[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
Dear Friend of Justice,
Four years ago, my parnter Jim D’Entremont and I attended the trial of Father Paul Shanley. At the time, I sent a few reports to my old FOJ mailing list. I would like to repost those reports here:
My Comments on the Shanley Trial
After the jury went out, but before the guilty verdict came in, I sent the following message to the people on my mailing list:
After Shanley’s conviction, I sent this follow-up message:
I sent this email after attending the sentencing hearing:
Dear Friend of Justice,
I was anticipating this morning’s Shanley hearing with so much dread, that I
got next to no sleep last night. (Ditto for Jim.) It was, if anything, even
worse than I had imagined.
As you probably heard by now, Shanley was sentenced to 12-15 years. He is
74. But even if he were 24, I wouldn’t expect him to live terribly long in a
Massachusetts prison. Were he to actually survive this sentence, the
Middlesex DA’s office could incarcerate him from one-day-to-life as a
“sexually dangerous person.” And if he were to avoid this fate, he would
serve ten years probation during which he would have to undergone “therapy.”
This morning, I was given permission to reveal something that I have known
for a very long time.
The Middlesex DA’s office offered Shanley a deal. If he would plead guilty
to one count, his sentence would be time served followed by two years of
probation. No further incarceration. But Shanley refused to plead to
something he did not do.
Should this plea bargain be made public, I fully expect Martha Coakley will
deny it. She did something similar in a case I was involved with a couple
years ago. Martha can lie without batting an eye.
I’m sure Shanley was offered the deal because (1) the DA’s office knew its
case against Shanley was extraordinarily weak and (2) they expected Frank
Mondano to provide a strong defense. But they were wrong about the second
point.
We were told that the hearing would start at 9, and we arrived at 8:15 to
insure getting into the courtroom. We entered the courtroom at 8:30, but
eventually were told that the hearing wouldn’t start until ten. The
courtroom quickly filled up with media and members of various
victim/survivor groups.
The mood among the latter was celebratory and almost voluptuously mean. We
overheard many charming comments during our wait. Someone accused a court
officer of “catering to the NAMBLA contingent.” One wit gathered a large
laugh by saying he’d heard that “Shanley called in sick.”
The hearing began at 10:15. Assistant DA Lynn Rooney asked for two life
terms plus ten years probation. (Which she essentially got.) She stressed
that Shanley showed, “No remorse. No resposponsibility.” (For crimes he did
not commit. I have seen Rooney use those same lines against the Amiraults.)
She stated that Paul Busa’s promising career in the Air Force had come to an
end on 2/11/02, when he suddenly “remembered” his six years of weekly abuse.
Busa’s father, Richard, began his impact statement by saying, “This verdict
is a tremendous relief and a source of satisfaction.” He talked about his
son’s “lifelong horror” and said that Shanley had “robbed my little boy of
his innocence” and “took his faith away.” He concluded by mentioning that
he works for the Department of Correction, and that “I’ve seen a lot of evil
people, but I want you to know [Shanley] is right at the top of the list.”
Busa’s wife, Teresa, cried through her statement. She said that Paul would
get “physically ill walking through the door of the church” and described
her husband “punching a hole in our bedroom wall” with his fist. She spoke
of Paul’s recurring “stress rash” and “weeks of depression when he wouldn’t
shower or shave.” She said that Paul “will never find comfort in faith.”
Addressing Shanley, she said, “No words will ever describe my disgust for
you. You are sick to the core.” She said she wished he would die in prison,
beg God for forgiveness and be denied, and spend eternity in hell.
After her statement, Teresa and Paul shared a tearful hug. (Indeed, there
was constant hugging going on among the victim/survivors. A friend of mine
who ended up sitting in the thick of them found himself consoled on
occasion.)
Paul Busa would not read his statement, so it was read by Assistant DA
Rooney.
