Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
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.
Posted in Innocents, Prisons, Sex Panic | Comments Off on Judge Alex Kozinski Speaks Out on Wrongful Convictions
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
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.
Posted in Prisons, Sex Panic | Comments Off on How “Risk Assessment” Tools Are Condemning People to Indefinite Imprisonment
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
October 9th, 2016
“Donald Trump doesn’t acknowledge wrongful convictions proven by DNA and by the credible, delayed confession of a convicted murderer and rapist. Insisting on Friday that the Central Park 5 are guilty of the 1989 high-profile horrific attack and rape of an investment banker jogging in Central Park, he revealed he knows nothing about DNA, the dynamics of false confessions, or contemporary understandings relating to criminal justice and wrongful convictions.”
Read the post by Nancy Petro at the Wrongful Convictions Blog.
Posted in Innocents | Comments Off on Trump’s Insistence that Central Park 5 are Guilty Reveals Frightening Ignorance and Worse
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
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.
Posted in Sex Panic | Comments Off on Making the Case Against Banishing Sex Offenders
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
September 24th, 2016
“Research shows that keeping some families together after children are abused can result in safety for the children and united families, when proper assessment and interventions are made. Even so, the usual suspect ‘child-protection professionals’ scapegoat the approach.”–Debbie Nathan
Read the article by Richard Wexler in The Chronicle of Social Change.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Opposition to Differential Response Dealt Heavy Blow
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
September 22nd, 2016
Posted in Innocents | Comments Off on Support the Innocence Project
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
September 11th, 2016
“Today, scores of other caregivers are accused of in injuring or killing a baby by shaking every year. But some doctors and lawyers believe the syndrome is being diagnosed too frequently and that debate is playing out in courtrooms around the country. Over 200 cases have fallen apart since doctors started challenging the diagnosis, with some defendants released after spending more than a decade in jail.”
From RetroReport. Produced by Miriam Weintraub.
Posted in Innocents | Comments Off on A Syndrome on Trial
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
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.
Posted in Innocents, Sex Panic | Comments Off on Why Jerry Sandusky May Be Innocent
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
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.”
Posted in Innocents, Sex Panic | Comments Off on The Father Gordon J. MacRae Story: Injustice in New Hampshire
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
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.
Posted in Prisons, Sex Panic | Comments Off on Expanding Incarceration Is Not the Best Way to Fight Rape Culture
