[Peace-discuss] Forgiveness or justice?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Al, you opined -- owing, apparently, to the vagaries of the late
Forgiveness Weekend -- that "Instead of 'Forgiveness' I would rather refer
to Justice."  I agree -- not because forgiveness is unimportant, but
because it is in a sense too important for it to be a matter that AWARE
"works on."  You put it nicely here: "Justice is always appropriate, but I
don't know what it means for a govt agency to forgive."  And I also agree
entirely that, as you say, "Although religion motivates some folks in
AWARE, the work we do is political rather than religious."

As I was pondering your excellent suggestion that justice be our goal, I
came across Alex Cockburn's description of an obvious miscarriage of
justice, the Shanley case, a throw-back to '80s hysteria, as Cockburn
describes.  (He mentions the all too typical Amirault case, which I
remember well -- a family railroaded by liberal officials in
Massachusetts; they would have been died in jail except for the work of a
conservative Wall Street journal reporter.)  It is easy to, as you say,
"recognize the seriousness of the issues involved."

But what can you mean that you're "not happy with the tone of Cockburn's
article"?  What "tone"?  His scorn for the perversion of justice?  Seems
right to me.

Even more, what can you mean by "The environment in Mass. was created by
concrete evidence which can't be ignored." You surely can't mean that the
clergy sex scandal in Massachusetts and elsewhere -- "concrete evidence
that can't be ignored"? -- justifies hysteria that convicts someone on the
basis of "recovered memories"?  Where is the justice that you call for in
that?

Regards, Carl


On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Alfred Kagan wrote:

> 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 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.
> >
> > 	###
> >