[Peace-discuss] Forgiveness or justice?

Tue Feb 22 10:39:55 CST 2005

Carl,

I can't understand the relevance of this article to my comments. 
Justice is always appropriate, but I don't know what it means for a 
govt agency to forgive. Furthermore, I can't comment on this case but I 
do recognize the seriousness of the issues involved.  I am not happy 
with the tone of Cockburn's article.  The environment in Mass. was 
created by concrete evidence which can't be ignored.

On Feb 22, 2005, at 7:11 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [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 rÃ©sumÃ© 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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>
Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliogrpaher and Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801

tel. 217-333-6519
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akagan at uiuc.edu