Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

Ethical Prosecutor J.D. Tomlinson needs your help!

January 4th, 2024

Dear Friend of Justice,

I recently received this email from my good friend Carol Tavris:

“I spoke this morning to JD Tomlinson, who, as you see, is up for reelection as DA against a challenger likely to use JD’s release of Joseph — and the apology he made to Joseph — as an attack. How dare a prosecutor apologize to someone falsely convicted?

“He will let me know what we might do closer to the election, in terms of writing letters of support to the newspaper or an op-ed. Of course all contributions gratefullly accepted.

“Incidentally, he would also be interested in speaking about the Allen/Smith case in any lecture venue—law students included. He was a defense attorney for 10 years and thinks that experience was invaluable in countering most DA’s inclinating to withhold exculpatory evidence and jump to conclusions about a defendant’s guilt.

“Do feel free to send his message to anyone who might be interested.

“Healthy new year to all,

“Carol”

If you need refreshing about the Smith-Allen case, here is detailed information.

In brief, during the great childhood sex panic of the 80’s and 90’s a white school bus driver named Nancy Smith and an uneducated black man named Joseph Allen were convicted of horrendous crimes against children. crimes that never occurred.

The prosecutors were ambitious, ruthless, and less than ethical. The trial was a horrendous miscarriage of justice.

For twenty years, all efforts to correct this injustice were thwarted by the Lorain county prosecutor, the Ohio Supreme Court, and the Ohio Attorney General. All were dedicated to the belief that convictions must be preserved — justice be damned.

But the convictions were finally thrown out, largely due to the efforts of J.D. Tomlison, a person of honor and integrity. Let’s do what we can to keep him in office.

Here is his campaign website.

Please donate.

Volunteer if you can.

 

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

Please Write to a Prisoner!

December 5th, 2023

Anyone who knows a prisoner knows how important it is to them to receive mail, especially at this time of year. Many prisoners receive no outside support at all.

Please send a letter, a Christmas card, a holiday card, or whatever. They will be delighted no matter what you send.

Here is a list of prisoners. If you have additions or corrections to this list, please let me know.

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

The National Center for Reason and Justice is Shutting Down

November 5th, 2023

The San Antonio Four photo: debbie nathan

For more than 20 years, the NCRJ has been instrumental in supporting, freeing, and winning exoneration for people falsely convicted of crimes against children. And now, the board of directors has decided to close up shop.  We wish to thank all our supporters and say goodbye.

The NCRJ was founded in 2002. It grew out of the Bernard Baran Justice Committee, set up by Bob chatelle, lawyer Harvey Silverglate, and journalist Debbie Nathan. In 1985,  19-year-old “Bee” Baran was convicted in a kangaroo court and given three life sentences for outlandish, horrific sexual abuse of the children in his charge, crimes that never occurred. Bee was the one of the first daycare workers accused in what could become a flagrant sex panic that spun accusations of ever-more outlandish sexual abuse and satanic ritual sexual abuse. None of these acts was real, but the panic lasted into the 1990s and destroyed the lives of scores of innocent people: sentenced to decades, sometimes centuries, in prison, like Bee most of these people refused to show remorse or undergo treatment related to crimes they did not commit. As a result, they could never be granted parole. Some of them died behind bars.

Over the years the roster of our “sponsees” shrank—because they were finally released from prison, and in some cases exonerated. At the same time, we broadened our purview to include people wrongly accused of other crimes against children, typically with use of “junk science” evidence—homicide by arson or by shaking, for instance. As the Sex Offender Registries and their accompanying systems of restriction and surveillance of people convicted of sex-related crimes became denser, more byzantine, and crueler, we began to work against these laws and the hysteria and hatred that produces them.

Also in the past two decades, a small movement of people—mostly those on the registry and their families—emerged to oppose the sex offense legal regime. Like us, the people in this movement believe that no one, guilty or innocent, deserves the perpetual ostracism and punishment these laws impose. Everyone deserves fairness, dignity, and another chance. NCRJ also made alliances with the strengthening prison abolition movement. The need for our work diminished, and with it, our activities.

The board is hugely grateful to our donors, advisors, and past board members; to the lawyers, social workers, researchers, and others who have worked indefatigably for the people we’ve sponsored; to the journalists who’ve investigated and publicized their cases; and, most of all, to our executive director, Bob Chatelle, without whom the NCRJ would not have existed and none of what it did would have happened.

