Posted on 11/22/2009 12:31:10 AM PST by 4rcane
Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry.
Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children.
I’ve been disgusted with the US legal system for a long time. Judges, lawyers, prosecutors can be pretty corrupt and they’re never punished. They’re like Wall Street banksters
Unless of course those they prey upon have a lot of money like the Duke Lacrosse players.
If the Prosecutors did withhold key evidence that could have proved him innocent then they need to spend 22 years behind bars, period!
I’ve had it with our criminal injustice system, its a pathetic joke!!!
If this don't chafe your rear nothing will!
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/042076.html
Rule one: Ask to see all recordings unedited. I believe most particulars include all evidence to be reviewed by the defense.
it is the prosecutions duty to share that information..
if true he is owed millions and the DA if alive should be given his own medicine
If the prosecution knowingly withheld “key exculpatory evidence” the party(s)responsible should be executed. There is no place for that sort of conduct.
I agree. This level of prosecutorial misconduct should be a capital offense.
Wasn’t it Scott Harsbarger, now the inside investigator of ACORN antics, who was the Mass. Prosecutor in these child molestation cases. Notorious for hiding exculpatory evidence. Gerald Amirault comes to mind.
Built a career on perves to become Atty Gen. of Mass.
The chance of a child sex abuse case being valid is in inverse proportion to the number of alleged victims.
The prosecutor is now a judge.
What gets overlooked in these cases is that some guilty party or parties went free. And free to duplicate the crime.
Assuming there was a crime. A lot of these mass child sex abuse cases seem to have been created out of the whole cloth by unscrupulous and ambitious prosecutors.
Agreed. But in this case there was at least one kid with...have you finished breakfast?...gonorrhea of the throat.
I remember seeing on television some woman pointing to areas on a doll while asking a three-year-old girl if some guy had touched her there or there or there. I was creeped out in thinking of how my nieces might have replied.
Central to these prosecutions were several concepts; 1) Young children do not lie, 2) Repressed memories can be factually retrieved and 3) Children must be protected from being questioned in court. Almost certainly not all of the defendants in these many cases were innocent BUT equally certain was the fact that innocent people ended in prison in these cases. In hindsight each of the above prosecutorial concepts has been disproven or modified but it took a long time for the victims (adults AND children) to recover.
An interesting footnote to this spate of prosecutions exists in our even more recent history. President Clinton's search for a FEMALE Attorney General yielded 2 duds, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, before finding a successful candidate in Janet Reno from Miami Florida. Part of her claim to fame was her efforts in prosecuting such a case for "Grant Snowden / Satanic ritual abuse" that apparently brought her name to the Clinton's attention.
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