Thurston County ritual abuse case

rdf:langString Thurston County ritual abuse case

rdf:langString The Thurston County ritual abuse case was a 1988 case in which Paul Ingram, county Republican Party Chairman of Thurston County, Washington and the Chief Civil Deputy of the Sheriff's department, was accused by his daughters of sexual abuse, by at least one daughter of satanic ritual abuse, and later accused by his son in 1996 of abusing him between the ages of 4 to 12. Ingram initially said he had no memory of such events, but said that he might have repressed memories of such an event, and investigators attempted to help him to "recover" these memories. Based on memories "recovered" during his investigations, he pled guilty, and his confession subsequently grew increasingly elaborate, detailed, and fantastical, while Ingram's young daughters and their friends subsequently accused a sizable number of Ingram's fellow Sheriff's department employees of ritual abuse. He now maintains he is innocent and alleges his confession was coerced. Ingram's daughters had been exposed to a church counselor who utilized methods based on recovered-memory therapy (RMT), a discredited pseudoscientific method of psychological examination that has been shown to produce false memories under suggestion. Ingram's interrogators similarly relied on RMT methods to produce his confession. Ingram tried to withdraw his plea and requested a trial or clemency, but his requests were refused. According to the appeals court, the original trial had conducted "an extensive evidentiary hearing on the coercion issue" and found that Ingram was unable to prove his claims of coercion, a situation his appeals did not change. Ingram was released in 2003 after serving his sentence. The case has mistakenly been cited by proponents of the idea that satanic ritual abuse actually exists as proof because Ingram was found guilty; in reality, Ingram was never charged with "satanic ritual abuse" but with six counts of rape in the third degree, and received an unusually long sentence – rather than a maximum of three and a half years, he was sentenced to twenty years. The "satanic" aspects of the case were dropped by the prosecution although the appearance of Satan was integral to Ingram's confessions. Paul Ingram's "recovered" memories, which were often incompatible with each other and universally uncorroborated by physical evidence, are today often cited as examples of false memory syndrome. The case has also been compared to the Salem witch trials.