NEW HAMPSHIRE
These Stone Walls
BY FR. GORDON J. MACRAE FEBRUARY 19, 2014
For Catholic priests, merely being accused is now evidence of guilt. A closer look at the prosecution of Fr Gordon MacRae opens a window onto a grave injustice.
Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald.
“Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents.” (Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2013)
The above quote says it all. I wrote for These Stone Walls two weeks ago to announce a new federal appeal filed in the Father Gordon MacRae case. I mentioned my hope to write in more detail about the perversion of justice cited by Dorothy Rabinowitz in “The Trials of Father MacRae,” her third major article on the MacRae case in The Wall Street Journal.
The details of how such injustice is perpetrated are especially important in cases like Father MacRae’s because there was no evidence of guilt – not one scintilla of evidence – presented to the jury in his 1994 trial. I recently wrote “Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester,” an article with photographs of the exact location where the charges against this priest were claimed to have occurred. If you read it, you can judge for yourself whether those charges were even plausible.
The sexual assaults for which Father Gordon MacRae has served two decades in prison were to have taken place five times in as many weeks, all in the light of day in one of the busiest places in downtown Keene, New Hampshire. Yet no one saw anything. No one heard anything. Accuser Thomas Grover – almost age 16 when he says it happened, and age 26 when he first accused the priest – testified that he returned from week to week after each assault because he repressed the memory of it all while having a weekly “out- of- body experience.”
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