My good friend Gunther Fiek has started a blog from prison. I encourage you to subscribe. Here is his first post:
Archive for the ‘Sex Panic’ Category
Gunther Fiek’s Blog
Tuesday, October 18th, 2016Inside Case Behind Wrongful Conviction Doc ‘Southwest of Salem’
Saturday, October 15th, 2016
“Homophobia and hysteria didn’t deprive these women of their freedom – prosecutors did. The state’s reluctance to take responsibility in a case where its failings have been unusually well-documented and publicized suggests locking up the occasional innocent person isn’t that big a deal. With that conviction-at-all-costs mentality pervasive among prosecutors in the U.S., we can expect there are many more innocent people in prison than we know.”
Read the article by Bridgette Dunlap in Rolling Stone.
Judge Alex Kozinski Speaks Out on Wrongful Convictions
Saturday, October 15th, 2016
“I can’t do this anymore.” I sometimes find myself waking up with that as the first thought of the day to enter my mind. But don’t worry. I’ve been waking up uttering that about once a week for at least twenty of the twenty-three years I have spent in wrongful and unjust imprisonment. The thought is more of a temptation than any real conviction. “You don’t have that luxury,” my friend Pornchai Moontri often says in rebuttal. He’s right.
Read the post by Father Gordon MacRae in These Stone Walls.
How “Risk Assessment” Tools Are Condemning People to Indefinite Imprisonment
Friday, October 14th, 2016
“Yet, the fact remains: Most of the people in civil commitment facilities, like Lieberman, sexually assaulted children or women. If released, some of these folks might harm again. Others will not. But regardless of that uncertainty, once they have completed their sentences, is it acceptable for our society to use a checklist, a psychological evaluation, or a software program to legitimate continued confinement?”
Read the article by Erica Meiners in Truthout.
Making the Case Against Banishing Sex Offenders
Thursday, October 6th, 2016
photo credit: Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
[Justice] Kennedy’s “frightening and high” line was based on a 1988 Department of Justice guide for treating sex offenders, which cited an unfounded conjecture in the magazine Psychology Today. Further studies have shown the ineffectiveness of residency restrictions. In 2003, the Minnesota Department of Corrections collected data on nearly 100 sex offenders who had been released from prison and concluded, “There is no evidence in Minnesota that residential proximity to schools or parks affects reoffense.” As many as 90 percent of child victims know their rapists, but residency restrictions are meant to stop sexual assaults by strangers, a much rarer scenario. The California Sex Offender Management Board, a state agency, concluded in 2008 that restrictions had led more sex offenders to become homeless, and in turn more likely to reoffend.
Read the article by Maurice Chammah in the Texas Observer.
Why Jerry Sandusky May Be Innocent
Friday, September 9th, 2016
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.
The Father Gordon J. MacRae Story: Injustice in New Hampshire
Monday, September 5th, 2016“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.”
Expanding Incarceration Is Not the Best Way to Fight Rape Culture
Monday, September 5th, 2016
Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/AFP/Getty Images
“The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other developed country. The American incarceration rate is roughly 3.5 times as high as the median rate in Europe, according to a 2013 report from the European Council of Annual Penal Statistics. This is not because Americans commit more crimes — victimization rates in the United States are comparable to those in Western Europe. Nor is our outsize prison population solely the product of our drug war. As the Marshall Project notes, 54 percent of the 1.3 million Americans in state prisons are there for violent crimes. Even if we freed every nonviolent offender in an American prison, we would still jail a far higher percentage of our residents than do our European peers.”
Read the article by Eric Levitz in New York magazine.
Unheard but Unafraid: The Story of the San Antonio 4
Sunday, August 14th, 2016
“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.
Judge Critical of Sex Offender Registry Confirmed to Massachusetts High Court
Thursday, August 11th, 2016
“Making a mild criticism of sex offender registries looked like it could have hurt a Massachusetts judge in her bid to serve on the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. But on Wednesday the Governor’s Council, an eight-member elected body responsible for approving judicial nominees, voted unanimously in favor of Superior Court Judge Kimberly Budd’s nomination to serve as an associate justice.”
Read the article by Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason.
