Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Detective James McLaughlin shows up on a previously secret list of dishonest police for falsifying records. In 1994 he falsified the case against Fr Gordon MacRae.

January 19, 2022

I was hoping to find someone else to write this, but information happened fast and time is critical. So I will write it myself even though I have an obvious conflict of interest. At this writing I am in my 28th year of unjust imprisonment. In that time, every avenue of appeal has been exhausted with no hope for justice. All resources for further appeals are also exhausted. And, frankly, so am I.

Many well-meaning friends and readers have nonetheless urged me in recent years to continue to explore and pursue any means to address what seems for most a clear injustice. My 67-year prison sentence — after rejecting plea deal offers to serve one year — just doesn’t sit well with fair-minded, rational people. That seems especially so given that if I were in fact guilty or at least willing to pretend so in 1994, I would have left prison 26 years ago.

From seemingly out of nowhere, a new development has arisen at the start of 2022. I am told that it has the potential to either right a wrong and set me free or simply fade away like all previous endeavors that left me to die in prison. I had come to accept that latter reality. My focus in the last two years, like that of my friend and patron, St. Maximilian Kolbe, was to set someone else free. I am proud of that accomplishment. It is all I have to show for this injustice. Then, at the very close of 2021, a bombshell exploded on New Year’s Eve.

The New Hampshire LEACT Commission

I received a message that day from an old friend, Joseph Lascaze. Like Pornchai Moontri, Joseph went to prison at age 18. Also like Pornchai, he accomplished something extraordinary in that time. After a few aimless years lost in an aimless prison system, Joseph fought against many obstacles to educate himself. Over those years, he became a close friend to both me and Pornchai. Prison is not a good place to grow up, but Joseph did, and in spite of all obstacles he became an exemplary citizen and gifted young man.

Joseph was released in 2019 and is today the “Smart Justice Campaign Manager” for the New Hampshire Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He also serves by invitation of NH Governor Christopher Sununu on the Governor’s LEACT Commission (Law Enforcement Accountability, Community, and Transparency). Joseph has been well received and even honored by New Hampshire law enforcement for his candor and unprecedented contributions to this Commission.

Among many other projects, Joseph has worked with LEACT to make public a previously secret document held by the NH Attorney General entitled the “Exculpatory Evidence Schedule.” It is more popularly known as the “Laurie List” named for the judicial ruling that created it. The ACLU, along with several NH media outlets, sued the state under the Freedom of Information Act to make the list public.

Joseph’s New Year’s Eve message was read to me by another friend who noted that Joseph attached an article he urgently wanted me to see. The article, by Damien Fisher at InDepthNH.org, was “AG Hides Some ‘Laurie List’ Names Hours After Release.” In short, the ACLU lawsuit settlement dictates that the secret ‘Laurie List’ is now to be a public list.

The potential bombshell for me is this: It turns out that Keene, NH Detective James F. McLaughlin, who choreographed the case against me in 1994, was sanctioned and placed on the list for “Falsification of Records” in 1985, nine years before my trial. Another recent InDepthNH article by Nancy West,entitled “AG Removes 28 Names From ‘Laurie List’ of Dishonest Police Outside the Law,” describes what this development potentially means:

“Officers placed on the list sustained discipline for dishonesty, excessive force, or mental illness in confidential personnel files .... If a criminal defendant finds out that such evidence existed, even many years later, he or she can petition the court for a new trial or try to have the charges dropped altogether.”

InDepthNH, November 24, 2021

More than a half century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in ‘Brady v. Maryland’ that criminal defendants must receive all exculpatory evidence or their conviction could be overturned or vacated entirely.

The Suppression of Exculpatory Evidence

Needless to say, neither I nor my defense were made aware of the 1985 falsification of records infraction against Detective McLaughlin before my trial. But that was certainly not the only suppression of exculpatory evidence. In multiple police reports prepared by McLaughlin before trial — reports which steered the prosecutor’s case — McLaughlin made repeated references to tape recorded phone calls and interviews from which he made specific claims.

Some of the subjects on those tapes claimed that McLaughlin grossly misquoted them or included statements that they never made at all. Despite a court order to turn those recordings over to my defense, every one of them disappeared before trial. McLaughlin claimed, for example, that a specific tape was “recycled” and a transcript that his report referred to was never made due to a “clerical error.” Years later, McLaughlin sent that same tape to The Wall Street Journal despite the fact that it contained none of what he said it contained. Writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2005, Dorothy Rabinowitz addressed this:

“On the police tape, an otherwise bewildered-sounding Fr. MacRae is consistently clear about one thing — that he in no way solicited [anyone] ... for sex or anything else. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says more than once, his tone that of a man who feels that there must, indeed, be something for him to understand about the charge and its causes that eludes him. . . . He listens as the police assure him that he can save all the bad publicity. ‘Our concern is, let’s get it taken care of, let’s not blow it out of proportion. You know what the media does,’ they warned. He could avoid all the stories, protect the church, let it all go away quietly.”

A Priest’s Story Part 1: The trial, April 27, 2005

There was no evidence at all in the case brought against me in 1994. In New Hampshire — as in many states since the 1980s — no evidence is needed to convict someone accused of a sexual offense. No evidence was admitted at my trial beyond the word of 27-year old accuser, Thomas Grover, a man with a criminal record who stood to gain $200,000 for making the claim.

The story of how that trial unfolded has received much attention over the years. Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer-prize winning member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, published two major articles on my trial and its back story in 2005 and a third in 2013 entitled “The Trials of Father MacRae.”

