DA Early, Is THIS The Office You Run?!

Some people will argue that Ben LaGuer is guilty as convicted, but I doubt anyone would argue that the errors made from the time of the investigation right up through this year begs the question: what's going on at the Worcester DA's office? 

During LaGuer's last parole board hearing ADA Sandra Hautanen claimed LaGuer was lying about having been offered a plea bargain in 1983, yet the evidence proves LaGuer was telling the truth.

We can add this newest error to a long list of errors already known in just this case:

• Why did a knife found at the scene of the crime that a police lieutenant mentioned in his police report and which he testified to on direct and cross examination at trial disappear from the evidence?

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  Why did a Pepsi can with a fingerprint disappear from the evidence?

 

• Why are there no records that the victim’s pocketbook, which was found several blocks away a month after the crime, was tested for fingerprint evidence?

• Why did the late Leominster detectives Ronald Carrignan and Keith LaPrade lie about the way in which they executed a search warrant for Ben’s apartment attesting that they took "nothing" when in fact 8 socks and a pair of underwear turned up in subsequent inventories?

• Why did police surreptitiously and illegally take socks and underwear from LaGuer’s apartment?

• Why were witnesses to the way in which the bedside photo ID was conducted never called to testify at trial?

• Why did Detective Carrignan grossly misrepresent the victim's statements and key elements of the crime during his grand jury testimony?

• Why did then prosecutor Hon. James Lemire misrepresent the victim’s history of mental illness to the judge at trial?

• Why was the jury kept from knowing about victim’s history of severe mental illness?

• How might the jury have responded had they known the extent of the victim’s mental illness and that she exhibited symptoms at the time of the crime, both before she was attacked and in period leading up to the trial?

• Why was no physical evidence whatsoever introduced at LaGuer’s trial leaving the jury to convict him exclusively on the power of the victim’s courtroom identification of him?

• Why didn’t police investigate a likelier suspect by the name of Jose Gomez whose mother had lived in the building, who had a documented history of sexual misconduct, who was acquainted with the victim and who resembled LaGuer?

• If the evidence against LaGuer was so strong then why did the commonwealth offer him a plea bargain under which he would have been free in 1985?

• Why did police and prosecutors hide a fingerprint report generated the day LaGuer was arrested showing that four prints found on the base of the telephone, the cord of which was used to bind the victim’s wrist, were not his?

• Why did the images of a set of four latent fingerprints retrieved from the crime scene disappear from the evidence?

• Why was a key piece of evidence, underwear marked as belonging to the suspect, removed from the evidence just before a 1989 hearing on a motion for a new trial?

• Why did State Police chemist Mark Grant misidentify a Type O blood stain as being Type B (the same as LaGuer’s) on his forensic report?

• Why did Mark Grant report that he was unable to identify the type of all the other stains retrieved from the crime scene?

• Why was Mark Grant (according to his bench notes) inspecting the “interior crotch” of white underwear marked as belonging to the “suspect” at the same time as he was handling crime scene evidence?

• Why did the late Judge Robert Mulkern deny a motion for a new trial in spite of a sworn affidavit that members of the all-white male jury had repeatedly uttered prejudicial and ethnically derogatory remarks before the trial began and extending into the deliberations?

• Why did someone write “also Benjie’s underwear” on a copy of the State Police forensic report that was faxed from the Worcester District Attorney’s office to the Leominster Police on July 8, 1998?

• Why was then assistant district attorney Sandra Wysocki inquiring about the whereabouts of biological evidence related to the victim in a letter dated July 8, 1998?

• Why, in an April 2001 press release, did then District Attorney John Conte make a demonstrably false claim in an attempt to explain Wysocki’s seemingly illegal foray into the evidence?

• Why didn’t authorities look into possible links between Jose Gomez and this crime after Gomez was charged with a similar rape involving a different victim in 1998?

• Why was a seal Judge Mulkern had placed on the box in 1989 found to be broken when a private investigator discovered the evidence on October 2, 1999?

• Why, if the case allegedly involved a prolonged attack involving multiple episodes of vaginal and anal rape, did a 2002 DNA test reveal only a trace reading of male DNA which experts have since determined is of a level significantly more consistent with contamination than with the description of the crime?

• Why have recent rulings against LaGuer included references to blood type evidence in the 1983 forensic report that has been proven to be incorrect?

• Why has nobody been called to account for the litany of lies, irregularities, and misrepresentations associated with this case since the day LaGuer was arrested?

I have one question for District Attorney Joseph Early; is this the sort of justice the citizens of Worcester can expect from you? 

Gallup Poll Shows Majority of Americans Approve of Gay/Lesbian Relations

From Care2.com:

Results of Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey have been released and the data shows a milestone has been reached in the acceptance of gay and lesbian people in America. For the first time in the poll's ten year history, "the moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations" has crossed the 50 percent threshold with 52 percent of respondents finding gay relationships morally acceptable while only 43 percent took issue, a new low. Perhaps even more noteworthy, the Gallup poll suggests that the largest change in attitudes over the last four years has come from men, and in particular younger men. 

Conducted each May, the survey has also documented a slight decrease in opposition to gay marriage this year, though a 53 percent majority are still opposed, while support for the legality of gay consensual relations has again gone up this year but still hovers at a slightly depressing 58 percent.