For justice,

The NCRJ Board of Directors

 

 

 

 

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

Corruption Drove the MacRae Case

October 3rd, 2023

“For the last 29 years, Father Gordon MacRae has been denied justice, relegated to Concord Men’s Prison in New Hampshire. Despite an ex-FBI agent’s 3-year investigation, a Pulitzer prize-winning Wall Street Journalist’s multi-part exposé, even a current investigation into the police officer who framed him, nothing has thus far moved the needle — except perhaps in the court of public opinion.”

Read the full article by Claire Best.

 

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

September 26th, 2023

Please join us to help launch this important new book by NCRJ Director Emily Horowitz.

Click here for detailed information.

Join your host, Amber Vlangas, for a casual fireside chat and launch party with Emily Horowitz, author of the new book: From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear (Bloomsbury, 2023). Dr. Horowitz is an activist and advocate who has spent nearly two decades fighting for rational sex offense policies, and a Professor of Sociology at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Amber is a crime survivor, organizer, and activist seeking to restore the world from sexual harm. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Restorative Action Alliance and works with the American Civil Liberties Union. Join us at this private event to hear about the book and the work being done locally and statewide to challenge irrational and ineffective sex crime policies. Co-sponsored by the Restorative Action Alliance + The National Center for Reason and Justice.

 

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

A New Documentary About the Gordon MacRae case

June 25th, 2023

The National Center for Reason and Justice has been sponsoring the case of Father Gordon MacRae for many years. Gordon recently informed me of this new 43 minute documentary about his case.

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

25 years after ‘shaken baby’ conviction, Baltimore County man once again tries to prove his innocence

April 6th, 2023

photo: Madeleine O’Neill/The Daily Record

“The criminal justice system’s demand for proof beyond a reasonable doubt has led to the development of entire scientific fields – some now facing serious questions about their accuracy — aimed at definitively proving a suspect’s guilt or innocence.

“Bloodstain patterns. Handwriting analysis. Firearm and toolmark examination.

“The urge for irrefutable evidence is particularly strong in cases of alleged child abuse, which often happen with no witnesses and give police little to go off besides the word of the parent who brings a child to the hospital.

“But a vocal minority of experts now say that the certainty doctors once assigned to the idea of shaken baby syndrome was misplaced. The ‘constellation’ of injuries, once considered a virtually certain sign of child abuse, may have other causes – including causes that aren’t criminal.

‘I think the broad problem is that what’s sometimes missing in these medical investigations of suspected abuse is the idea that there are limits to what the science can tell us,’ said Jeffrey Gilleran, the chief attorney of Maryland Office of the Public Defender’s forensics division.

Read the article by Madeleine O’Neil in the Maryland Daily Record.

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

Suffolk judge overturns 1992 murder conviction, clearing Barry Kamara’s name at last

March 31st, 2023

photo: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

“Since 2019, judges have thrown out murder and rape convictions against more than a dozen Boston men, almost all of whom are Black and had been sentenced to life in prison.

Barry Kamara has fought for nearly 32 years to prove that he wasn’t the gunman who killed a fellow teenager on Dakota Street in Dorchester.

Those efforts paid off Tuesday, when Suffolk Superior Court Judge James Lang said he plans to throw out Kamara’s 1992 murder conviction. The case that first sent Kamara behind bars at age 17 had fallen apart because prosecutors and police withheld evidence that pointed to potential other killers.

Read the article by Andrew Ryan in the Boston Globe.

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

Does mandatory reporting of child abuse help or hurt? A Colorado task force is taking a second look.

March 18th, 2023

photo: Mark Reis, special to the Colorado Sun

“The way our mandatory reporting system exists right now — my opinion is that it does more harm than it does good,” Jerry Milner told the state’s Mandatory Reporting Task Force last month.

Milner is former head of the Children’s Bureau, a federal agency tasked with child abuse prevention. He said listening to families, including children, who have been negatively impacted by intrusive and damaging investigations by child protective services changed his mind about a policy he once endorsed.

Read this article by Kristin Jones in the Colorado Sun.

Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.

Does the Sex Offender Registry do More Harm than Good?

February 6th, 2023

A debate between NCRJ Director Dr, Emily Horowitz and Montclair State University ProfessoA debate between NCRJ Director Dr, Emily Horowitz and Montclair State University Professor Cary Fetterman.

Listen to the debate and cast your vote.r Cary Fetterman.

Listen to the debate and cast your vote.