In March 2011, a young girl known as P.J. told her maternal grandmother that Daniel Spade, her biological father, had sexually abused her in a hotel near Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Spade lived in Manassas, Virginia. He and P.J.’s mother had briefly dated, but the relationship ended before the girl’s birth in 2006. Based on travel records, the alleged abuse was tied to one of Spade’s visitations, in September 2010. P.J. would have then been 4 years old.
At the time of the alleged assault, Spade and H.J., the girl’s mother, were engaged in a heated legal battle that began in 2009, when H.J. and her husband, D.J., had moved to terminate Spade’s parental rights. A judge in Spartanburg County had dismissed their petition in January 2010, allowing Spade unsupervised visitation with his daughter and the right to have the girl visit him in Virginia. The mother and her husband filed a new petition on November 3, 2010.
After the girl reported the alleged abuse, Kim Rosborough, a therapist who was already treating P.J. for panic attacks and behavioral issues, referred her to the Children’s Advocacy Center. Tabitha Weber, a social worker and forensic evaluator at the center, videotaped and interviewed P.J., who said the abuse took place at a hotel with a pool.
On April 11, 2011, Weber contacted the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Department, which conducted its own investigation, led by Detective Nikki Cantrell.
Officers arrested Spade in Virginia on May 3, 2011, charging him with first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor.
Spade was placed in the Spartanburg County Jail. At Spade’s first two bond hearings, in May and June 2011, Cantrell said officials were still waiting on the forensic report on Spade’s laptop and cellphone, and he was denied release. In mid-July, Cantrell said the report had come back, and Spade’s devices contained no inculpatory evidence. On July 20, 2011, Spade was released on a $75,000 bond.
In early 2012, H.J. and D.J. amended their petition and again moved to terminate Spade’s parental rights and allow D.J. to adopt P.J. At a subsequent hearing, Douglas Brannon represented H.J. and D.J., and Kenneth Shabel represented Spade. In late 2012, a judge terminated Spade’s parental rights and allowed the adoption to proceed.
Spade’s jury trial, presided over by Judge R. Keith Kelly, began in Spartanburg County General Sessions Court on February 24, 2014. Shabel, along with Shawn Campbell, represented Spade.
On the morning of the trial, Barry Barnette, the solicitor for the Seventh Circuit, told Judge Kelly that he had appointed Brannon as a volunteer special prosecutor to oversee the case. Shabel objected. He said there had been a lack of notice about the appointment and no indication that the governor had approved the appointment, which Shabel said was required by statute. He also said Brannon had a conflict of interest.
Barnette said that Brannon was familiar with the case because he had represented H.J. and D.J. in the parental rights case and that the appointment was necessary because Barnette was preparing for a trial where the defendant was facing the death penalty.
Judge Kelly said he did not see a conflict because Brannon had represented the parents, not Spade, and he allowed the appointment to proceed. He did not rule on whether the appointment needed the governor’s approval.
Cantrell testified about the investigation. At the family court proceedings, she had testified that she referred the case to the Children’s Advocacy Center. At the criminal trial, she testified that the center referred the case to her. Campbell asked, “Were you telling the truth today, or were you telling the truth then?”
Cantrell said she was telling the truth today; she had been confused at the earlier proceeding.
P.J. was now 7 years old. She testified that Spade “stuck his private part in my mouth … at the pool … in the bathroom.” A prosecutor asked P.J. if this happened at a motel in South Carolina. The girl shook her head yes and said that Spade threatened to not take her home if she didn’t do what he asked. The prosecutor asked her, “Do you remember anything else happening at the motel in South Carolina?” P.J. said “No.”
H.J. testified that after she picked up her daughter from the visit in question, P.J. displayed signs of anxiety, such as wetting herself and crying uncontrollably. She said she told Spade about the anxiety, which she testified continued after Spade’s visit with P.J. in October 2010. It was after that visit, H.J. testified, that she sought counseling for her daughter and refiled a motion to terminate Spade’s parental rights.
