Reasonable doubt about Benjamin LaGuer's guilt By Eric Goldscheider/ Guest Columnist Thursday, October 26, 2006
The fascinating thing about Benjamin LaGuer becoming a political football
in the governor's race is that the man convicted of raping his 59-year-old neighbor in 1983 might actually be innocent.
Largely missing from
the debate is that the original case against LaGuer was very weak and revelations made years after the verdict show that vital
information was kept from the defense. That issue is currently before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
In 2002 a DNA test
LaGuer fought for showed a trace amount of his genetic material in the evidence. This is cited as ironclad proof that LaGuer
is guilty, but the media has ignored statements from four reputable DNA experts that the results are unreliable due to the
way evidence was handled.
LaGuer was indicted
in August 1983 after the lead detective made blatantly false statements to the grand jury, including that the victim identified
LaGuer by name.
Private investigators
identified a "likelier suspect" who was five years older than LaGuer with a similar build, complexion and ethnicity. His mother
had lived in the building where the crime occurred and, most significantly, he had a history of sexual misconduct. Even though
police were made aware of this man, they never interviewed him. In 1998, he was charged with another rape.
The list of things
pointing to LaGuer's innocence is long. His attorney, who counted on LaGuer taking a plea bargain under which he could have
walked free after two years, was ill prepared for a trial marred by jurors uttering racist slurs about LaGuer during deliberations
and, as it turns out, suppressed evidence. The all-white male jury convicted LaGuer based only on the victim, who unbeknownst
to the panel had a history of mental illness, pointing to him in the courtroom.
By the 1990s LaGuer's
claims of innocence and the gaping holes in the case against him were widely reported in the press. The long list of prominent
people speaking and writing in his support included Elie Wiesel, William Styron, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Boston Globe editorial
page, and John Silber. While fighting his conviction, LaGuer explored the world of ideas Boston University's prison education
program was exposing him to. He was a model prisoner, teaching AIDS awareness to other inmates, winning writing awards, and
earning a bachelor's degree with honors.
That the parole board,
in 1998, refused to acknowledge either the weakness of the original case or LaGuer's achievements as an inmate incensed his
many supporters. With Silber's encouragement, a team of lawyers set out to find and then test evidence from the case for DNA.
Midway through that process, Tamara Fisher, then a young lawyer with a high powered firm, used the Freedom of Information
Act to get LaGuer's police file and eventually the fingerprint report at the heart of the current challenge to the conviction.
The file showed that
socks and underwear from LaGuer's apartment were mixed in with the rest of the evidence. Seen together with the miniscule
amount of genetic material that yielded the DNA results, it is clear to the experts looking at the case that the way evidence
was handled could and probably did lead to contamination.
Theodore Kessis concluded,
"...many instances of DNA testing errors have led to the false conviction of innocent individuals... It is my opinion that
we have encountered such a case here." Harvard geneticist Daniel Hartl seconded that finding, writing, "There is, in my opinion,
ample reason for a full inquiry into this case, and I hope that the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
will agree."
The issue before
the SJC is whether LaGuer was denied a fair trial due to the fact that prosecutors withheld a report showing that four fingerprints
lifted from a key piece of evidence -- the base of the trim line telephone, the cord of which was used to bind the victim's
wrists -- were left by someone other than LaGuer. The detective testified at trial that he only recovered one partial print.
That testimony was obviously untrue. If the verdict is overturned then it will be up to a new jury to decide if LaGuer is
in fact guilty as charged.
