Friends of Justice

Dear Friend of Justice,

Jim D’Entremont suggested that I supplement my rant with specific examples of the media coverage.

Particularly annoying was the coverage by WBUR, which began with the outrage of victim advocates that Shanley was exercising his rights. Then Monica Brady-Myerov juxtaposed a sound bite of Robert Shaw calling repressed memory theory “junk science,” making the statement appear unsupported, with an uncritical summary of the ADA’s claim that repressed memory is widely recognized as real by distinguished scientific professionals.

The Boston Globe also began with victims outrage. Then they quote Shaw calling repressed memory “junk science” and immediately follow that with Mitchell Garabedian and Robert Costello, who says he was abused by another priest.

The Boston Herald story was entirely about victims advocates and their outrage.

Suprisingly good was an article by Keri Roche in the Waltham Daily News Tribune. Waltham is a town of about 60,000 west of Boston. I was surprised that they even bothered to send a reporter to cover the story. When I first looked at the Shanley articles I’d received from my google alert, I confess I skipped over the Waltham article. I read it just now and it caught me by surprise.

Roche’s story was devoid of sensationalism. There were no quotes from outraged victims. Instead she reported on what was actually said in the courtroom. She disposed of the “junk science” sound bite and instead discussed Shaw’s arguments.

Her reporting on the DA’s case was equally fair and accurate.

Roche was also the only journalist to report that there were issues other than repressed memory.

The Boston Globe could learn a lot about journalism from Keri Roche.

-Bob

Dear Friend of Justice,

The media on the Shanley hearing was as inaccurate and as unfair as I feared it would be. I’m not sure why those reporters even bothered to sit in that courtroom, given that the proceedings went above their heads and that they had drawn their conclusions beforehand.

Reporters now just ignore anything inconsistent with their assumptions. What they ignore doesn’t make the six o’clock news. And if it doesn’t make the news, it doesn’t exist.

The overriding assumption is that accusers must never be doubted. Accusers are victims and victims are Holy. To doubt a sainted victim is to commit heresy. And heretics don’t have a lot of career opportunities.

The rush to judgment of accused Catholic priests was additionally complicated by a lot of pent-up homophobia and anti-Catholicism. Paul Shanley never had a chance. He was tried and convicted by the Boston Globe in January of 2002. Since then, his guilt — and that of other accused priests — has never been doubted by the Globe or most other media.

But it is as absurd to believe that all accused priests are guilty as it would be to assume that they are all innocent.

Because Shanley’s guilt is assumed by the media, and because the only evidence against him was the repressed memories of a highly disturbed young man, the press now considers the theory of repressed memory validated. In other words, Shanley is guilty because of repressed memory and repressed memory is proved by Shanley’s guilt. A perfectly circular argument.

The press refused to address the fact that there is no support for repressed memory within the scientific community. What did they do instead?

Some of them interviewed Mitchell Garabedian, an ambulance chaser who has earned millions of dollars, mainly from the Catholic Church, through civil suits based on repressed memory. Is Garabedian their idea of an objective observer?

Other members on the press instead concentrated on the outrage, expressed by victim-survivors, that Shanley was exercising rights given to him by the U.S. Constitution. Now I think it is newsworthy when any group asserts that the Constitution should only apply to people they happen to like. But since so many members of the press themselves endorse this notion, it’s not surprising that they took no note of it.

There was a time when I was naive enough to trust the press. But during the early 90s I became an anti-censorship activist. I soon learned that what I directly observed bore almost no resemblance to what was reported in newspapers and on television. Since then I have observed the failure of the press in many areas. They certainly failed big time from the beginning in their coverage of the Shanley case.

The press, of course, does OK when it operates with an open mind. The recent coverage of the Baran case by the Berkshire Eagle, for example, has been very good. Their coverage of the case back in 1985, however, was quite a different matter. Baran’s guilt then was considered as obvious by the press as is Shanley’s guilt now. Then and now, conflicting information was just ignored.

In my opinion, media unfairness is independent of ideology. For example, much has been made of the inaccuracies and unfairness of Fox News. But are the people who rely on Fox any worse than those Massachusetts “liberals” who get all of their information from the Boston Globe and NPR?

Citizens make decisions based on the information available to them. And most citizens get their information from the mainstream media. Without a fair and hard-working press, democracy cannot function.