During the trial, Shabel sought to question P.J.’s maternal grandmother about whether H.J. and D.J. were present during all the girl’s panic attacks prior to October 2012. The state opposed the request, arguing that this was a back-door attempt to introduce the idea of third-party guilt. Shabel denied this intent and said he wanted to show that there could be “non-criminal reasons” for the panic attacks.
Judge Kelly ruled that Shabel could call an expert witness to testify about potential causes for panic attacks but could not use the grandmother’s testimony, in part because that testimony wouldn’t be inconsistent with Spade’s guilt.
Despite that ruling, the grandmother testified for the state and said that P.J. disclosed the alleged abuse in March 2011, while the grandmother was putting the girl to bed. The grandmother said she waited a day or two before telling her husband.
Three expert witnesses testified for the state.
Rosborough, whom Kelly qualified as an expert in child abuse therapy and treatment, testified that she saw P.J. 10-12 times with the goal of “helping her with her anxiety and some of the separation anxiety and the symptoms she had developed after beginning visitation with her biological father.”
Rosborough testified about “coaching,” which she said would be “if someone encourages the child to say something that’s not true.”
A prosecutor asked Rosborough whether she saw any signs of coaching with P.J. Shabel objected, arguing that this was “bolstering.” Kelly sustained the objection. Rosborough said that although P.J. did not want to talk about Spade, the girl never disclosed any allegations of sexual abuse.
Rosborough testified that her last session with P.J. occurred on March 28, 2011, and that she had recommended that Spade, H.J., and D.J. meet with her to begin planning to restart Spade’s visitations with his daughter. Three days later, P.J.’s maternal grandfather left her a voicemail that said he wanted to talk with her about a situation that had arisen.
Weber testified about her video interviews with P.J. (Neither side introduced the videos into evidence.) She testified that P.J. said in the interviews that she had been sexually abused at a hotel with a pool in South Carolina. After the girl made this disclosure, Weber testified, she contacted law enforcement and referred P.J. to a therapist for counseling. Shabel did not cross-examine Weber.
Meredith Thompson-Loftis was the therapist who met with P.J. after Weber’s referral. Judge Kelly qualified her as an expert in family counseling and child therapy. Thompson-Loftis said that P.J.’s referral came through the victim’s assistance program at the Children’s Advocacy Center.
Thompson-Loftis testified that she met with P.J. 71 times between May 2011 and the trial. She also said that P.J. told her that the alleged abuse happened in South Carolina. During her testimony, Thompson-Loftis also testified about “partial disclosure” and the role that a child’s age and personality play in disclosure.
She said: “A partial disclosure is one where children who take time to disclose all different parts of abuse that they—what I refer to as piecemeal disclosure. They take different pieces, and they report what they can when they feel safe and what they are able to report at that given time. So, it’s not unusual to see kids report part of the disclosure and then the rest of that disclosure at a later point in time.”
Spade did not testify, and Shabel did not present any expert testimony or other witnesses. Shabel would later say the decision was strategic; under South Carolina’s criminal procedure laws, defendants who did not present witnesses were allowed to make the final closing argument to the jury before its deliberations.
In his closing argument, Brannon said Spade was a negligent father who didn’t see his daughter until she was five months old. He also said that police arrest the “bad people,” and juries take care of the “good people.”
Shabel said in his closing argument that the jury was on a search for the truth. He said the facts of the alleged crime made no sense; why would Spade use a public restroom beside a public pool at a hotel to abuse his daughter? He noted the inconsistencies in P.J.’s testimony. She had testified the pool was on the same floor as Spade’s room. But the pool was on the ground floor, and hotel records said Spade stayed on other floors. Shabel told jurors, “If there is a real possibility that he is not guilty, you must give him the benefit of the doubt.”
On February 26, 2014, the jury convicted Spade of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor. Spade later received a sentence of 35 years in prison.