These articles sparked some national interest, but no one could have predicted the tidal wave of accusations against Catholic priests that arose in 2002 and continued until the present day. Other media — including most in the Catholic media — decided to look the other way in any case of injustice against a priest.

Seeking justice has been a steep uphill battle. In 2009, at about the same time this blog began, a new investigator began a fresh look at the case. A decorated career FBI Special Agent Supervisor, he ended his investigation in 2012 concluding, bluntly:

“In my three year investigation of this matter, I found no evidence that MacRae committed these crimes or any crimes. Indeed, the only ‘evidence’ was the statements of Thomas Grover which have been discredited by those who were around him at the time including members of his own family.”

Affidavit of former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott, Ret.

Alarming New Evidence Alarmingly Ignored

When no evidence is needed to put a man in prison there is no evidence to dismantle or challenge. Nonetheless, Mr. Abbott’s investigation uncovered many things, including allegations of misconduct by Detective James McLaughlin. New witnesses were interviewed and they bravely came forward to write and sign statements in the case. Their evidence is profiled by David F. Pierre at The Media Report under the title, “Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest.”

Among the many statements described and quoted there is one from Steven Wollschlager obtained by the Investigator. Steven, facing a drug charge, described being summoned to the office of Detective McLaughlin where, he alleges, he was offered a direct monetary bribe in exchange for a fabricated accusation against me. He was given $50 in cash and told that “a large sum of money” could be obtained in a civil suit. “Life could go a lot easier for you with a large sum of money,” McLaughlin allegedly said.

Steven wrote that the detective “knew I was using drugs at the time and could have been influenced to say anything for money.” Enticed by the prospect, Steven agreed to come up with a fabricated claim. He then received a summons to appear before a Grand Jury to help bring a new indictment. It was a testament to his integrity that his conscience, instead of the proffered bribe, became his guide. He decided that he could not do this “to someone who only tried to help me.” He was then told to go away because “we won’t be needing anything more from you.”

I write that these witnesses “bravely” decided to come forward because some of them were threatened by Detective McLaughlin before my trial. One witness, former drug abuse counselor Debra Collett who treated Thomas Grover, denied that he accused me during therapy sessions as he alleged. She described being “bullied,” “coerced,” “overtly threatened” by this detective when she would not say what he wanted to hear. “I will come to your house and physically drag you out of it,” she was told.

Ms. Collett described that the entire interview was recorded, but that tape, like other exculpatory evidence, “disappeared” before my trial. It is shocking that judges reviewing my appeals declined to even hear from these witnesses. Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld described how such misconduct by police was sometimes covered up by judges. From their acclaimed book, Actual Innocence:

“For 64 percent of DNA exonerations analyzed by the Innocence Project, misconduct by police or prosecutors played an important role in the convictions. Lies, cheating, distortions at the lower levels of the system are excused at the higher ones.”

Barry Scheck, Actual Innocence, p. 225

That is exactly what happened when my habeas corpus appeal and its accompanying memorandum of Law was filed in 2012. One judge after another summarily declined to hold any hearing that would give these witnesses a chance to go on record. One possible reason for this is that Detective McLaughlin has brought forward hundreds of cases with an almost 100-percent conviction record through offers of lenient plea deals.

I believe judges are reluctant to deal with the “Pandora’s Box” of challenged convictions if this officer’s challenged integrity becomes public. I wrote more about this in a March 2021 post, “Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct.”

I was entirely demoralized by the judicial lack of regard for truth and due process in this story. A witness, who directly accused a sworn officer of offering a bribe to suborn perjury before a grand jury has been simply ignored and silenced. I saw no further path if judges can willfully decline to hear such testimony.

So my attention turned then to assisting my friend, Pornchai Moontri, whose plight was even more brutally unjust than my own. I made a promise to him, to myself, and to God that I would use whatever time I had left in life to do all I could to bring forward the truth of his situation and free him.

With help from readers, I did just that. The person who arranged for him to be brought here from Thailand at age 11 — only to be horrendously exploited and sexually abused — was found and brought to justice in 2018. He pled “no contest” to forty felony charges of sexual assault of a minor in Penobscot (Maine) Superior Court in September 2018, but was sentenced (are you sitting down?) to zero prison time and 18 years probation.

I had no reason left to expect anything even remotely resembling justice from our justice system. But then, yet another ray of hope surfaced just at the dawn of a new year.

I do not know what to do. The prospect of possibly emerging as a free man after over 27 years unjustly in prison is daunting. The very infrastructure of my life has long since disintegrated. Even in prison I remain a priest, but in freedom I doubt that my bishop would do anything to help me. I will be 69 years old in April, 2022. At the age at which most people plan for retirement, I would be faced with starting life anew. But how? Where? Would I now be required to sacrifice priesthood for freedom?

It will be many months before there is clear direction on what comes next. I will keep you posted ... .

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ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Please visit our new “Documents” section in the Navigation Bar for more information about this story. Please also share this post. You may be interested in the following relevant posts:

Wrongful Conviction: The Other Police Misconduct

The Trials of Father MacRae by Dorothy Rabinowitz

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud by Ryan MacDonald

LEACT commissioners include, from left, Rep. David Welch, Joseph Lascaze, John Scippa, Hanover Police Chief Charlie Dennis, and Lt. Mark Morrison of Londonderry.

