Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“On September 9, 2022, three years after leaving this prison, Joseph was the recipient of the New Hampshire Rising Stars Changemaker of the Year Award, a civic award bestowed upon a citizen who has played an outstanding role in effecting positive social change.”
Read the post by Father Gordon MacRae about his good prison friend who is not the Smart Justice Campaign manager for the ACLU of New Hampshire.
The NCRJ has long sponsored the case of Gordon MacRae.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“Just what happened to lead so many well-intentioned people down such a road is not a simple story. Understanding the power of recovered memory therapy requires an examination not just of the memory retrieval techniques used by individual therapists but also of how the movement created a tide of popular belief that bordered on mass hysteria. Recovered memory stories were, for a time, pervasive and inescapable. These stories influenced both patients and therapists as they hunted for hidden histories of abuse.”
Please read this excellent article by Ethan Watters on the disastrous recovered-memory movement and the lasting damage it caused.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“During those first weeks in March, I had the steadfast support of my good friend and mentor, who I think has been in my life for a good part of my legal career, one of the most respected judges in Massachusetts, Judge Daniel Ford,” he said. “Judge Daniel Ford can’t be here tonight because unfortunately he was not feeling well.”
Despite Shugrue’s compliments, Ford is infamous for his role in the prosecution of Bernard Baran in the 1980s. In 1984, Baran – an openly gay man from Lanesborough working at the Early Childhood Development Center in Pittsfield – was arrested on charges of child molestation. As First Assistant District Attorney, Ford secured Baran’s conviction on five counts of rape and five counts of indecent assault and battery. Decades later, an investigation into the trial found enough prosecutorial misconduct to overturn the conviction. The charges were dismissed in 2009, but only after Baran reported experiencing multiple sexual assaults while in prison.
Another of Ford’s convictions – that of Barry Jacobson, a Jewish Manhattan real estate broker accused of arson in the early 1980s – was overturned just this year due to faulty evidence and antisemitism among jurors. A 2014 Washington Post article went as far to ask in its headline “Why is Daniel Ford still a Massachusetts judge?” Ford retired in 2019.
Read the article by Josh Landes of WAMC.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“Prosecutors got their conviction, but at a great cost to an innocent man. To make matters worse, defense attorneys did an inadequate job of saving their client.
“Blood and semen evidence that could’ve cleared a Black man’s name in a home-invasion rape was never considered in his trial, and he spent more than 35 years in prison as a result, the longest known wrongful incarceration of a juvenile in Louisiana’s history and the fifth-longest in the nation.
:Sullivan Walter, 53, was freed from state prison on Aug. 25, 2022, after a judge overturned his conviction. The New Orleans man was 17 years old when he was arrested, prosecuted as an adult and sentenced to 39 years for rape and burglary.”
Read the article by Nyamekye in Atlanta Black Star.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
photo credit: Steven Hirsch/New York Post
“It’s PTSD that all of us in this sort of fraternity suffer,” Herman Atkins told NBC News, in a story this week about the lasting trauma of wrongful convictions on Black men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Black Americans make up half of all exonerees, despite being only about 13% of the nation’s population.
In 2000, DNA evidence cleared Atkins of a rape conviction. Even two decades later, he told NBC News, he’s constantly seeking to establish alibis, hoarding receipts and staring into security cameras, just to avoid being wrongfully accused of a crime again. “Being in prison when you know you shouldn’t be there is hard to describe. It’s crushing,” Atkins said. “You are fearful of death almost every second, conditioned in ways that bring on paranoia and anger.”
Read the article by Jamiles Lartey at The Marshall Project.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“Former NH detective James McLaughlin, the shady detective who was instrumental in pursuing lie after lie about Fr. Gordon MacRae sending him to a long prison term in 1994, was prominent on the Laurie List for “Falsification of Records” and/or evidence. Over 28 years of wrongful imprisonment in the New Hampshire State Prison, MacRae has consistently asserted that the case against him was built on lies, cheating and distortions aided and abetted by a dishonest police officer.”
Read the full article by Charlene C. Duline in Beyond These Stone Walls.
The NCRJ has bee sponsoring the case of Gordon Macrae for many years.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“How to account for trauma’s creep? Take your corners. Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage?”
Far too many people get their scientific “information” from best-selling novels and popular movies and TV shows. As a result, there is a vast misunderstanding of trauma and a concurrent belief in baseless theories, such as repressed memory. The consequences have been disastrous. For example, many innocent people are rotting in prison for committing crimes that never occurred.
In this essay, literary critic Paruh Sebgal argues that the reliance on trauma as a plot device has also led to a lot of over rated literary and theatrical fiction Read the entire article in The New Yorker.
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“Public and political support for registries remains high. There is little evidence that attitudes have been impacted by a growing body of research showing that public registration, community notification, and residency restrictions do not decrease the incidence of sexual offense. Rates of sexual re-offense have been low both before and after registries, and sex offenses have lower recidivism than almost all other crimes. Further, decades of data consistently show that the majority of sex offenses involve non-strangers and those without prior sex-offense convictions. In other words, there’s scant proof that sex offender registries make us any safer.”
Read the article by NCRJ Director Dr. Emily Horowitz in Inquest, published by the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, housed at Harvard Law School.
Copyright 2008-2024 Bob Chatelle. Design by Fort Hill Design.
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