Spade appealed, arguing that Judge Kelly erred in excluding the grandmother’s testimony on the panic attacks. He also said that the state had failed to turn over Thompson-Loftis’s therapy records in a timely manner. (Shabel received the records four days before the trial’s start.) In addition, Spade said that Judge Kelly should have barred Brannon’s appointment as a special prosecutor because of his conflict of interest and because the district attorney didn’t follow the proper procedure in appointing Brannon.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on July 6, 2016. It said Judge Kelly had ruled properly on these issues at trial and that Shabel had not properly raised the procedural problems with Brannon’s appointment.
After Spade’s conviction, in 2016, Shabel had gone to work at Brannon’s law firm. In 2018, Brannon appeared on behalf of H.J. and D.J. in a post-conviction matter, which created a conflict of interest because of Shabel’s employment. The South Carolina Supreme Court reprimanded Brannon in 2019. Separately, Shabel received a reprimand in 2021, and Campbell received a four-month suspension in 2021 for several acts of misconduct, including a failure to keep accurate records on funds they received from Spade’s family for his initial appeal.
On July 13, 2017, Spade filed a pro se motion for post-conviction relief. The motion was amended several times, after E. Charles Grose Jr. became Spade’s attorney.
The amended motion said that Shabel and Campbell had provided ineffective representation by failing to show the jury the videos of P.J.’s interviews with Weber; not presenting expert testimony on problems with the interviewing techniques used by Weber; and not calling to testify Alexandria Wolf, the guardian ad litem who had represented P.J. during the family court proceedings.
In addition, the motion said that Shabel and Campbell failed to request a proper ruling on Brannon’s appointment or object to portions of the state’s closing statement, in which Brannon said the jury was filled with “good people” who take care of other good people, such as P.J.
The motion said Shabel and Campbell also failed to object to Judge Kelly’s jury instructions, in which he said the jury’s role was to “search for the truth” and make sure “justice is done.” This wording shifted the burden of proof away from the state and toward Spade, the motion said.
The motion also said that the state had failed to disclose a report by the South Carolina Department of Social Services (DSS) on P.J. as well as investigative reports into allegations that Spade’s former fiancée witnessed or participated in the alleged abuse of P.J. (Law enforcement in South Carolina and Virginia had determined the allegations were unfounded.)
The motion included reports from Dr. Michael Lamb, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Maggie Bruck, a psychiatry professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Lamb said in his report that Weber’s forensic interviews were poorly conducted. “The interviewer asked developmentally inappropriate questions, encouraged the child to engage in drawing which distracted her and made many responses uninterpretable, and failed to follow up on indications that the child’s account might have been influenced and contaminated by negative stereotyping,” the report said.
Bruck said in her report: “Despite the absence of electronic recordings or detailed notes of the 71 or more therapeutic sessions conducted by Ms. Thompson-Loftis, one can still state that her procedures were highly unusual: in terms of their frequency, the reluctance of the child to make any statements of abuse until many months into therapy, the techniques used to get the child to disclose and the content of the actual disclosures.”
The amended petition also included emails between H.J., D.J., and the former fiancée. Spade, who had three children with the former fiancée had obtained the emails from a third party, and the correspondence took place in the fall of 2010, while the parental termination case was underway. “These emails also establish that [D.J. and H.J.] were colluding with Ms. [L.] during their respective child custody litigation, that P.J. was an anxious child, and P.J. makes up stories to get attention,” the motion said.
Judge J. Mark Hayes II held a five-day evidentiary hearing in May 2019 and heard from Lamb, Bruck, Weber, Wolf, Brannon, Cantrell, Thompson-Loftis, and Shabel, among others.
Lamb and Bruck testified that the forensic videos from the Children’s Advocacy Center and an analysis of Thompson-Loftis’s notes supported Spade’s assertion that P.J. was coached or coerced into making a false accusation.
Weber defended the interviews and the methodology she used.
During her testimony, Thompson-Loftis said that P.J. made multiple disclosures during her therapy sessions that suggested the former fiancée was present during some alleged abuse. She testified she didn’t contact law enforcement because she didn’t believe the disclosures were reportable.