Busa (via Rooney) said, “This monster must spend the rest of his life in
prison…. He ripped my character and my world apart…. He is a pedophile,
possibly the worst ever.” Busa also falsely claimed, “He is a founding
member of NAMBLA and openly advocated sex between men and little boys.” (If
you repeat a lie often enough does it eventually become true?)
Busa also said, “I want him to die in prison, whether by natural causes or
otherwise…. However he dies, I hope it is slow and painful.”
Shanley’s lawyer, Frank Mondano, criticized the DA’s written argument for
sentencing. He pointed out that its recitation of facts were not the facts
presented at trial. He noted that Shanley had no criminal record, and that
the public outcry against him had been “fueled by half-truths and lies.” He
mentioned that public statements by the jurors indicated that they had paid
little attention to the facts. (This would have been difficult, considering
that the Commonwealth presented no reliable evidence.) Mondano pointed out
that the entire prosecution had been “geared to emotion” and that “this is
the point where emotion should be separated from the facts.”
Mondano expressed fear for Shanley’s safety in prison, and cited a recent
quote from a representative of the Massachusetts Correctional Officers who
said they could hardly protect themselves let alone the inmates.
As expected, there was no statement from Shanley. It had been Mondano’s
policy from the beginning to alone Shanley to speak to no one. I think this
hurt Shanley a great deal.
There was a recess while the judge prepared his sentence. “That Mondano. He
is a scumbag,” said a woman sitting in front of me. “He’s just a low-level
felon,” the man to her left said supportively. The victim/survivor crowd
kept exchanging big warm hugs. Busa worked the room, laughing and joking
among his adoring supporters. For a time he hovered a few feet away from us,
accepting congratulations for his eloquent victim’s impact statement. Jim
overheard him say, “I wrote something about the gay life, but they wouldn’t
let me keep it.”
Before passing sentence, the judge spoke of the devastation to Paul Busa
“when he first recovered his memories.”
Traumatic amnesia is now considered fact in Massachusetts courts.
I think the time has come to retire the term “recovered memory” completely.
It means too many different things to too many different people. All
memories are recovered. No memory is continuous. A continuous memory would
be with us every waking moment. The interval between retrieval of the “same”
memory can very from minutes to decades. (Actually, I doubt that any of us
ever retrieves the “same” memory in precisely identical ways. memory is
always changing.)
>From now on I will use terms such as “massive repression” and “traumatic
amnesia.” But whatever you call it, there’s no evidence indicating that it
exists.
In my opinion, it is essential that this verdict is appealed and appealed in
the most careful and professional way. This will be a hard case to win,
because this case is so politically loaded. But the effort has to be made.
Too much is at stake.
The challenge will be to keep Paul Shanley alive while the appeal is written
and argued. I fear that Paul Busa may get his wish and that Shanley will be
murdered in prison.
I have the most uneasy feeling that I have just come from an execution.
-Bob Chatelle (with Jim D’Entremont)
For a good account on the Shanley case, I recomment this article.
In fact, there’s increasing evidence that every time we retrieve a memory, we eventually “refile” it with subtle alterations; we’re not “copying” something permanent for retrieval, but rather taking the original out of the filing cabinet, so to speak, and scribbling on it and erasing parts of it.
One thing that research has established nearly beyond reasonable doubt is that our episodic memory (memory of events) is reconstructive; we only store a few details of the episode and when we retrieve it, we actually make up a story around those details (that’s probably the evolutionary reason for our having an imagination). I walked a couple blocks to the store a few minutes ago; remembering the walk, I can picture all the buildings along the way even though I probably actually looked at only a few of them. Most of what I feel like I’m rembering episodically is actually just general knowledge of the neighborhood which got incorporated into my reconstruction. The idea that we store every single detail of every event we experienced the way a movie camera or video recording would is popular largely because L. Ron Hubbard asserted it after a prolonged interview with his typewriter (a lot of people forget that Dying Ethics, oops, I mean Dianetics is the oldest and best-selling “self-help” book of all time).