Thomas Jefferson once said something to the effect that if given a choice he would prefer newspapers without government to government without newspapers.

What would Jefferson think if he knew the sorry state into which this nation’s media has fallen?

-Bob Chatelle

Dear Friend of Justice,

There may be worse ways of spending a beautiful spring afternoon than sitting in a Massachusetts court room, but they don’t readily come to mind.

On May 29^th, I and about 35 others attended the hearing on the new-trial motion of Paul Shanley. About half of that number were supporters of Paul. Of the rest, many were from the media. I only recognized a handful of people from the victim-survivor cult.

Shanley was represented by an excellent lawyer – Robert Shaw of Cambridge. The Middlesex DA’s office was represented by Loretta Lillios and Bethany Stevens. The one who did most of the talking was Ms. Lillios.

Perhaps I should say the mumbling, as I was barely able to understand anything that either of them said. While Mr. Shaw spoke from a miked podium at the back of the courtroom, Ms. Lillios and Ms. Stevens stood directly in front of the judge and spoke in weak monotones.

In the new-trial motion, Shaw raises four issues:

1. That Shanley’s lawyer, Frank Mondano, had failed Shanley by not demonstrating that the theory of repressed memory is not accepted by the scientific community.
2. That the Court’s statute-of-limitations instruction to the jury was erroneous.
3. That the Court had failed to follow mandated procedures during jury selection and that Mondano had failed to object to the same.
4. That a court officer had secretly and inappropriately intervened to influence a key prosecution witness.

I will not give a detailed account of the hearing, which lasted for over two hours. And I will confine myself to an account of a discussion of the first issue, which I believe is the one of most interest to us.

Shaw said that the evidence on which Shanley was convicted was “the thinnest of thin.” He said that justice was not done and that the court needs to answer questions about the validity of repressed memory.

According to the allegations, every Sunday morning Shanley would remove up to three children from a class of 12, take them to various spots in the church, and sexually abuse them. Yet not one teacher had testified that he or she had seen Shanley remove a child from a class. One child had testified that when in second grade, Shanley had abused him during confession. Yet children do not go to confession at such a young age.

The allegations arose when a childhood friend of Paul Busa told Busa that he (the friend) had recovered memories of being abused by Shanley 20 years prior. Busa soon recovered identical memories and joined his friend in pursuing a lawsuit. Busa’s “memories” were images in his mind that occurred in the wake of massive media exposure. At the time, Busa even made statements that he didn’t know if these images were memories or not.

Shaw stated, “Repressed memory is not generally accepted in the scientific community. Shaw said that the court had to consider three questions.

1. Who is the proper scientific community?
2. What is valid scientific methodology?
3. Was information at the trial accurately and fairly presented?

Shaw stated that he had presented a lengthy and detailed affidavit from Dr. Harrison Pope, an internationally respected memory scientist. He contrasted Dr. Pope with the prosecution’s “expert,” Dr. Daniel Brown. Shaw pointed out that the professionals that Brown relied upon included people who had been indicted and had lost their professional licenses. They included people who subscribed to unsupported theories about brainwashing by the CIA, Satanic cults, and the Ku Klux Klan. (See this speech by Dr. Corydon Hammond, co-author with Brown of Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law.)

Dr. Brown, first of all, misidentified that relevant scientific community. He stated that this community included social workers, hypnotherapists, and clinicians. None of these people are scientists.

In discussing methodology, Brown mentioned scholarship, clinical observation, and constructing meaning from observation. This is not scientific method.

Shaw stated that the prosecution’s other witness, Dr. Chu, had conducted retrospective studies in which people were asked if they had ever remembered things that they once had forgotten. Such “studies” are scientifically worthless. [Also, forgetting is very different from “repressing.]

When Shaw expressed the opinion that the theory of repressed memory was “junk science,” Judge Neel asked if it wasn’t the case that Dr. Elizabeth Loftus believes that it does exist but is very rare. Shaw disputed this. I am sure that he was right. As a scientist, Dr. Loftus would never state that the nonexistence of repressed memory has been proven. She may have said something like, “If it exists, it is very rare.”