A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America

Father MacRae being led to prison, September 23, 1994

On the Feast of St Padre Pio, Fr Gordon MacRae marks 27 years of wrongful imprisonment amassing tools for coping mentally and spiritually with life’s unjust wounds.

September 22, 2021

Note from the Editor: The title for this post was inspired by a 2019 article at LinkedIn by Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D. entitled, “A Catholic Priest 25 Years Wrongly in Prison in America.” It was written by Father Valladares from excerpts of his acclaimed book on priesthood cited below. Still in prison two years later, this version is written entirely from the perspective of Fr. Gordon MacRae as his 27th year in prison comes to an end.

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Wounds from the Church

As most readers know, I was convicted and sent to prison on September 23, 1994, the same day the Church honors Padre Pio, a great saint whose shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo is the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. Padre Pio was canonized by another saint, Pope John Paul II, on June 16, 2002 at the height of the Catholic sex abuse scandal as it emerged out of Boston and spread like a virus.

For fifty years, Padre Pio bore the visible wounds of Christ on his body. He also bore the less visible wounds of slander and false witness inflicted from inside the Church. On several occasions in his life, his priestly ministry was suspended because lurid and ludicrous accusations were hurled at him from unscrupulous critics, many of whom were Church personnel. It was because of this, and some uncanny threads of connection, that Padre Pio entered our lives and became a Patron Saint of Beyond These Stone Walls. This is an account last told in 2020 in “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

In 2012, Australian Catholic priest, psychologist, and author, Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D., published a widely acclaimed book, “Hope Springs Eternal in the Priest1y Breast” (iUniverse). It cites a good deal of my own writing on the subjects of sacrifice, suffering, and priesthood. I am not at all worthy of this citation that appears on his "Acknowledgments" page:

“Fr. Gordon MacRae — an extraordinarily heroic priest with indomitable courage, unrelenting tenacity, unwavering patience, and Christ-like magnanimity who personally reflects what Pope Benedict XVI confessed: ‘All of us [priests] are suffering as a result of the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust or failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse.’”

— Hope Springs Eternal in the Priest1y Breast, p.xviii

I don’t know about any of that, especially the part about “unwavering patience.” (Maybe Pornchai, writing from Thailand will weigh in on that.) Anyway, the book extensively cites the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal whose three major articles on my trial and imprisonment took this story out of the darkness of one-sided suppression. It also cites the work of Ryan A. MacDonald, most notably his investigative journalism compiled in “Truth in Justice.”

However, the cryptic statement of Pope Benedict cited by Father Valladares above needs clarification. The Pope’s reference to “the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust” needs no explanation. His further statement referring to those who “failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse” is broader in scope. Fr. Valladares understood it to refer to some in the Church who tried to remedy one injustice by inflicting yet another. Some bishops went far beyond what has been required by the rule of law and also acquiesced to demands of the media and others with an agenda by publishing lists of priests deemed “credibly accused” but without basic due process of law.

Before my trial in 1994, for example, a past bishop of my diocese wrote a press release declaring me guilty of victimizing not only my accusers, but the entire Catholic Church. Two years ago, twenty-five years into my unjust sentence, a subsequent bishop joined the mob with stones in hand by publishing anew such a list with the stated goal of “transparency.” A year later, that same bishop was himself accused in a case that on its face is “credible” according to the standards bishops have used against priests.

The claims against Bishop Peter Libasci are alleged to have taken place in 1983, the same year as the claims against me. His defense is being handled by a law firm that most priests could never afford. But as I have documented in the post linked below, I believe the claims against him to be untrue and unjust. I was criticized for defending my bishop after my own name appeared on his list, but I am not looking for the mob approval my bishop was apparently looking for. I wrote of the injustice he faces in “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Detective James McLaughlin celebrates his 350th arrest.

Wounds from the State

I cannot bring myself to rehash the litany of false witness and official misconduct that sent me to prison on September 23, 1994. I just read a report by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). It reveals the disturbing fact that in more than half of the cases overturned with new evidence revealing that the person in prison did not commit the crime, misconduct by prosecutors or police was the primary cause. (See Dale Chappell “Report Shows Official Misconduct Responsible for More than Half of Exonerations.”)

In the cases of many falsely accused Catholic priests, however, misconduct usually has a different outcome. There is never any “planted evidence,” but there is usually a lot of money in play as accusers become plaintiffs in civil lawsuits. Money is often an enticement to corruption and false witness. In many of these cases, no actual crime was ever committed 20, 30, or 40 years earlier when claims were alleged to have occurred.

In the Exonerations Report, sex offenses constituted the second highest category of wrongful convictions. Exonerations in that category encompassed a wide range of official misconduct including police threatening defendants and witnesses, falsified forensic evidence, police not pursuing exculpatory evidence, and police lying under oath. All of this was in the background of my trial and is documented in “Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct.”

Many people ask me why I am still in prison when others have come forward with evidence and testimony that casts doubt on the integrity of my conviction. I believe that the most important factor in my continued imprisonment is that the officer behind it has scored convictions via lenient plea deals in over a thousand cases of suspected sexual abuse. Lenient plea deals bolstered his conviction rate without totally destroying the defendants for life. As most readers know, I was offered such a deal in 1994 which would have had me released from prison by 1996 had I actually been guilty or willing to pretend so.

