Friends of Justice

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Civil lawyers sent potential victims to therapy to help unearth memories. As Howard Janet, a civil lawyer for an alleged Sandusky victim, explained in a CNN interview, victims could “create a bit of a Chinese wall in their minds. They bury these events that were so painful to them deep in their subconscious.”

But that’s not all. The well-known sodomy-in-the-shower story is fictional. When Mike McQueary went into the locker room in 2001, he briefly heard slapping sounds in the shower that he interpreted as sexual. As McQueary later put it, “Visualizations come to your head.”

Read the article by Mark Pendergrast in The Crime Report.

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“In 2005, I came upon the story of Father Gordon MacRae in a series of articles by Pulitzer-Prize winning writer, Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. This was my first inkling that the case against this Catholic priest, that I and most others thought to be fairly and justly adjudicated, was in fact deeply flawed.

“As I looked more closely, and probed more deeply, it became apparent to me that this priest is a victim of a zealous sex crimes detective, a set of political agendas, and the greed of men pretending to be victims to ride a wave of media coverage of Catholic scandal to commit fraud.”

Read the post by Ryan A. MacDonald in his blog, “A Ram in the Thicket.”

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“There was never a day I just never stopped fighting or looked for strength from God. I never gave up,” Elizabeth said. “I had three friends incarcerated with me and my family, and that was my strength to say I’m not giving up and the truth will one day come forward.”

Then, she struck up a friendship with a pen pal in the Yukon Territory [Darrell Otto], with a man who believed in her innocence. Soon, an organization called the National Center for Reason and Justice had picked up the case, and reporters were paying attention to the story.

Listen to the program about this case on Latino USA.

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In a sentencing hearing weeks after the trial, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced MacRae to a term of 67 years in prison – more than thirty times the two-year maximum sentence proposed to MacRae pre-trial, deals that the priest rejected citing his innocence of the charges. During the sentencing phase, he was not permitted to say a single word in his own defense while the Judge berated him for observing his Constitutional right to a jury trial.

When sentencing MacRae, Judge Arthur Brennan offered some evidence and testimony of his own: “This court has heard clear and convincing evidence that you created child pornography of your victims.” In the entire trial, not a single word about child pornography was ever raised. Eleven years later, the lead detective in the case admitted to Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

Read the post by Ryan MacDonald in These Stone Walls.

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“The doors to Gunther’s classroom were solid, but windows were installed so that people in the hallway could see into the room. The doors were never locked, and were often propped open. There were mirrors on three of the classroom walls. Children and parents came and went in and out of the classroom while classes were going on. Some parents watched while sitting on chairs inside the room. Others would watch through the windows.

“On May 20, 2000 Gunther Fiek got married. Life was good. But six months later, a panic-driven witchhunt would devastate his promising young life and the lives of those he loves.”

Of the many cases I’ve been involved with, few have bothered me as much as that of Gunther Fiek. Gunther was a popular and successful Taekwondo instructor who worked with over 2,000 kids. His life was destroyed late in 2000 by a false accusation of sexual abuse, followed by a panic in which more accusations were manufactured by improper interviewing techniques. In October 2001, he was sentenced to 90 years without the possibility of parole.

For more information, follow this link.

Gunther’s family is not wealthy and they are unable to pay for the kind of legal help he needs. The Georgia Innocence Project only handles DNA cases and I have been unable to find another Innocence Project to look into this. I know a first-rate private investigator who will work for an affordable fee, but if he uncovers new evidence there will be no way to pursue it unless a good lawyer can be hired.

If anyone out there has any idea of how we might proceed by contacting me via the NCRJ: http://ncrj.org/feedback-form/. Perhaps a journalist could look into this case. To my knowledge, nothing decent has ever been written about it.

-Bob Chatelle

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“In the file of worst possible things that could happen to you, being falsely accused of sexually abusing young children, and then convicted and imprisoned for over a decade, is probably close to the top of the pile.

“This is the hell that was dealt out to a few dozen Americans in the great Satanic sexual abuse panic that burned its way across the nation in the 1980s and 90s. Rumors and media fervor, followed by wild and often impossible accusations from little children, methodically coaxed out by bogus experts, sent childcare employees and others to prison all over the United States. From the McMartin family’s preschool in Los Angeles—the longest criminal trial in US history at the time, which ended with nearly all charges dropped—to the saga of the Amirault family’s day-care center in Malden, Massachusetts, where prosecutors said about 40 kids were “tied to trees, sexually penetrated with knives, and tortured by a ‘bad clown’ in a “secret room,'” it was a dark time.”

Read the article by Chase Madar in Vice.

Readers can contact Bexar County Criminal District Attorney Nico LaHood at 210 335 2311 to politely but firmly request a full exoneration.