Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison

In 2011, former N.H. Judge Arthur Brennan was arrested at an "Occupy Movement" protest at the U.S. Capitol. In 1994, he sentenced Fr Gordon MacRae to die in prison.

Editor’s Note: This eye-opener was written and published by author Ryan A. MacDonald on February 9, 2012. In the 11 years hence, much new information has surfaced that supports and upholds Ryan’s conclusions about the nature and intent of the trial of Father MacRae.

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I spent some time recently poking around inside Beyond These Stone Walls, an extraordinary website that by all odds should not exist. I once wrote of all the random factors that had to coalesce for this story of a Catholic priest falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned to be told. “The Prisoner-Priest Behind These Stone Walls” tells that tale, and hopefully has drawn some fair minded souls to this remarkable site.

Spend just a few minutes at the “About” page at Beyond These Stone Walls, and consider its simple math. On September 23, 1994, in Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Catholic priest, Gordon MacRae to consecutive prison terms for a combined sentence of 67 years in prison. The sentence was imposed after a highly problematic jury trial in which MacRae was convicted of having sexually assaulted Thomas Grover during counseling sessions in 1983 when Grover was 15 years old.

The accused priest was 29 years old when his “crimes” — now deemed by many to be fictitious — were claimed to have occurred. MacRae was 41 years old when the sentence was imposed. At this writing [2012] he is 59 years old and still in prison. Barring the just outcome of a pending new appeal based on new evidence in the case, the priest will be 108 years old when his sentence is fully served and he is free to leave prison. There is no other possible conclusion. Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to die in the New Hampshire State Prison.

From a pragmatic perspective, and even with an emphasis on retributive justice, this makes little sense. Given that New Hampshire prosecutors sought a pre-trial plea deal that would have released MacRae after one or two years had he been actually guilty or willing to pretend so, a 67-year sentence seems an expensive folly that will cost New Hampshire taxpayers millions of dollars. Even if MacRae’s sentences were imposed concurrently instead of consecutively — an option for judges when defendants have no prior felony record — MacRae would not still be in prison today.

Parole in New Hampshire for someone convicted of a sexual offense — true or not — invariably requires completion of a prison sex offender program which in turn requires an unqualified admission of guilt. Because of the vast numbers of men convicted of similar offenses in New Hampshire — by some estimates more than 40% of the state’s prison population — the waiting list for the prison sex offender program requires that inmates must be within two years of their aggregate minimum sentence to be eligible.

By the time MacRae could fulfill this requirement for parole consideration, over 50 years will have passed between the charged offenses and the “treatment” program. At age 80, this priest’s parole would rest on his ability to recall with consistency the details of fictitious sexual assaults alleged to have occurred when he was 29. What seemed to make perfect sense to Judge Arthur Brennan in this sentence eludes just about everyone else.

Nonetheless, these considerations are all rendered moot. From everything I have read on this case, MacRae is innocent of the claims, and will not say otherwise just to avoid dying in prison. Justice is not served when an innocent defendant is coerced to plead guilty to something he did not do just to discharge a decades-long prison term. Coercive plea deals work well for the guilty, but not for the innocent. Careful readers of this story know that MacRae, sitting alone in a county jail awaiting sentencing, his meager assets wiped out by the trial, his diocese having already publicly condemned him, and his lawyers having abandoned the case for lack of funds to investigate and defend it, was coerced by circumstances into a post-trial plea deal on remaining charges in exchange for a sentence of zero additional time in prison. He and others close to the case described this, then and now, as “a negotiated lie.”

Today, I describe what played out in Judge Arthur Brennan’s court after MacRae was found guilty in his first trial as an extorted lie, and it is nothing new. Attorney Barry Scheck, founder of the Innocence Project, reveals that of the hundreds of DNA exonerations his organization has championed to free the wrongfully imprisoned, a full 25% have involved coerced and extorted plea deals such as that inflicted on Father Gordon MacRae, post trial. It is for abuses such as this that a March 21, 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling vastly expanded judicial oversight of the pressures placed on defendants during plea deals, requiring that competent counsel advise them.

The details of the related, but untried charges against this priest render them highly doubtful as well. The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of these claims brought by Thomas Grover’s brothers and others jumping aboard this cash-cow opportunity in “A Priest’s Story.” I wrote of other details related to these claims in “Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest” and “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” No just person can read these documents and conclude the legitimacy of Father Gordon MacRae’s trial and imprisonment.

A Sentence Devoid of Common Sense

Gordon MacRae, Prisoner No. 67546, at this writing [2012] has been in prison for 18 years. Nearly 30 years have already passed since his charges were claimed to have occurred — charges that new evidence shows never occurred at all. New Hampshire prosecutors were willing to let MacRae out of prison after just one year had he been willing to forgo trial and stand before Judge Brennan to utter a single word, “guilty.”

MacRae refused three such prosecution overtures for a plea deal to end the case with a recommended sentence of only one to three years. One such offer was made to the priest’s lawyers in writing. Another came in the middle of MacRae’s trial. That offer was made just after 27-year-old Thomas Grover wept dramatically from the witness stand as he recounted being forced to endure sexual assaults five times during counseling sessions for his drug problem at age 15 in 1983. He vaguely claimed to return from week to week unable to remember being raped the week before. His heavily coached description of PTSD-induced “out of body experiences” was his only explanation for how such traumatic memories were “repressed.” After this incredulous testimony, the two prosecutors looked at each other and headed for a hallway with MacRae’s lawyer to offer a new plea deal — this time a sentence of one to two years. The priest refused it.