Reversing a conviction based on Detective James F. McLaughlin’s malfeasance in my case may have the unintended consequence of reopening a thousand others that he was involved with. It would have required moral courage and judicial integrity on the part of the judge, a former federal prosecutor who declined a hearing in my habeas corpus appeal. Judges rely on a procedural ruling giving state courts a right to finality. No judge has ruled on the evidence or witnesses that have arisen in the years since my trial. No judge has ever even heard the evidence or witnesses.

This raises a hard truth about our justice system. Guilty defendants are inclined to accept lenient plea deals while many innocent defendants cannot or will not. I am one of them. As a result, many guilty defendants spend far less time in prison than innocent ones. You have already seen a glaring example.

As a direct result of my writing about the horrific crimes perpetrated against Pornchai Moontri when he was brought to America against his will at age 12 in 1985, Richard Alan Bailey was found and arrested in Oregon. Due to extensive evidence, he pled no contest to forty felony charges of sexual assault in the State of Maine in 2018. He was sentenced to 18 years probation and never saw the inside of a prison. In nearby New Hampshire, I refused a one year plea deal and faced trial with no evidence. I was then sentenced to 67 years in prison. Let that sink in.

The Prophet Jonah: A Final Chapter

But none of this addresses what I intended to be at the heart of this post that marks those 27 years. There is nothing I can do to secure justice or freedom for myself. And there was nothing I did do to bring about my loss of them. But there was a lot I could do to secure justice and restore freedom for one whose path on this journey from Jerusalem to Jericho crossed with mine.

I did nothing so grandiose as the conversion of Nineveh, but through the Grace of God I became a necessary instrument in the conversion of Pornchai Moontri who once was lost and broken and now lives free in the light of Divine Mercy. In a September 10 telephone call to him in Thailand on his birthday, his first as a free man, he told me that his deliverance from both prison and his past could not have happened without me. I do not regret paying that ransom. I today believe this to be the purpose for what I have endured.

In my recent post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote about the Seventh Century BC Prophet Jonah and why much of the Book of Jonah is today considered to be a parable. I did not want to detract from the hopeful outcome of that story, so I held its final chapter until now. Its last chapter also took place in Nineveh, but in our time and not Jonah’s.

Though the story of Jonah and the Great Fish is a parable, the Prophet Jonah was a historical figure honored by all three of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Jonah was sent by God to the ancient city of Nineveh in the Seventh Century BC, it was the capital of the Assyrian Empire in its time of glory. Nineveh was a center for commercial trade routes on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq, just opposite the modern city of Mosul. Nineveh was established in the Neolithic period more than 8,000 years ago, and inhabited almost without a break until about 1500 AD.

In the centuries before the Prophet Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the city was known as a religious center, but it fell far away from its religious roots. The city honored the Assyrian goddess, Ishtar, a goddess of healing who somehow was transformed by the time of Jonah into a goddess of war. The Assyrians built the city with broad boulevards, parks and gardens, and a magnificent palace of more than 80 rooms.

Today, Nineveh is reduced to two large mounds beneath which are the ruins of a city once thriving. The mounds are called, in Arabic, “Kuyunjik” and “Nebi Yunus” which means “place of Jonah.” In ancient times, a massive tomb in honor of the Prophet Jonah was built in a Sunni mosque in Nineveh on the site of an Assyrian church where the remains of Jonah were thought to be buried. This part of the city was revered by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Tomb of the Prophet somehow managed to survive intact until just a decade ago. After standing for over a thousand years, the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah was blown up and destroyed in 2011 by the fundamentalist Islamic group, al Qaeda.

The Taliban had been doing the same thing in Afghanistan. Islam was preceded there by Buddhism which was eventually eclipsed by Islam and driven out around the Seventh Century AD. In the Sixth Century AD, Buddhist monks carved into a cliff side the world’s largest statue of Buddha. Standing at 180 feet, it survived for 1,500 years before it was blown up by the Taliban in 2001. It was destroyed at about the same time the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda while the September 11, 2001 assault on the United States was planned.

I bring all of this up now because witnessing in my own recent lifetime the demise of people, places, and things once held sacred by many people has had an outsized impact on me that some might find perplexing. Why would I care so much about the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah or a 1,500 year-old gigantic stone Buddha? No matter who these monuments ultimately served, they arose from the hearts and souls of a people. When religious icons are destroyed by evil intent, so is the spirit of those people.

Catholicism and the cancel culture assault on the priesthood now risk this same fate. That risk is manifested most in America over just the last two decades. This threat does not come from the Taliban or Islamic State — though they may be poised to take advantage of the vacuum of hopelessness left in its wake. The terrorism behind this threat is called “apathy.”

If the priesthood and the Mass fall away, it will have as its primary cause the agendas of a few and the silence of too many.

We have witnessed in just recent years a chronic disparagement of the priesthood even from Pope Francis and our bishops, a canceling of a widely reverenced ancient form of the Sacrifice of the Mass, a handing over of the Church’s patrimony to the Chinese Communist government, a disparaging of our Church and faith as a “non essential service” by secular authority, a rampant capitulation to that by some bishops, a failure to defend the sanctity of life and the sanctity of the Eucharist, and a Catholic President who believes in neither.

This is why the Taliban despise us and judge us to be “Infidels,” which means exactly what it implies: “A people of little faith.”

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From a Homily of Padre Pio

“Why does is there evil in the world? Listen closely to me. There was a mother who was embroidering on a small weaving frame. Her young son was seated in front of her on a small low stool watching his mother work. But as he watched, he saw only the underside of the weaving frame. And so he said, ‘But Mother, what are you doing? The embroidery is so ugly!’ So his mother lowered the frame to show him the other side of the work, the good side with all its colors in place and all the threads in a harmonious pattern. That is it. Have you seen what evil is like? Evil is the reverse side of that embroidery and we are all sitting on a small stool.”

