Voices from Beyond
Justice Delayed for Father MacRae
A list of officers with credibility issues calls his 1994 conviction into question.
Gordon MacRae is escorted out of the Cheshire County Superior Courthouse in Keene, N.H., Sept. 23, 1994.
PHOTO: JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A list of officers with credibility issues calls his 1994 conviction into question.
The Wall Street Journal
By Harvey Silverglate | October 10, 2022
PREFACE
The long saga of Fr. Gordon MacRae is likely to soon end
By Harvey A. Silverglate, Esq — November 11, 2022:
To the readers on my opt-in list of those who have chosen to receive my occasional columns and articles:
Many of you are likely familiar with the case of Father Gordon MacRae, the Catholic priest in New Hampshire who got caught up in the massive child sex abuse epidemic that engulfed the Catholic Church some time ago, remnants of which continue to come to public attention even now. This abuse scandal is particularly well known to Boston-area residents since The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for its reporting of the scandal — a scandal that resulted in the exile of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law to a minor position in Rome in order to keep him safe from potential indictment for turning a blind eye toward widespread abuse. The ground-breaking work of the Spotlight Team resulted in an Oscar-winning motion picture entitled “Spotlight.”
However, as the legendary baseball player (and pundit) Yogi Berra once said: “It ain’t over until it’s over.” A startling development in the MacRae case indicates a quite decent possibility — I would say a probability — that post-conviction litigation almost certain to begin shortly will exonerate and free Fr. MacRae.
Harvey Silverglate, Esq
Father Gordon MacRae has been in prison since 1994, when a New Hampshire jury convicted him of sexual assault and he was sentenced to 33½ to 67 years. The charges against him were “built by a determined sex-abuse investigator and an atmosphere in which accusation was, in effect, all the proof required to bring a guilty verdict,” the Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in 2013. Father MacRae has maintained his innocence all along.
A new development will soon provide Granite State courts an opportunity to reconsider Father MacRae’s conviction. The state attorney general has published a so-called Laurie List of law-enforcement officers with credibility problems. The list is named for State v. Laurie, a 1995 case in which the state supreme court overturned a conviction after exposure of a detective’s dishonest conduct.
The list initially included Detective James F. McLaughlin of the Keene Police Department, who was the lead investigator in the MacRae case. He made the list for alleged “falsification of records” in an unrelated case in 1985. Detective McLaughlin successfully petitioned to have his name removed from the list, but the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism sued to learn who had been removed. (Detective McLaughlin has declined to respond to local press requests for comment on the list.)
Father MacRae plans to ask a court to throw out his conviction, arguing that Thomas Grover, his only accuser at trial, testified falsely at Detective McLaughlin’s behest. As Ms. Rabinowitz has documented, Detective McLaughlin’s own reports showed that he attempted a sting by writing a letter to Father MacRae and forging the signature of Jon Grover, the accuser’s brother. According to supporters of Father MacRae who run the website BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com, Detective McLaughlin failed to produce and maintain recordings of interviews with alleged victims, despite making adamant statements about the importance of recordings in child-abuse investigations.
In a May 1994 lawsuit, Father MacRae alleged that Detective McLaughlin accused the priest of having taken pornographic photographs of one of the alleged victims. No such photos were ever found. (Detective McLaughlin filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, which the judge denied. After Father MacRae was convicted in September 1994, the judge dismissed the suit without prejudice.)
Ms. Rabinowitz wrote a series of stories about such cases beginning in the late 1980s. False and implausible accusations of child sexual abuse led to conviction and imprisonment of innocent people from New York and Florida to Washington state.
All this happened because “believe the children” became a nationwide mantra. Society has a duty to protect young children—but also to assess accusations rationally and fairly, especially when they’re improbable, spectacular and horrifying. Journalists, too, must maintain a level of skepticism when cases as improbable as these arise. Any reporter who covers the legal system should have recognized the high probability that these accusations were false.
Most of the defendants in these cases were ultimately released, but their lives had been ruined. The recent development in Father MacRae’s case offers hope of another such bittersweet vindication.
Harvey A. Silverglate is a Boston-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer.
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RELATED, by David F. Pierre, Jr. and The Media Report: “Twice Is a Charm? Wall St. Journal Again Profiles Stunning Case of Wrongfully Convicted Priest Fr. Gordon MacRae”
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Addendum by the Author, Harvey Silverglate
“In today’s Wall Street Journal, I have a column about a long-lingering miscarriage of justice that might, I suggest, be on the verge of producing justice at long last. The subject is the Catholic priest Father Gordon MacRae who has spent many years in prison for a crime that I, along with many others, feel strongly that he did not commit.
With regard to this particular genre of cases, I recommend that you read Dorothy Rabinowitz’ 2003 book entitled No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. Ms. Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer Prize for her path-breaking exposes of wrongful convictions in child sex-abuse cases (including, but not limited to, the MacRae case).
“Those of you from Massachusetts might remember our own local version of this false-accusation phenomenon that swept the nation during a time of particularly intense vulnerability and gullibility. We had the prosecution/persecution of Bernard F. Baran, Jr., out in Western Massachusetts, whose innocence ultimately got him released from a lengthy prison sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baran (Full disclosure: I worked on the Baran case, along with fellow Massachusetts criminal defense counsel John Swomley and Eric Tennen.) Massachusetts was also, shamefully, the location of the prosecution/persecution of the Amirault family, which is featured in Ms. Rabinowitz’s aforesaid book. (Full disclosure: I represented defendant Gerald Amirault at his parole hearing. The Parole Board granted parole. One member of the Board confided to me that the Board was convinced that the crime never happened, but it had the power only to release an innocent convict from prison, not to grant pardons. Gerald to this day wears an ankle-bracelet, a heavy burden for an innocent person.)
“Those interested in the problem of wrongful convictions are also advised to take a look at a recently-published book by Northeastern Law School Professor Daniel S. Medwed, entitled Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get out of Prison. And, of course, an occasional visit should be paid to the website of The National Innocence Project, co-founded and still led by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Similarly, there is the Boston-based organization dubbed The National Center for Reason and Justice, led by Robert D. (“Bob”) Chatelle. (Disclosure: I am on the organization’s advisory board. The NCRJ also sponsors the defense of Fr. Gordon MacRae.) And the problem of wrongful convictions is not reserved to state prosecutions. Consider my 2009 book (updated in 2011) Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”