Wolf testified at the hearing that P.J.’s mother and adoptive father stopped cooperating with her after Rosborough suggested joint counseling that included Spade. Wolf testified that during her visits with P.J., she did not observe that the girl had any fear of Spade.
Cantrell testified about the investigation and her roles in both the criminal case and parental termination case. At the family court hearing, she had testified that she received a copy of the DSS file and turned it over to the district attorney’s office. But at the post-conviction hearing she testified that she had actually not seen the file. Cantrell also testified that in a 2011 report, she had included information that Spade had been expelled from Liberty University for criminal assault. She testified at the hearing that this information turned out to be untrue, but she had never corrected it.
By the time of the hearing, Cantrell was working with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). On August 20, 2020, Grose filed a formal request for an investigation into Cantrell’s conduct in the Spade case, based on her testimony at the hearing and other alleged misconduct, including an assertion that she sat on the forensic report for Spade’s computer, keeping him in jail for at least an extra month. (SLED finished the investigation on December 31, 2020, but any actions it took are not public.)
Prior to the hearing, Grose attempted to obtain the DSS records. The agency didn’t respond to his request, and Judge Hayes ordered DSS to produce the records, which were released after the hearing. The file included an undisclosed medical report that appeared to contradict P.J.’s testimony about the form of the alleged abuse.
On October 8, 2020, Judge Hayes denied Spade’s motion for post-conviction relief. He said that while he agreed with Spade’s experts that the forensic interviews were suggestive, Shabel made a strategic decision not to introduce the videos or present expert testimony about the videos, in part because the jury would “view a young four-year-old child with non-age-appropriate knowledge of potential sexual matters. This court cannot criticize trial counsel for his decision, even if that decision may have proved to be wrong.”
Referring to Cantrell’s testimony, he said, “This court was also troubled that law enforcement made inconsistent factual statements to different courts.”
The ruling said that Shabel’s actions regarding Brannon’s appointment were immaterial, because the appointment was as a volunteer prosecutor for a single trial, not as an assistant solicitor, and was therefore not covered under the statute in question.
The ruling also found that neither Judge Kelly’s jury instruction on seeking the truth nor Shabel’s use of that phrase prejudiced Spade.
Judge Hayes said it was unclear why Shabel never received the DSS file, but he said there was no evidence the documents were ever in the possession of the district attorney’s office. In any event, he said, nothing in the DSS file would have changed the trial’s result.
On November 23, 2020, Grose filed a motion asking Judge Hayes to reconsider. The motion said Judge Hayes’s ruling had borrowed too heavily from the state’s proposed order, essentially denying Spade’s right to have a court make the findings of fact.
At a hearing on March 29, 2021, Grose repeated many of his arguments from the previous evidentiary hearing, including the problems with Brannon’s closing argument.
“He told those jurors ‘you are good people, this child is a good person,’” Grose said. “Ms. Thompson-Loftis said she was a remarkable child, take care of her, Danny Spade is guilty. So, when you look at the entire argument, it was infected with prejudice, and then when you look at the facts, look at the whole case like what we talked about in the beginning that it turns on the credibility of the child, yeah, that argument we think requires … reversal.”
On November 12, 2021, Judge Hayes reversed his earlier ruling and granted Spade a new trial. He now said that Brannon’s closing argument was “crafted to have the jury view the evidence through an unconstitutional lens” and that his previous ruling was based on a “flawed analysis.”
“The acknowledgment during the [evidentiary] hearing that [Brannon’s] intent was to present a closing argument that invoked the emotions and passions of the jury further supports the conclusion that the arguments were improper and that an objection should have been made by trial counsel,” Judge Hayes wrote.
He said that Shabel compounded the problem by also urging jurors to “seek” and “search” for the truth.
The state sought review of Judge Hayes’s ruling by South Carolina’s appellate courts, but the state’s Court of Appeals denied that request on April 11, 2024.
Spade had remained in prison during this review period. He was released on May 1, 2024. The state dismissed the charge against Spade on December 9, 2025.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 02-01-2026