— From a homily of St. Padre Pio

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I want to thank readers who have consulted our Special Events page to assist our friend Pornchai in the daunting task of rebuilding his life. As you know, he was taken from Thailand at age 11. On his September 10 birthday this month, he had a touching reunion with his cousin who was eight when they lived together and is now 45 and an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. They met on September 10th for a birthday celebration at the Gulf of Thailand.

You may also wish to review the related posts linked herein:

Padre Pio, Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct

A new article by Ryan MacDonald, linked herein, spotlights police detective James F. McLaughlin who orchestrated the wrongful conviction of Father Gordon MacRae.

March 24, 2021

I read somewhere that the State of New Hampshire — the “Live Free or Die” State — has this nation’s second highest percentage of prisoners over the age of 55, second only to West Virginia. To be certain, the offenses that put most of them in prison did not occur at age 55, however. New Hampshire is also one of only three states with a “Truth in Sentencing” law. In effect it means there is no avenue to reduce a prison sentence based on rehabilitation.

I admit that I do have a vested interest in this subject. I will be 68 years old on April 9th. I was 29 when my fictitious crimes were claimed to have taken place. I was 41 when I was sent to prison for them. I could have been set free at age 43 had I actually been guilty or willing to pretend so.

I have already learned the hard way that growing older in prison is its own special cross. I severely sprained my right knee early this month. I’m not exactly sure how or why it happened. I awoke one morning with a painful knee. At almost age 68 in my 27th year in prison, that is not at all unusual. But me being me, I just ignored it. Later that morning I had to go to the commissary to pick up food and hygiene supplies that I ordered a week earlier.

The pickup process can be a little daunting. After 23 years in a place with very little “outside,” I love living on the top floor in a place where I can step out onto a walkway and see above prison walls into the forests and hills beyond. But this also involves stairs. Lots of them. Among the items I had ordered that day were a supply of bottled water because I had become a little dehydrated. My net bag was substantially heavier than usual.

Leaving the commissary, the walk across the long walled prison yard was no problem. The series of ramps to the upper levels left me huffing and puffing just a bit. But the final leg involves carrying the heavy bag up eight flights of stairs — 48 in all. Just a few steps from the top that day, my knee exploded. Now I use a cane — temporary, I hope — and a knee brace and lots of ice.

Police Brutality Is Overblown, but Not This

I have read that one of the common traits of the wrongfully convicted in prison is that they simply cannot let go of the injustice that befell them. For me, this injustice is as vividly felt today as it was on September 23, 1994.

But there comes a point at which it is no longer even about freedom. When freedom suddenly comes to a man who has spent more than a quarter century in prison, then freedom itself becomes an intimidating affair. We have seen this faced head-on in some recent posts about my friend, Pornchai Moontri. His imprisonment came to an abrupt end after 29 years on February 24, 2021.

Pornchai went to prison at age 18 after years forced into homelessness. Freedom brings lots of firsts for him. He has never driven a car, for instance, and has no frame of reference for how that would feel except to feel scary. I told him that driving became second nature to me as it will one day for him as well.

If I ever regain my freedom, I will likely find it to be less new and intimidating than Pornchai did at first, but I try not to set myself up for disappointment by thinking about it too much. However, being deprived of justice still remains a gnawing insult to both my psyche and my soul. I cannot help but ponder this and it has never relented. After 27 years it still leaves me fending off bitterness and resentment. Justice and freedom were stolen from me by a dishonest police officer.

I find it strange, but just and merciful, that even after more than 26 years unjustly in prison, people are still writing about it. In a thoughtful pair of posts written in France, Catholic writer Marie Meaney arrived at some boldly incisive conclusions after doing substantial research. Both are available in English at her blog, Cheminons avec Marie qui défait les nœuds (“Let Us Walk with Mary Who Unties the Knots”). Marie’s first article published in June 2019 was “Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison.” It was mostly about my friend, Pornchai Moontri, and how the knots of abuse were untied for him through a team effort.

Marie Meaney’s second article, published in November 2020, was a model of thoughtful, honest research. Its understated title was simply, “A Priest Unjustly Imprisoned.” It strikes me as highly ironic that most American Catholic writers — with the bold exception of Catholic League President Bill Donohue — go to great lengths to avoid any mention of this story lest they be targeted by the cancel culture crowd for whom questioning a claim of victimhood is a mortal sin. Meanwhile in France, a nation known for its anticlerical Catholic culture, my story is told with guns of truth blazing. Here is an excerpt from her excellent post:

“This same man had been accusing so many people of sexually abusing him ‘that he appeared to be going for some sort of sexual abuse victim world record’ according to (Thomas) Grover’s former counselor, Ms. Debbie Collet, who said that Grover never mentioned Fr. MacRae during their sessions — though pressure had been put on her by the Keene (NH) police to alter her testimony. This small, 20,000 inhabitant town had been assigned a detective, James F. McLaughlin, to uncover sex abuse cases.”

— "A Priest Unjustly Imprisoned," by Marie Meaney

Please do not misunderstand me here. I am very much pro-law enforcement. I do not at all subscribe to the left’s notion that police brutality has been rampant in America. Hyped-up exceptions must not overcome the rule of law. You may be surprised to learn that most prisoners believe this as well. In the heat of the political left’s promotion of anti-police policies in 2020, I wrote of the danger this represents in “Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption.”

