Innocent Man Exonerated After False Accusations During Satanic Panic Era

I note with a wild combination of emotions the exoneration of Melvin Quinney. Mr. Quinney was falsely accused of sexual assault and murder during the Satanic Panic of the 90s. Coincidentally, he and his wife were going through a divorce at the time. He was found guilty of Indecency with a Child, served eight years of a 20-year sentence, and had to register as a sex offender.

But it never happened.

After he reconnected with his kids, they worked through the actual emotional abuse the kids suffered at the hands of those who were supposed to protect them. The kids eventually contacted the Innocent Project of Texas in 2020 on behalf of their dad. IPTX and the Bexar County DA petitioned the court to overturn Mr. Quinney’s conviction. That request made its way through the court system and this week, the Court of Criminal Appeals vacated the conviction.

Mr. Quinney is now entitled to about $640,000 for his time in prison, and about $600,000 for time spent on the sex offender registry. Justice would be served if his ex-wife and anyone who lied in support of her claims had to pay part of those sums. I absolutely understand him possibly not wanting to sue her. The State of Texas, if it’s truly interested in justice, would pursue perjury charges against any civilians involved.

He’s fortunate to have been convicted in Texas because they have a fairly robust compensation program for exonerees. A wrongfully convicted person is eligible for $80,000 per year of incarceration and $25,000 per year of parole or sex offender registry time. Twelve states don’t compensate exonerees at all: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and South Dakota. And ironically, exonerees are often ineligible for assistance in returning to society, because those services are only available to convicted felons. Once someone is exonerated, they no longer have a conviction. Quite the Catch-22.

In Other News

I got some good news from the concrete guy and the weatherman. Next week’s forecast looks good enough that he thinks he’ll be able to get the first couple of sections of the pad poured. That, and he’ll be able to fix some of the erosion damage in the driveway. We should have temps in the high 60s all week, with just a chance of rain on Thursday. Fingers crossed!

The Subie should be going into the shop next week, too. Middle Son finally has his car back (he’d been driving the Subie), and we got a check last week that we weren’t expecting, so now’s the time to get everything done on my car that we’ve been holding off on. There’s a transmission fluid leak and the power steering pump is whining a lot (but that’s a Subaru thing anyway. Plus I’ve been wanting to get the stereo swapped for a while now too, and get my dashcam hooked up.

Twitterpidity

I woke up to an…interesting notification on Twitter Saturday. They’re switching Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) over to a paid feature. That means if you want to use one of the best and most commonly recommended security precautions to secure your Twitter account, you’ll have to pony up the $8 a month for Twitter Blue. That’s about stupid, in my book. 2FA should be a default setting for social media accounts, not something you opt in to, and it should be free.

I’m keeping my Twitter account for the time being, though it’s something like a car crash that you can’t look away from. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter announced they were turning off free access to their API, which will kill a number of third-party apps. I suspect that announcement is what led to Hootsuite killing their free access plan, and I’m curious to see what other social media management tools will do when that access goes away. It was a good tool for me, but not worth $1,200 a year for the cheap plan. I switched over to SocialChamp.io for scheduling. I’m trying to make do with Tweetdeck for Twitter interaction, but it’s less than optimal, as it were. I can’t set up tabs like I could on Hootsuite.

There’s a part of me that wishes I could still code. But even when I was in IT, I wasn’t writing anything that could help here. And even if I could, the loss of free API access would negate any benefit to writing my own app.

Supposedly Mr. Musk has claimed that he’ll step down from Twitter at the end of this year. I’m curious to see if he will (I kind of doubt it), who he’ll appoint to follow him, and how much free reign that person will have to fix the damage Mr. Musk has caused. I think Twitter will never recover completely to what it used to be.

AI

I mentioned back in September that I’d experimented with SocialBu, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion AI image generators. Those were interesting enough tools, but then ChatGPT came out, and things took a turn.

I’m not going to get into the ethical concerns being raised about any of the AI bots. That’s way above my paygrade, and I don’t know that I have the spoons to deal with it. But ChatGPT looks like it can help me here on the blog, so I started playing around with it.

I’d originally planned on making a big part of this week’s post about AI. But that doesn’t make much sense with only a week’s worth of “data,” such as it is. I’m going to play around with it over the next few weeks and put something together after that.

In the meantime, if you’re wondering what all you can do with ChatGPT, consider this post over at Medium.

Writing

Tooling along on Ghost. 2,200 words for the week, which takes me to just over 57k so far. I’m almost certainly going to have to edit some of this down because I’ve realized some of the earlier stuff I’ve written may not move the story along as much as it should. Then again, it’s paranormal. I need to do at least a little world-building along the way, which always adds to the word-count. We’ll see what my alpha readers suggest when they get it.

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