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By Kay Ebeling
Robert Costello was steaming mad as he sat behind Paul Shanley in court last week. Not only that the court would consider a retrial for one of the worst pedophile priests in the country, not only at the line of NAMBLA types, "creepy guys" in the row behind him who Costello recognized as Shanley supporters from the criminal trial. The thing that induced rage in Costello was the hearing aid, where was Shanley’s hearing aid.
He and other victim advocates would joke during breaks in Shanley’s 2005 trial, Maybe he just has his hearing aid turned off. Now he’s in prison and taxpayers have apparently paid for surgery on his ears.
“The church protected him as a priest when he was getting away with serial pedophilia in Massachusetts and California. Now why is it up to the victims once again to monitor him, pay attention to what he’s doing.”
Shanley’s new attorney only seems to have come out of nowhere but the National Center for Reason and Justice is paying at least in part for Shanley's Defense. NCRJ say they are “An innocence project for people wrongly accused or convicted of crimes against children.”
NCRJ announced they would “provide financial and other support to the legal appeal of defrocked priest Paul Shanley,” in June 2005 press release, soon after the ex-priest’s conviction.
“What pisses me off,” Costello said, “is that the church moves him around, lets him abuse probably a thousand kids because he was such a disaster of a human being, then now when he’s convicted, the church dumps him on the State. HOW THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO PUT THIS BEHIND US when they let him come up with excuses to get a new trial every year.
“One of his victims slashed his throat and is now in a mental hospital. The other guy doesn't want his life torn apart again.”
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Who Cares What a Retrial Does to Badly Damaged Crime Victims? We at National Center For Reason and Justice Have an Agenda, to prove there is no such thing as repressed memory.
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There was Shanley’s new attorney, Robert F. Shaw, preparing to use this pedophile priest’s defense to promote the NCRJ agenda, which includes proving that repressed memory is all fake. The requested retrial of Paul Shanley is only incidentally about getting one “innocent” man out of prison.
The retrial of Paul Shanley would be a national referendum on repressed memory.
This is from the NCRJ June 2005 press release announcing support for Shanley’s appeal:
“False memories of sexual abuse – which are sincerely believed by the individual –have been induced in adults and even more infamously in the children who were led to make false accusations of ritualistic sexual abuse against day-care workers in the 1980s and early 90s.”
That same press release links you to another story about Shanley, “On the irrevocable damage caused by recovered memories.” In the article at Legal Affairs, an online journal, JoAnn Wypijewski, a New York freelance writer, chronicles Shanley’s career with observations such as:
By 1973, Shanley was offering a "ministry to sexual minorities." Gay Community News printed his phone number every week with the notice: "Fr. Paul Shanley . . . has been working with younger gays and bisexuals, to overcome the negative conditioning of the Catholic Church.
She quotes from the personnel files of Shanley that were finally released in Boston after his conviction, items such as:
There were claims of sexual encounters between the priest and adolescents or young adults during the late 1960s and '70s. Shanley himself, according to people close to him, has admitted to past "sexual misconduct." In a January 2002 letter to friends, he explained that "it was never with a child but with a highly sexualized adolescent, never with an 'innocent,' and was so non-traumatic then that some of the victims returned.
She even comments on the size of Shanley’s released files and the volumes of evidence contained in them by criticizing the plaintiffs for holding:
“a PowerPoint presentation of strategically edited excerpts from a 1,600-page personnel file that the archdiocese had kept on Shanley.”
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A 16 thousand page personnel file?
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In a retrial, Shanley's guilt would not be the issue, the focus would be on the neo-libertarian concept that innocent people are being put in prison because crazy people (Like Me) think they are having recovered memories:
Wypijewski writes:
The accusations against Shanley rely on a psychological theory called dissociated or repressed memory. It holds that the mind can submerge the most traumatic memories in some walled-off place, where they remain unaltered and retrievable in exact detail by a triggering event or therapy. The idea comes from Freud's early work, and is one which he ultimately rejected.
ME: Yeah and today it's the only part of Freud's work that is still relevant.
Pedophile Priest Crime Victims Are Like People Who Think TheyWere Abducted By Aliens
Wypijewski compares pedophile priest crime victims who recover memories to “people who claimed to have recovered memories of alien abduction—a patently false memory.”
(Hey, how does she know?...)
The National Center for Reason and Justice funded defense, if the Boston court grants Shanley a retrial, will likely compare the pedophile priest rape survivors, many of whom experienced repressed memory, to the children in the McMartin Preschool case in the early 1990s, and people who think they were abducted by aliens, and people who in isolated cases have otherwise undocumented memories. . .
“Here’s what really pisses me off,” says Robert Costello. “The Church tells us to heal and move on, put this behind us, but here I am going to a hearing for Shanley again.”
Costello added: “I went to the hearing last week so this mother fucker could see me and know, and his family who were all there would see and know that the advocates aren’t going away.”
“We aren’t going away.”
ME: Meanwhile here is what I posted on a comments section somewhere on some article, out there in the ether when I had a break at work this weekend:
I would not mind seeing repressed memory go on trial. It's a phenomenon that pedophile priest rape survivors share all over the country. In alarmingly similar ways children repress a memory of molest or turn the memory into some other imaginary event.