Detective James F. McLaughlin

Marie Meaney was correct in her assertion that between 1988 and 1993, the time in which much older claims against me were probed, the City of Keene, New Hampshire, with a population of about 22,000 then, had a full-time sex crimes detective named James F. McLaughlin. He is now mercifully retired. A 2003 Boston Sunday Globe article by Carlene Hempel (“Hot Pursuit,” Nov. 23, 2003) described him as a detective who “focuses specifically on men interested in boys.” The news media, especially The Boston Globe, has since then gone to great lengths to separate the Catholic sexual abuse narrative from having anything to do with homosexuality.

Carlene Hempel reported that McLaughlin separated himself from his initial involvement with ICAC, the “Internet Crimes Against Children” Task Force. Instead, he decided to go it alone, but Hempel avoided writing about why. She infers something, however, in an interview with a former ICAC police trainer who spoke of McLaughlin more generically:

“Cops who ... operate outside the ICAC system put some people at risk. ... You can’t be posing as a 15-year-old and throw something out like, ‘I’m really questioning my sexual orientation and I wonder if someone out there can help me with that.’ That’s really leading, and in my opinion, entrapment.”

— Police ICAC trainer

It was some time after my 1994 trial that McLaughlin took up the cause of Internet crimes. He made 1,000 arrests luring men to Keene, NH from other states in a process that many described as entrapment. In The Boston Globe article, McLaughlin said in his own defense that no judge has ever said that he has gone too far. That did not remain entirely true. In 2005, a federal judge reprimanded McLaughlin for sending child pornography to an online subject of his entrapment effort. At the time, McLaughlin’s supervisor said one of the scariest things I have ever heard from law enforcement. He told a reporter for The Concord Monitor, in an article that has since disappeared from the Internet, that, “It’s our job to ferret the criminal element out of society.”

Detective McLaughlin’s focus on Internet crimes involving men and teenage boys came well after the case he built against me. It is interesting that in her article from France, Marie Meaney mentioned my accuser at trial, Thomas Grover, who in the end was awarded close to $200,000 from the Diocese of Manchester for his easily identifiable lies. The problem with an accuser’s lies in the hands of a crusading sex crimes detective, however, is that they are easily covered up by finding witnesses willing to corroborate the accuser’s story. There were none here to be found, however. Consider this excerpt from a sworn statement of accuser Thomas Grover’s therapist, Debbie Collett:

“Thomas Grover never revealed to me that Gordon MacRae perpetrated against him. Mr. Grover spent a great deal of time being confronted (in therapy) for his dishonesty, misrepresentations, and unwillingness to be honest about his problems. Thomas Grover did reveal that he had been sexually abused, but named no specific person except his foster father. When asked if he meant Mr. Grover, he responded ‘yes, among others ...’ He accused so many people of sexual abuse that we thought he was going for some sort of sexual abuse victim world record. But he never accused Fr. MacRae.”

— Sworn statement of Debbie Collett

Of her experience with Detective James McLaughlin and his pre-trial investigation, Ms. Collett wrote:

“I was contacted by Keene Police detectives McLaughlin and Clarke ... I was uncomfortable with (the) repeated starting and stopping of the tape recorder when my answers to their questions were not the answers they wanted to hear ... I confronted them about this and their treatment of me which included coersion, intimidation, veiled and more forward threats of arrest ... McLaughlin said that he would personally come to my home, drag me out of it bodily if necesary, and force me to testify despite my information to him ... They presented as argumentative, manipulative, and threatening me via use of police power to get me to say what they wanted to hear.”

— Sworn statement of Debbie Collett

Perhaps the more important part of Debbie Collett’s statement is her assertion that it was recorded. Under court rules, the prosecution was required to turn over to the defense all material including any recorded interviews. Despite repeated references to tapes in police reports, however, none were ever provided. The recording of McLaughlin’s interviews with Debbie Collett simply disappeared.

In the article linked at the end of this post, Ryan MacDonald raises the issue of recorded interviews.

“Unlike his protocols in nearly all other cases, Detective McLaughlin recorded none of his interviews with claimants in the MacRae case. A reason for the absence of recorded interviews may become clear from a statement of Steven Wollschlager, a young man who accused MacRae during one of McLaughlin’s interviews, and then recanted, refusing to repeat his accusations to a grand jury. From his sworn statement:

’In 1994 before [MacRae] was to go on trial, I was contacted again by McLaughlin. I was aware at the time of the [MacRae] trial, knowing full well that it was all bogus and having heard all the talk of the lawsuits and money involved, and also the reputations of those making the accusations. ... During this meeting I just listened to the scenarios being presented to me. The lawsuits and money were of great discussion and I was left feeling that if I would just go along with the story I could reap the rewards as well.

’McLaughlin asked me three times if [MacRae] ever came on to me sexually or offered me money for sexual favors. [He] had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about [MacRae] and I could reap a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin ... referenced that life could be easier with a large sum of money ... I was at the time using drugs and could have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money. A short time later after being subpoenaed to court, I had a different feeling about the situation.’ ”

— "Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest," by Ryan MacDonald

Neither Steven Wollschlager nor Debbie Collett have ever been allowed to present their testimony in any appeal before the appeals were dismissed without hearings in State or Federal Courts.

