The Cheit pushback

Ross Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2014) is the principal scholarly challenge to the strong-skeptical consensus that emerged from the reversals. Cheit, a political scientist at Brown University, argues that the consensus account — that essentially all of the panic-era prosecutions were unfounded — overcorrects on specific cases where the evidence was substantively stronger than the skeptical narrative credits.

Cheit’s central case is the Country Walk prosecution of Frank Fuster in Florida. Fuster’s conviction has not been overturned; he remains incarcerated; the evidence in that case, as Cheit reconstructs it from the trial record, included physical findings and testimony developed without the most criticised interviewing techniques. Cheit argues, with detailed engagement with the record, that the case does not fit the panic-era pattern of suggestion-driven prosecution. He extends the analysis to specific features of several other cases, arguing in each that the dismissive consensus has obscured evidentiary substance.

The disciplined treatment of Cheit’s work is to acknowledge both its specific case-level scholarship and its bounded scope. Cheit identifies real problems in how the cases have been retrospectively characterised in popular and journalistic coverage. He does not — and does not claim to — establish the existence of the alleged organised satanic-cult network. The position that emerges from engaging Cheit seriously: the panic as social phenomenon was real and largely unfounded; the alleged national network was not supported by evidence; individual case merits vary, and a small number of cases include evidentiary substance that the strong-skeptical consensus has tended to overlook.