Memory . She has published hundreds of articles and chapters. She has received honorary degrees from Miami University (Ohio); Leiden University (the Netherlands); the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; the University of Portsmouth, England; and Haifa University in Israel. In 2001, she received the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society. Dr. Loftus was listed as one of the Review of General Psychology's 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Dr. Loftus was the highest ranked woman in the list. Dr. Loftus has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science, and the American Philosophical Society.
Dr. Debra Poole is a Professor of Psychology at Central Michigan University. She is an international authority on children’s memory and the limitations of children’s eyewitness testimony. She has presented her research at two international NATO Advanced Studies Institutes and was an invited attendee at a 1998 think tank in Sweden involving 24 international experts on investigative interviewing, funded in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She is co-author of the book Investigative Interviews of Children: A Guide for Helping Professionals. In 2000, she received the Governor’s Award from the Michigan Family Independent Agency for drafting the state’s forensic interviewing protocol.
Harvey Silverglate , Esq. is a criminal-defense lawyer and civil-liberties litigator and a partner in the firm of Silverglate & Good. Mr. Silverglate writes regular columns for the Boston Phoenix and The National Law Journal, and has taught at Harvard Law School. In 1971 he was admitted to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court and has been admitted to the Bars of six Circuit Courts of Appeal, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the US Court of Military Appeals, and others. Mr. Silverglate is a past President of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. He is co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses and a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education , a civil liberties organization devoted to academic freedom issues.
Dr. Carol Tavris is a writer, lecturer, and social psychologist whose career has been devoted to educating the public about the importance of scientific and critical thinking in psychology. She is the author of Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, The Mismeasure of Woman, and Psychobabble and Biobunk: Using Psychology to Think Critically About Issues in the News. She is also the co-author of three psychology textbooks. She has written hundreds of articles and book reviews for a wide variety of magazines, including The New York Times, Discover, Science Digest, Harper's, Geo, Redbook, Woman's Day, and New York. She has given many addresses and workshops on psychological science versus pseudoscience for judges, attorneys, mediators, and mental-health professionals, including the Council of Chief Judges annual meeting. Dr. Tavris is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a charter Fellow of the American Psychological Society; on the board of the Council for Scientific Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry; and on the editorial board of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
Dr. Leonore Tiefer is a feminist and psychologist who has specialized in sexuality for 30 years. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry at both the New York University School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and has a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. In recent years, Dr. Tiefer has written widely about the medicalization of men's and women's sexuality [ http://www.fsd-alert.org ], e.g., Sex is Not a Natural Act (2nd edition, 2004) and A New View of Women's Sexual Problems (with Ellyn Kaschak, 2001). Dr. Tiefer has received professional awards and held office in various groups. She has been on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition against Censorship for over 10 years.
Dr. James Wood teaches in the psychology department at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has done groundbreaking work on children's suggestibility, including experiments based on the content of the McMartin children interviews. His work for the past few years has focused on exposing the Rorschach test as pseudoscience. He is on the editorial board of APSAC's journal on child maltreatment. He has done research on the way children in incestuous family situations typically disclose their abuse to child protective services investigators (he has found that these children tend to be quite forthcoming, compared to, say, how Roland Summit used to describe them as trying to keep it a secret and needing prolonged prompting). He has also studied the behavior of child protection bureaucracies in citywide systems.