Could Fr. Gordon MacRae Finally Go Free?

There is new evidence that the detective, whose investigative report led to the priest’s conviction, had submitted false reports in an earlier case, and likely in the MacRae case as well.

November 11, 2022 by Kathy Schiffer | Catholic World Report

“Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the pervertion of justice it represents.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Wall Street Journal

Father Gordon J. MacRae, wrongly convicted of sexual misconduct, may finally be freed soon, after serving nearly thirty years in prison. Father MacRae, who tells his story on his blog Beyond These Stone Walls, has long been believed to be innocent of the alleged crimes for which he was convicted in 1994. He has many supporters, though — among them, the Wall Street Journal.

On October 9, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae”, by famed civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate. The article cited new evidence that New Hampshire Detective James McLaughlin, the detective whose investigative report led to the priest’s conviction, had submitted false reports in an earlier case and, Silverglate believed, likely in the MacRae case as well. According to Silverglate, the detective’s name was included in the original “Laurie List” — a catalog of law enforcement officers who had falsified evidence in order to secure a guilty verdict. McLaughlin was proven to have falsified records in an unrelated case, nine years before Fr. MacRae went to trial.

Silverglate reasoned that this newly uncovered evidence of Detective McLaughlin’s past misconduct raises serious concerns about the Fr. MacRae case. This revelation was important, according to the Wall Street Journal, because

… MacRae has not only vehemently argued that McLaughlin paid off his accusers to manufacture a case against him but that recordings by McLaughlin of the priest purporting to prove MacRae’s guilt were bogus. Indeed, when MacRae demanded that that these recordings be turned over for his trial, McLaughlin was suddenly unable to produce them, claiming that they were taped over and that transcripts of the recordings were not made due to an alleged ‘clerical error.’

Widespread Belief in Fr. MacRae’s Innocence

Silverglate’s new report is not the only public defense of the prisoner priest. His case has received attention from journalists and from voices within the Church.

In 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board, published an account of the travesty of justice by which Fr. MacRae was convicted. Her report was described by Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things magazine as “a story of a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

In September 2008, Father Neuhaus published an editorial in First Things calling the case “A Kafkaesque Tale.”

Father Michael Orsi, writing for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, insisted that “Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound.”

The late Cardinal Avery Dulles believed in Father MacRae’s innocence and encouraged him to write his story. Cardinal Dulles wrote in 2005,

Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent, and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.

The following year, Cardinal Dulles invited Father MacRae to contribute a chapter to the volume of Christian literature from believers who were unjustly imprisoned.

Cary Solomon, writer, producer, and director of the pro-life film “Unplanned” has said,

Fr. Gordon Macrae is beyond innocent. It is a travesty that he is in jail. If you listened and read the evidence, transcripts, videos, audio tapes you would be horrified. The people who did this need to get on their knees and beg forgiveness from God.

And William Donohue, Ph.D., president of the Catholic League for Religious Liberty and Civil Rights, said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” Show, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

Prejudice against the Church Led to Improper Verdict

Why was Father MacRae convicted if, as he asserts, he had not taken sexual liberties with a young man? The clergy abuse scandal was fresh in the news in 1994, when Father MacRae was accused of sexual assault; and there was a lot of anger toward the Catholic Church. The accuser was 27-year-old Thomas Grover — a man with a long history of violence, theft, and drug charges. The charges against Father MacRae were uncorroborated; in fact, many people, including Grover’s ex-wife and son, testified that Grover had told them the incident didn’t really occur.

Although Grover himself stood to benefit substantially from filing a complaint against the priest (he was eventually awarded $200,000 from the diocese), the court found Father MacRae guilty.

Offered a plea deal which would have brought only two or three years in jail, Father MacRae declined. He was innocent and refused to confess to any crime, even a misdemeanor offense. He was found guilty without evidence or corroborating testimony. New Hampshire Judge Arthur Brennan then imposed a harsh 33-1/2 to 67-year sentence in the New Hampshire State Penitentiary.

As Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Father MacRae’s case is troubling to anyone concerned for the state of due process, justice, and liberty in America.” Catholics and others who value the integrity of the judicial system will be watching this month for signs that the case against Father MacRae might be revisited.

Please continue to keep him in your prayers.

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Kathy Schiffer is a Catholic blogger. In addition to her blog Seasons of Grace, her articles have appeared in the National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Zenit, the Michigan Catholic, Legatus Magazine, and other Catholic publications. She’s worked for Catholic and other Christian ministries since 1988, as radio producer, director of special events and media relations coordinator. Kathy and her husband, Deacon Jerry Schiffer, have three adult children.

NH Detective James McLaughlin on a List of Dishonest Police

For 28 years Fr. Gordon MacRae said that NH Detective James McLaughlin falsified police reports. It turns out that he has been on a secret list for doing just that.

May 2, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld have long asserted that police and prosecutor misconduct played a significant role in the spate of wrongful convictions that have badly stained our justice system. It seems that not a week goes by without a media story about a man or woman exonerated and released after being wrongly imprisoned for years or decades. At his acclaimed blog from prison, Father Gordon MacRae recently analyzed one such heart-wrenching account in “For the Lovely Bones Author Alice Sebold, Justice Hurts.”

According to Scheck and Neufeld, “in 64-percent of exonerations analyzed by the Innocence Project, professional misconduct by police or prosecutors played an important role in convictions. Lies, cheating, distortions at the lower levels of the system are excused at higher ones” (Actual Innocence, p. 225). A focus on policing in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has made police misconduct a lot harder to ignore. This is not about a bias against police. No one is more offended by a bad cop than a good cop. The vast majority represent their profession with both honor and honesty. But one did not.

Over 28 years of wrongful imprisonment at the New Hampshire State Prison, Fr. Gordon McRae has consistently asserted that the case against him was built on lies, cheating and distortion on the part of accusers aided and abetted by a dishonest police officer. Just as Barry Scheck predicted, those assertions have been ignored or explained away at higher levels of the justice system by judges with a clear bias in favor of police and against defendants — and this defendant in particular.

The last judge to preside over a Habeas Corpus petition to review new evidence and witnesses in the MacRae case allowed errors that I wrote about in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.” That judge, like too many others, was a career prosecutor before his appointment to the federal bench. He was honored by New Hampshire Magazine in 2003 as “New Hampshire’s Top Prosecutor.”

In addition to the new evidence and witnesses that this judge declined to hear, much of Father Mac Rae’s Habeas Petition that came before his court was about Keene, New Hampshire sex crimes Detective James McLaughlin and the shady tactics he employed to investigate, prosecute and convict MacRae in 1994.

Now it turns out that Detective McLaughlin was sanctioned for “falsification of records” in 1985, nine years before MacRae’s trial. Under a U.S. Supreme court precedent, prosecutors were obligated to reveal that fact to Defendant MacRae and his legal counsel. They did not. This is especially egregious because a central issue in this case has been the falsification of police reports and witness tampering. You might think that this priest wrongly imprisoned for the last 28 years should not be the one to write about this because he has a liberty interest. There has been no one so severely impacted by this story than MacRae himself, and he exposed it brilliantly in a recent post at Beyond These Stone Walls. If you care at all for the integrity of justice in America, read and share this riveting post by Fr. Gordon MacRae “Predator Police: The New Hampshire Laurie List Bombshell”

I have also composed a follow-up article on this troubling matter entitled “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”