Paul Busa claimed that he has been abused and had instantly forgotten the abuse many times over. The only way the jury could make sense of such statements was to subscribe to a belief in repressed memory. The prosecution’s entire case against Shanley rests on belief in repressed memory, yet Shanley’s trial attorney, Frank Mondano, did not challenge the theory at trial. Mondano only called one witness – Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. But Loftus could not effectively respond to Dr. Chu because Loftus was not a clinician. [Note: I attended the trial. Mondano didn’t have a clue about what to ask Loftus. After prosecutor Lynn Rooney did a cross-examination that was mainly an attack on Dr. Loftus’s character, Mondano did not even bother to do a redirect.]

Shaw pointed out that the past thirty years of memory research should have been used in the Shanley case to discredit the theory of repressed memory. Yet because Mondano did not challenge it, the court relied on unreliable information to make erroneous decisions.

As I said, it was very difficult to hear and understand the DA’s response. But she seemed to try to make the following points:

1. That the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has given its full blessing to repressed memory in the case of Commonwealth v. Frangipane.
2. That “The DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] accepts dissociative amnesia [repressed memory] and that should be enough.”
3. That Shaw had “unjustly maligned” Dr. Brown’s book, which is an award-winning leading textbook.
4. That Paul Busa’s abuse had been corroborated because he was able to describe a number of rooms in the church and also because his teachers [not Shanley] had often sent him out of the room for misbehavior.
5. That Frank Mondanao may have decided not to challenge the theory of repressed memory for “tactical” reasons.

The Frangipane decision is not a good decision. That should surprise no one – the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is not a good court.

Shaw had addressed the Frangipane issue in his written response to the Commonwealth. I will quote from that document.

In an effort to characterize the Defendant’s claims as having no merit, the
Commonwealth relies on several erroneous assertions concerning the Frangipane case. Commonwealth v. Frangipane, 433 Mass. 527 (2001). In Frangipane the issue of “repressed memory” was not subjected to any Lanigan hearing, and therefore no competing expert evidence was admitted and considered by any Court for a determination about general acceptance, standardization, or any other factor inherent in a proper Lanigan/Daubert evaluation. This is important context for the issues now before this Court, and perhaps explains why the Supreme Judicial Court’s opinion in Frangipane ultimately retained language indicating that the Court’s holding did not reach the question of whether there was general acceptance of “repressed memory,” or whether a Lanigan hearing was required. Commonwealth v. Frangipane, supra, supra, at 537 (“We need not reach the defendant

Dear Friend of Justice,

This afternoon my partner Jim D’Entremont and I will be attending the hearing on the new-trial motion of Paul Shanley (http://www.ncrj.org/Shanley/). This case, as most of you know, hinges on the junk-science “theory of repressed memory.” (Usually referred to as “recovered memory,” but that usage is somewhat misleading. Every time we remember anything we can be said to “recover” a memory.)

In an article in today’s Boston Globe, Middlesex DA Gerry Leone is quoted as saying, “The concept of recovered memory by victims of abuse has been accepted by both the scientific and legal communities…”

That statement, of course, is a lie. But it is a lie that few Globe readers will question. Had Mr. Leone said, “The concept of astrology has been accepted by both the scientific and legal communities..,” his statement would probably have raised a few eyebrows. Yet there is no more evidence for repressed memory than there is for astrology.

Repressed memory has, unfortunately, been accepted by a great many prosecutors. But that is because it enables them to win cases they would otherwise lose. Scientific validity is seldom a matter of concern to such people.

But support for the theory of repressed memory in the scientific community is almost nonexistent. The “scientists” who support this theory are, for the most part, crackpots.

Consider, for example, Dr. Corydon Hammond, one of the principal authors of Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law. This is an award-winning book published by Harvard University. It is perhaps the bible of the repressed-memory cult. I’m sure Mr. Leone would not hesitate in saying that Dr. Hammond is a leading scientist who “accepts” (and promotes) the theory of repressed memory.

One wonders what Mr. Leone would say if he were to read this speech by Dr. Hammond (http://mysite.verizon.net/vzex11z4/greenbaum2.html)

Many of you have already read this speech. But I suggest you take a little time to read it again.

I think any reasonable person reading the Greenbaum speech would conclude that Dr. Hammond is not playing with a full deck.

Unfortunately, neither are a great many Massachusetts prosecutors, journalists, and politicians.

The battle against ignorance and bigotry is indeed difficult. But to abandon it is to abandon our humanity.

-Bob Chatelle