[Peace-discuss] Forgiveness or justice?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Al suggests we should refer to justice rather then forgiveness.  Here's
an interesting test case (admittedly also rather far from AWARE's remit).
Should Shanley be demanding justice (as well as/rather than) forgiveness?
It looks that way. --CGE]

 	Back to Salem: Paul Shanley and
	the Return of "Recovered Memory"
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Off goes former Father Paul Shanley to state prison in Massachusetts for
twelve to fifteen years, convicted of "digitally raping" and otherwise
sexually abusing Paul Busa two decades ago. Shanley's now 74; the earliest
he can hope for parole is when he's 82, at which point the DA could
determine that he is still, though frail, "a sexually dangerous person"
and should be confined for whatever years remain. A DA in Massachusetts
exercised just that option in the case of another ex-priest, James Porter,
who was released last year after pleading guilty in 1993 to molesting
twenty-eight children. At the time of his death in February at the age of
70, Porter was in civil confinement, with the state seeking to keep him
behind bars indefinitely.

So Shanley must know that most likely he will never see the light of day,
unless through a barred window. He has more pressing concerns, namely the
distinct possibility that he will be murdered in prison, a hope expressed
by more than one person present at his sentencing, where Christian
compassion, always rationed in Massachusetts, was in short supply. "I want
him to die in prison, whether it's of natural causes or otherwise. However
he dies, I hope it's slow and painful," declared Shanley's accuser, Paul
Busa, a 27-year-old firefighter, in a written statement read in court.

The menacing words "or otherwise" were no doubt intended to evoke the fate
of John Geoghan, a priest sent to a Massachusetts prison in 2002 for
fondling a 10-year-old. Although Geoghan was being kept in "protective
custody," he was strangled to death by a man serving a life term for
killing a gay man. There have been allegations that prison guards were
complicit in his murder. Paul Busa's father, Richard, is a corrections
officer, and other relatives, including Paul's wife, are in Massachusetts
law enforcement.

In his written statement Busa said that Shanley "is a founding member of
NAMBLA and openly advocated sex between men and little boys." It's this
supposed distinction, as the man who created the North American Man Boy
Love Association, that has earned Shanley his throne in the Ninth Circle
of the damned. It was one of the credentials in his résumé as presented
in a two-and-a-half-hour PowerPoint presentation to the press in April
2002 by Roderick MacLeish Jr., the personal-injury lawyer representing
Busa. At that presentation MacLeish released Shanley's ample diocesan file
to the media, which hurriedly repeated MacLeish's allegations without
pausing to scrutinize the file.

Had they done so, they would have found nothing to buttress the claims
that Shanley founded NAMBLA, or was ever a member, or had ever advocated
sex between men and little boys, or had a thirty-year record of child
abuse complaints made against him or a history of being moved from parish
to parish. Yet all these allegations have become the common currency of
Shanley's biography, and if guards usher a murderer into his cell, the
killer will probably have the NAMBLA charge at the top of his mind.
Shanley's defense counsel, Frank Mondano, has said that during jury
selection every potential juror was aware of the Shanley scandal, and what
they most commonly "knew" was that Shanley was somehow involved with
NAMBLA.

When my colleague JoAnn Wypijewski began to report on the Shanley case in
2002, the first thing she did was read the 1,600-page diocesan file that
MacLeish had brandished. It became clear to JoAnn that in a case that had
consumed the press, most conspicuously the Boston Globe, which ran almost
daily stories on the priest scandal for years, she seems to have been the
only reporter to have taken the trouble to look at the church dossier.

What she found in the documents were many, many pages of Shanley's fervent
defense of homosexuality as a normal human variation and the uproar these
arguments provoked in the Church. (Shanley, like many in his generation,
found support for his assertions in Alfred Kinsey's 1950s sex surveys.) In
terms of sexual abuse, the Church file has one complaint from the 1960s,
which Shanley denied and his superior, rightly or wrongly, determined to
be baseless; then nothing until the early 1990s, when a few accusers
imputed various abuses to the priest dating back to the 1960s or '70s.

But nowhere was there any support for the claim that Shanley was a founder
of NAMBLA or had attended a NAMBLA meeting; JoAnn, despite many
discoveries about Shanley's active sex life as a priest, found no external
evidence to back the charge. For her fascinating report on Shanley, see
the September/October 2004 issue of Legal Affairs and jw01292005.html.

What landed Shanley in prison was not anything in the Church's file but
the uncorroborated "recovered memories" of one man, Paul Busa. This case
is a throwback to the early 1990s and before, when people were put behind
bars for lifetimes on the basis of memories elicited by leading questions
of psychotherapists. Ultimately, after years of patient effort by a few
journalists, psychoanalysts, psychological researchers and advocates for
justice, "recovered memory" as a tool of the latter-day Inquisition fell
into well-deserved disrepute. In the state that gave us Salem in the
seventeenth century and the Amiraults (all wrongly sent to prison on
charges brought by Middlesex county DA Martha Coakley) in the twentieth,
Shanley's case has reintroduced recovered memory to the courtrooms of the
twenty-first.

In Shanley's trial, prosecution witnesses would not confirm Busa's claim
that he was regularly taken from religious-instruction classes by Shanley.
Nor would they confirm that they had ever seen the priest alone with Busa,
or had seen anything untoward in the years 1983-89, during which Busa
claims abuse. These claims were based on memories that became active in
2002, following Busa's conversation with his girlfriend about the nearly
identical recovered memories of his friend Gregory Ford. Ford was dropped
by the prosecution in the same case, as were two others, their stories
apparently deemed by the DA too vexed for courtroom use.

No facts relative to the charges intruded into the courtroom; only
emotion. Superior Court Judge Stephen Neel should have dismissed the
charges, as requested by the defense. In the atmosphere of Massachusetts
it would have taken courage to do that, and truly extraordinary courage
for anyone on the jury (which included a therapist) to have insisted that
memories are not evidence, and that there was far more than reasonable
doubt in this case.

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