Was Paul Shanley railroaded?

I've no doubt that the notorious Boston "street priest" Paul Shanley (now defrocked) was a bad man. He's sitting in prison for having sexually abused victims. But did he get a fair trial? Was his guilty verdict based in part on pseudo-science? The Nation writes:

Sex panics make for bad law. It could be said that they make for bad science,
too, except that what has driven some of the most notorious legal cases to
emerge from such panics has been more a masquerade of science, a belief tricked
out in the language of medicine and social science to distract from the mumbo
jumbo at its core. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is set to be the
latest arena to test that belief, taking up the admissibility of "dissociative
amnesia," or "repressed memory," in a case that some powerful interests no doubt
hoped was as settled as the grave. The petitioner is Paul Shanley, a once famous
"street priest" who became infamous in the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic
Church, was tried in 2005, convicted and sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in
prison. Because the media, particularly the Boston Globe, were central to the
allegations and the frenzy that provided the context, it has always been
difficult to see the case plainly. But because justice, as opposed to its many
stand-ins, is blind, imagine yourself or one you love as the defendant at the
bar.
In October 2004 Dr. Daniel Brown, a Boston psychologist, took the
witness stand in a pretrial hearing at Middlesex Superior Court and offered what
would become the state's only foundation for its prosecution. There was no
evidence in the case, just a claim that depended entirely on faith. Dr. Brown
was in the courtroom to give it the imprimatur of science.
The accuser asserted that from the age of 6, in 1983, he had been raped and otherwise indecently assaulted by the defendant for three years in a busy church on Sunday mornings. Each assault, it was alleged, instantly erased his memory of what had just happened, so that the boy re-approached the defendant in a state of
innocent unknowing, to be assaulted again, to forget everything again and again,
and then move on in life without the slightest inkling of the experience until
twenty years later, when it all came back to him.
Dr. Brown had appeared as a certified expert in courtrooms for years, stating that the mind's capacity for such "massive repression" was generally accepted as demonstrable fact in the psychological professions. That was always false. By 2004, however, as compellingly detailed in documents now before the Supreme Judicial Court, the literature in major scientific publications questioning the validity of
repressed memory was weighty. Many of the therapists whose work Brown
recommended had been disgraced, stripped of their licenses and revealed as
dangerous frauds in successful malpractice suits.

Imagine yourself or one you love as the defendant at the bar. That has a way of making a despicable man caught in such circumstances a lot more human.

Reacties

Maar wat het dan ook was: het was een meer dan vreselijk proces.
Op een voor mij meer dan gruwelijk moment: ik probeerde, voor de 2e keer mijn klacht in te dienen. Dom. Ik had buiten de kerk en haar hooligans gerekend. Goddank!

De Kerk schopte Paul Shanley én zijn slachtoffers kapot.
De rest? Een zooitje vet betaalde wetenschappers die met hun door de kerk toegeworpen kluif "hij is een monster" aan de rol gingen.
De liegende kerk die haar pondje vlees opeiste, zelfs in Nederland, waar ik mijn twijfels over de gang van zaken niet mocht uitspreken van een rk mediaman.
Shanley en de arts van Ibsen.

Maar de slachtoffers elkaars kopvel ruikend hebben aangekeken!