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A RETRIAL ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY might be good for the pedophile priest survivors because
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Many of us, myself included, did not remember the rapes until our own children turned the same age as we were during the rapes. It is a phenomenon repeated all across the country, I've read about the same effect, remembering when your children turn the same age, in several case briefs concerning the LA cases.
To put repressed memory on trial would in the end prove how critical it is to understanding how rape as a child affects a person for their entire life.
Pedophiles often force the child victim to forget, that is part of their MO, don't tell anyone. What else can a child do but force the memory into some space in the brain, otherwise we would be blurting our experience out to everyone, like I did.
Until a bishop at the archdiocese offices stood over me at age 6 or so and told me I had to "stop babbling" about what Father Horne did to me. I did not mention it or think of it again for 40 years. But boy was I sexually confused.
Our recovered memories only prove the guilt of the pedophiles. You can't have the same thing happen all over the country, as we've seen with pedophile priest victims, people who did not know each other before describing the same experience of recovered memory, and still say it does not exist.
So go ahead and retry Shanley, or better yet, sue the victims.
No, it is too hard on his victims to put him on trial again. They should put Paul Shanley in a dank dungeon with only bread and water, for what he did.
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THAT NIGGLING HEARING AID
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Meanwhile Robert Costello vows he’s going to follow up with Victims Rights groups in Boston to find out if the state really has been paying for surgery on Paul Shanley’s hearing so he no longer needs a hearing aid.
“For the next 18 years whatever it is Shanley has, once a year he gets to apply for a new trial, and he gets medical, dental, all this other stuff. It’s like the church just dumped him on the state,” Costello said.
In Los Angeles the church has dumped ex-priest George Neville Rucker on the state as well. It sounds like an issue for mainstream media. Will they get it? Will they stop covering Britney Spears long enough to even think about the damage done by pedophile priests all over the country?
I asked Costello, What happened at the hearing?
“They were doing minute details, saying he should have a new trial because of tolling of the statute of limitations and he was in the state for 43 days at some point in 1983 or something like that. The guy was rambling on and on you could barely hear him.”
Indeed a visit to the website of Robert F. Shaw attorney at law gives you no list of cases or clients, you have no idea who he is or what he represents even if you do read through the masses of print, lo-o-o-o-o-ong paragraphs as Robert Shaw talks about his “common sense” and word-stuffed meaningless phrases such as this under Quotes of Note:
"As a member of the State Bar of California, Defendant-Lawyer was granted the privileges and duties of a fiduciary. Defendant-Lawyer owed duties of the highest character: undivided loyalty and fidelity, the most scrupulous good faith, honesty and integrity. The evidence in this case will establish that Defendant-Lawyer was negligent, that he desired to conceal that negligence, and that this desire gave birth to fraudulent, deceptive conduct..."
Then in the section quoting articles by Robert F. Shaw you get an inkling of his libertarian leanings:
Euthanasia In The United States? Selected Arguments Against Legally Assisted Suicide And Why They Should Not Prevail," is a 1996 article written by Robert Shaw. This article is not concerned with the presence or absence of a constitutional right to die nor the legal analysis necessary to make that determination” which “asks whether, as a matter of public policy, euthanasia should be assimilated into our society. . . Part IV describes the foundation upon which arguments for the legalization of euthanasia rest.
"Look at his picture!" I hollered into Robert Costello’s ear as we talked on the phone Saturday. He looks like one of those ranting libertarians, full of theory and ideology who never listen to the personal story of a person, they never even listen, I've known guys like him, I can tell by his picture." (And I can tell.)
(Shaw’s picture is at left, lifted by digital free access from rfslawoffices dot com. Now, since this picture is posted on his website, I assume it’s there for PR purposes, so it’s okay for me to lift it. I hope this does not result in another stream of emails from copyright infringement geeks telling me I'm a thief and they are going to see me prosecuted, as happened when I ran a Chicago Tribune cartoon last week. In my opinion if something is on the web, it’s there for everyone. If you don’t want people ‘lifting’ your artwork, don’t post it on the internet where anyone can lift it.)Welcome to the 21st Century.
But I digress.
Most of what you find at the Law Offices of Robert Shaw website is masses of print, long paragraphs full of obsequious wording, you can read pages and pages and maybe lift out one or two significant words.
So this is what we can expect in court if Paul Shanley gets another trial, Robert Shaw droning on and in, with comparisons of pedophile priest rape survivors to persons abducted by aliens.
Why do we need another hearing on Paul Shanley:
Last week in court Costello said, “I kept hearing Shanley's new attorney say, he is entitled, he is entitled. You could barely understand what he was saying he was talking fast and droning, but I kept hearing those words Shanley is entitled to a new hearing he’s entitled.”
FROM National Center for Reason and Justice website:
Your innocence does not protect you. When innocent people are confronted with untrue, absurd allegations of child abuse, they frequently assume that this is a simple misunderstanding and that it will be cleared up quickly. They cooperate with police and try to explain. They have faith in our system of justice.”
Right, your clients are all just like Paul Shanley.
Onward. . .
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