[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
Dear Friend of Justice,
When I first heard the unfortunate news about Senator Kennedy’s terminal illness, my blood ran cold at the thought of his being succeeded by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley.
I fear that Coakley is going to be hard to stop. She will be the only woman in a crowded race, and she is likely to have the enthusiastic support of the Boston Globe, which does its best to influence electoral politics in Massachusetts.
The media is making much of her “stellar” record in the Middlesex District Attorney’s office. Let’s look at that record.
First, there is the case of Ray and Shirley Souza. These were the Lowell grandparents falsely accused and convicted of molesting their own grandchildren. The case was spurred by a daughter who was victimized by a recovered-memory “therapist.” The testimony was manufactured by the same discredited methods used in the other high-profile cases of the day. Ray Souza is now deceased, but Shirley — a very fine woman — is saddled with living her life out as a registered sex offender.
Coakley was also the prosecutor in the case of Louise Woodward — the nanny accused of murdering a child in her care. There was no reliable medical evidence supporting this. Woodward was convicted, but the judge changed the verdict to manslaughter, sentenced her to time served, and released her to return to her native England.
Then there was the Fells Acres case. The Amirault family was falsely accused and wrongly convicted of abusing children at the daycare school that they ran. This was one of the classic daycare cases, along with the McMartin case, Bernard Baran, the Little Rascals, and many others. While Coakley was not one of the original prosecutors, she fought the appeals tooth and nail. And when Gerald Amirault was pursuing a commutation, she orchestrated a disinformation campaign against the Amiraults.
Coakley and the Middlesex County DA’s office also did their best to derail at least one wrongfully convicted inmate’s efforts to prove his innocence via DNA evidence, at first denying that such evidence existed, then trying to impede access to it. Once the evidence was obtained. and the inmate’s innocence was established, Coakley still tried (and failed) to strike a face-saving deal in which the exoneree would admit to a nonexistent measure of guilt.
And then there is the case of Paul Shanley The media campaign against Shanley was so successful that few consider his innocence a possibility. But innocent he is. I attended that trial. There was no evidence against him, other than the testimony of a sociopath who had collected a huge settlement from the church and who claimed to have massively repressed for decades all memory of terrible abuse that had occurred weekly for years. There is no scientific evidence to support the theory of massive repression. I refer you to Dr. Richard McNally’s excellent book on the subject, Remembering Trauma.
I believe that Coakley is driven more by ambition than ideology. But her willingness to sacrifice the lives of innocent people in order to further her political goals is most troubling. If Massachusetts voters wish to honor Ted Kennedy’s legacy, they should send someone else to replace him.
-Bob Chatelle
I hope the information you provide here will receive series consideration. My way of helping in this effort is to repost your remarks, with my commendation, on my own blog, hoping that it will reach more readers there. I assumed you would appreciate the repost with commendation and attribution, so did not take the time to try to contact you first.
Set up an online petition. I already wrote to gov. Patrick, but that was just one e-mail from an out-of-stater.
Under current Massachusetts law, the governor will not appoint her successor. An election will be held in January. It will be hard to keep her from getting a plurality in the Democratic primary, and she will have weak Republican opposition.
A Friend of Justice rightly pointed out that my initial version of this post was such a rant that it was unsuitable to forward to the nonconverted.
After this weekend (we’re going to Western mass for the Baran fundraiser) I hope to flesh this post out a bit. Stay tuned.
-Bob
Just a quick reminder to all my fellow cynics when it comes to politicians: the political system as it is now construed makes it virtually impossible for anyone with integrity to operate based only upon what is right. Anyone who gets into politics – and wants to get something done – has to make concessions in order to work with the cast of dysfunctional actors that get into positions of influence and make such a mess of the world. So we can either just throw our hands up in the air and give up, or try to put into office the people that we think will do the best job of holding on to their integrity – and thank them profusely for being willing to put up with the political stench around them as they try to get something positive done.
With that cynical perspective as a preface, Martha Coakley is one of the few people I have worked up the energy to actually support over the past many years. She was a classmate of mine at Williams, so I have known her long before she knew she was going into politics. It would be very hard to find anyone who knew her then who didn’t like and respect her. From where I sit, she is doing as good a job of holding on to her integrity as anyone could do in this awful age of narcissistic commentators and self-righteous bloggers, mostly people who seem to lack the capacity for self-awareness, critical thinking and complex thought. From where I sit, Martha has actually been able to hold onto ideals that inform her decision making, and a capacity to reflect on what might serve the greater good, rather than what might be politically expedient and self-serving.
There are those who will only scrutinize the political concessions that the system demands and who will speak about Martha as if they really knew something about her. They don’t. Because I have known Martha for a long time, I see the price that she has to pay to get in there – in the manure pile of politics – to try to move a complicated world in a better direction. Don’t agree with her vision of that better world? Fine. Make your voice heard. We always need lots of perspectives to keep us from getting blinded by our own perceptual bias. But remember our founding fathers, when they devised this political system, held out hope that people would engage with each other based upon thought and reflection concerning what would keep our shared republic strong, rather than upon primitive and self-serving emotions. I have thought about it and I’m supporting Martha.
You might feel less enthusiastic about Coakley had she advanced her political career by destroying the lives of people you cared about.
I agree with you–Chalie might feel differently if his life, or the lives of people he knew about, were destroyed by false accusations supported by the likes of Scott Harshbarger and Martha Coakley. They both rode the 1980’s wave of sexual abuse hysteria to positions of political power in this state. They should have defended truth and supported justice in their roles as prosecutors. Instead, they ensured that the lives of innocent people–including men, women, and children–were ruined by hideous, unsupported accusations of sexual abuse, as in the cases of the Amiraults and the Souzas. I am a registered Democrat, and generally agree with the social and economic positions supported more often by the Democrats than the Republicans in Massachusetts–but I will NEVER forget the travesty of justice wrought by Martha Coakley, and I will NEVER vote for her. In this 2010 election, I am relieved she is being opposed in her rerun for AG. I am supporting her opposition, Jim McKenna, and hope all Massachusetts voters–Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Green/Rainbow Party members–who seek in justice for all will support McKenna for Attorney General of Massachusetts. Martha Coakley would have made a perfect prosecutor during the shameful Salem Witch Trials in 17th Century Massachusetts–she would have overseen lots of alleged “witch” hangings. But she has no place representing–or defending–Massachusetts citizens in this century! Do not reward Coakley for her despicable past behavior!