In the photograph atop this post, Detective McLaughlin was honored by unknown entities for his 350th arrest while posing as a male teenager luring adults online to their arrest in Keene, New Hampshire. Less than one percent of these cases ever went to trial. The other 99 percent were resolved through lenient plea deal offers that defense attorneys urged their clients to take — even the ones whom they knew were not guilty.

I was never a part of McLaughlin’s Internet predator obsession, but his tactics and dishonesty leading up to that endeavor were very much a part of his case against me. Recently, journalist Ryan MacDonald was invited to submit an article on police and prosecutor misconduct for SaveServices.org. His February 20, 2021 article has since been republished at multiple other justice sites, including the National Center for Reason and Justice which continues to advocate for justice for me.

Ryan’s article is an eye-opener. Don’t miss “Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest.”

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You may also like the related articles referenced herein:

Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison

A Priest Unjustly Imprisoned

Don't Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest

Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is against defunding police departments. He instead wants to disarm police officers who can then “de-escalate things.”

This was to be the post I wrote for These Stone Walls  two weeks ago. Most of America was in the throes of protest and urban riots over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin while other officers passively looked on. To the horror of once-civilized America, life was crushed out of Mr. Floyd with an officer’s knee on his neck in full view of cameras in a nine-minute video. I first covered this story in these pages in “The Death of George Floyd: Breaking News and Broken Trust.”

This threw America into political, social, and moral chaos in the final months of a contentious and volatile presidential election year. This nation was already reeling from a global pandemic that took over 110,000 American lives in a matter of months. As a direct consequence of the pandemic, economic recession choked the life out of businesses and terminated millions of jobs in what had been the strongest economy since World War II. And then the George Floyd injustice happened and millions of Americans who have just “had it” took to the streets.

It also drew the problem of police abuse and other misconduct into the public forum, but not for the first time. Cooler heads will eventually prevail, but as of this writing, movements like the tone deaf “Defund Police” are gaining momentum. You might imagine that behind these stone walls I am surrounded by men who would be right on board with such a movement, but that is not so.

It may seem surprising that some of the “cooler heads” we need to prevail are right here in prison and none of them want to put police out of business. As the Law Clerk in a prison law library, I have fielded hundreds of George Floyd related questions and comments in the recent weeks. Prisoners watch the news. Many compensate for being separated from the world by watching the news relentlessly.

Every prisoner where I live is aware that New Hampshire currently has one prisoner on death row even though the state repealed the death penalty a year ago, and outvoted the governor’s veto of the repeal effort. The one prisoner on death row is an African American man who shot and killed Manchester, New Hampshire police officer, Michael Briggs. Officer Briggs and his assailant were both armed in that Manchester alley.

Officer Briggs’s partner, John Breckinridge, was also there. His description of what took place is a riveting account in which he spoke of his insistence upon the death penalty for Michael Briggs’ killer. Mr. Breckinridge also told the story of how his long road to Catholic reversion led him to Divine Mercy and a reversal of his position on the death penalty in “A Matter of Life and Death” (Parable, Jan/Feb 2014).

From what I have read, I know of the chilling likelihood that two police officers may have died on that night in Manchester, New Hampshire if they were the only ones there who were unarmed. Turning all this into political theater, former Vice President Joe Biden stated his opposition to the “Defund Police” movement. He suggests instead that officers should be disarmed so they can “deescalate things.” No one should take up that hapless solution without first talking to John Breckinridge.

Police Misconduct Takes Many Forms

I have seen no evidence of any glee among prisoners in any of this. Not one has spoken in favor of defunding or in any way diminishing police in our society. On the contrary, few Americans have a more accurate sense of what would happen in this nation without police. Believe it or not, prisoners want their families well protected. Like most, prisoners want crime prevented when possible, investigated when not, and perpetrators prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

They just want it done justly and evenly. They want police who are colorblind, without manipulation or entrapments, without planted evidence, without beatings, without coerced plea deals, without “testilying” or any of the other malfeasance with which some police — but certainly not all — have abused their power without a physical knee on someone’s neck.

Michael Gallagher’s recent TSW  guest post, “A Teacher’s Worst Nightmare,” was an eye-opener for many and a painfully familiar account for me. Too many people believe that protecting the civil rights of those accused of crimes just provides the guilty-accused with an avenue to “get off” on a technicality. But what about the innocent-accused? They exist in greater numbers than most Americans know. Mike Gallagher’s haunting story presents a compelling case for protecting the rights of the accused.

The police misconduct in that case was not as glaring as in the case of George Floyd, but the story leaves no doubt that it was destructive, and not only for Mike Gallagher and his family. The erosion of trust in the American justice system is the most enduring fallout of stories like Mike’s.

Court rulings have upheld the practice of some police to lie to the accused during the investigation of a suspected crime. When teacher Mike Gallagher took and passed a polygraph test, for example, he was told by police that he had failed it miserably. As dirty as the tactic was, it is not technically considered police misconduct because it is not against their rules.

But it was a different story when the police told the District Attorney prosecuting the case that Mike failed the polygraph. The police in that case, as in so many other accusations of child sexual abuse, justified the lie because they presumed from the start that Mike must be guilty.

From that point on, the search for evidence in the case was filtered through a powerful bias in favor of guilt. There are volumes of studies showing how “investigator bias” among police leads to wrongful convictions. When the police officer lied to the District Attorney by stating that Mike failed the polygraph test it could have had only one cause. The police bias was so strong that any evidence to the contrary was suppressed.

