[Peace-discuss] Forgiveness or justice?

[Alfred Kagan]

As Carol said, this topic should be addressed off list.  Furthermore, 
it is not a topic that I can speak to except to say that my friends 
tell me that Cockburn is out to lunch on this one.


On Feb 22, 2005, at 9:56 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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.
>>>
>>> 	###
>>>
>
>


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