As unfortunate as that case was, Mike Gallagher himself is a very fortunate man. The case fell apart of its own accord because an honest District Attorney had doubts and tested them out. If the case remained in the hands of the biased police, Mike would only just about now, some 25 years later, be emerging from prison.

There are many more nefarious examples of police misconduct that lead directly to wrongful convictions. This includes a long list of illegal infractions like withholding exculpatory evidence, inventing fictitious crimes, planting evidence, and the widespread practice of “testilying,” a term police use instead of perjury to describe lying under oath to bolster their case.

Coercive plea bargaining is then used by over-burdened or unethical prosecutors to get a conviction without having any of the above practices exposed and tested in court. Of nearly 80,000 defendants in federal criminal cases in 2018, just two-percent of them went to trial. The other 98-percent were resolved by plea bargains.

In the Southern District of New York in 2018, the plea bargain figure was almost 95-percent. This holds true in almost every jurisdiction in America. The real danger is that innocent defendants will end up spending much longer in prison than guilty defendants who are well motivated to take the deal.

About 25-percent of the DNA exonerations in America involved cases in which innocent defendants were coerced to plead guilty to avoid spending the rest of their lives in prison. This is a practice I wrote about in “Plea Deals or a Life Sentence in the Live Free or Die State.”

Defund Public Sector Unions That Cover-up Corruption

A lot of ink is now being invested in an analysis of what happened to General Michael Flynn. In 2016, he served just 24 days as President Trump’s National Security Advisor before being ensnared in an FBI probe about fictitious Russian collusion now entirely dismantled as a fraud heavily hyped by the get-Trump-at-all-costs media.

General Flynn’s decision to accept a plea deal, which was also a fraud, was coerced with lies and threats from the investigating FBI agents that they would arrest and charge his son. The nation today can agree on only one thing. The FBI used to be better than this, and could be again if and when this whole truth comes out.

In the case of the late George Floyd of Minneapolis, the officer who killed him had 18 prior abuse complaints in his record. They resulted in just two letters of reprimand in his personnel file, a file that is beyond the reach of citizens thanks to the “progressive” city’s collective bargaining with the police union.

One of those cases involved a 2006 case in which Derek Chauvin was one of six officers who fatally shot 42-year-old Wayne Reyes. The prosecuting attorney in the case was Amy Klobuchar who reportedly declined to place the matter before a grand jury for indictments. Ms. Klobuchar is now Senator Klobuchar, a former Democratic presidential candidate and potential running mate for Joe Biden.

In fairness to senator Klobuchar, she explains that she was elected to the U.S. Senate before that case was resolved without prosecution by her successor. She added that she in hindsight believes that using the grand jury to decide prosecution of this and multiple other cases of alleged police misconduct in Minneapolis was a mistake. The point I want to make is that all of this was kept from the public by levels of secrecy secured by the police union.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey exhibited leadership and courage when he stood up to a chanting mob recently in opposition to defunding and disbanding his police department. He was screamed at, taunted, called names, and violently harassed by the mob as he walked through them after courageously stating views considered heresy by the mob. The Minneapolis City Council caved in completely with a call to dismantle their police force.

Even before the protests and riots this year, several other Democrat-controlled “progressive” cities saw marked increases in violent crime. In the first six months of 2020, shootings in Minneapolis had risen 60-percent. In New York City shootings had risen 18-percent; in San Francisco, 19-percent; in Philadelphia, 51-percent. Mr. Biden would have the police as the only unarmed characters in these urban dramas. We all know how that would end.

There were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019. Only three of them involved police. The vast majority of others involved crimes perpetrated by young African Americans upon other young African Americans. This points to a serious problem in American cities, but not necessarily the one CNN and other venues are telling you.

This does not mean racism does not exist. It certainly does, but in my world it is overshadowed by something much more subtle: racial bias. The current President’s appointment of General Charles Q. Brown to be the first African American to serve as Air Force Chief of Staff has raised a discussion about racial bias. It was raised by General Brown himself whose appointment was in the works well before the current racial tension in America. In a brilliant video address on June 5, General Brown stated:

“I’m thinking about my Air Force career, where I was often the only African American in my squadron, or as a senior officer the only African American in the room. I’m thinking about wearing the same flight suit, with the same wings on my chest as my peers, and then being questioned by another military member: ‘Are you a pilot?’ I’m thinking about how some of my comments were perceived to represent the African American perspective when it’s just my perspective…”

— General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., June 5, 2020

[ Editor’s note: please watch the following video for the full context. ]

That such subtle bias still exists in the blind corners of our attitudes should be a cause for soul searching for all Americans. I am proud to be in a nation that can look past such bias and recognize greatness in General Brown. We are a better — and safer — nation for his service.

As for Disarming the Police …

One widely Tweeted solution to police misconduct was this: “Almost every role in our community a police officer fills would be better handled by a social worker.” I asked other prisoners about Mr. Biden’s idea that police should be disarmed, and about the suggestion that police could be replaced by social workers. I never got any straight answers. They could not stop laughing.

The real criminals around me — they are not all real criminals but the real criminals are in the majority — sneer at these suggestions. Then they express worry about their families who still live in the same Blue State broken communities from which their offenses were committed.

But what they sneer at the most is the revelation that the City of Minneapolis received over 2,600 citizen complaints about just a small percentage of abusive police officers since 2015 and took action in only twelve of those cases thanks to the public sector police union’s political clout. If real reform is the real goal of protesters, #DefundPublicSectorUnions, and not #DefundPolice, would be our antiphon to the memory of George Floyd.

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