In the end, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Defendant Gordon MacRae to more than thirty times the maximum sentence State prosecutors were prepared to request.  Those prosecutors are long since gone. One was inexplicably fired the day after MacRae’s trial ended, and later relocated to another state under a cloud. The other has since committed suicide.

Even a cursory examination of new evidence in the MacRae case warrants vacating his convictions. Additionally, there are elements of the case that could not be part of the appeal process, and are not generally known. For example, MacRae agreed to two pre-trial polygraph examinations in 1994. The polygraph tests were based on the claims of Thomas Grover and his brother, Jonathan Grover, whose accusations amassed most of the indictments for which the priest faced trial. Father MacRae passed the polygraph tests conclusively. Even today, after the passage of many years, the polygraph examiner recalls this case and reported that Father MacRae “did very well” on these investigative tools. Neither Thomas Grover nor Jonathan Grover, nor any other accuser ever agreed to submit to polygraph testing.

There is more. A lot more. David F. Pierre, author of the book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused and host of The Media Report, performed a public service by reviewing hundreds of pages of court documents and trial transcripts now published at the website of The National Center for Reason and Justice. David Pierre’s summary of these documents, entitled “Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest,” includes the following eye-opening facts:

1. The ex-wife of accuser Thomas Grover has revealed this case as a fraud. Her statement describes him as a “compulsive liar” who “never stated one word of abuse by MacRae” until the prospect of money loomed. She describes him as a “manipulator...who can tell a lie and stick to it ’til its end.” She reports that Grover’s lawyer advised him to “act crazy before the jury” and hired a therapist to heighten the effect. Once Grover got his nearly $200,000 settlement, all therapy came to a halt.

2. Thomas Grover’s adult stepson today states that Grover repeatedly told him before and after trial that he “had never been molested by MacRae,” and that he was “setting MacRae and the Catholic Church up for money.” He reports that Grover laughed and joked with him about this scheme before, during, and after MacRae’s trial.

3. The former wife and stepson both report that before MacRae’s trial, Grover repeatedly sought and obtained cash advances on his projected settlement from his contingency lawyer, a practice that is prohibited in the New Hampshire Code of Professional Conduct for lawyers.

4. Two observers present throughout the trial report having observed the manipulation of Grover’s testimony by therapist Pauline Goupil, M.A., a victim advocate hired by Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer. According to signed statements Ms. Goupil influenced Grover’s trial testimony using hand signals for him to feign sobbing during specific segments of his testimony. In several instances she was observed placing her index finger over her eye and down her cheek at which point Grover would commence sobbing, disrupting cross examination and, on at least one occasion, prompting Judge Brennan to call a recess.

5. Debra Collett, Thomas Grover’s former drug addiction counselor, today states that Grover made so many claims of sexual abuse in the course of drug treatment that “he appeared to be going for some sort of sex abuse victim world record.” She reports that his claims of sexual abuse targeted his adoptive father and others, but he did not accuse MacRae.

6. Ms. Collett also described that she was threatened by “coercion, intimidation, veiled and more forward threats,” “overtly threatened” and confronted “with threats of arrest” by the investigating police detective to alter her testimony for the trial and “to get me to say what they wanted to hear.”

7. A former accuser of MacRae has today recanted his claim of abuse stating, “I was aware at the time of [the] trial knowing full well that it was all bogus and having heard of the lawsuits and money involved, also the reputations of those who were making accusations.” This former accuser attests that “[Keene, NH Detective James] McLaughlin had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story ... and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could be easier for us with a large amount of money.” This witness reports he was given cash by Det. McLaughlin after this interview.

8. James Abbott, a veteran career Special Agent with the F.B.I., today reports: “In the entirety of my three-year investigation of this matter, I discovered no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any crimes. Indeed, the only thing pointing to any improper behavior by MacRae were Grover’s stories — that were undermined by the people who surrounded him at the time he made his accusations.”

The Money Flows

After Father MacRae was sent to prison, Thomas Grover’s three brothers reportedly walked away from this case with additional settlements from the Diocese of Manchester in excess of $430,000. I have written of these accusations in my column, “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” Two of the three brothers also accused another priest, but pre-trial discovery shows no indication that the other priest was interviewed or even investigated.

Following publication of the two-part “A Priest’s Story” in The Wall Street Journal  in 2005, Arthur Brennan defended his presiding over this trial and his sentence of MacRae by stating that it was all “more complex” than what Dorothy Rabinowitz reported. Indeed it was, and the complexities which continue to surface leave many doubts about the justice of the MacRae trial and the legitimacy of its entire pre-trial investigation and prosecution.

Arthur Brennan took early retirement from the New Hampshire bench for a brief stint with the U.S. State Department’s Office of Transparency and Accountability in Iraq. The trial and sentence  of Gordon MacRae have transparency and accountability issues of their own still to be resolved.

Do the Math! Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to die in a New Hampshire prison. It’s an outcome I suspect this priest would not shrink from if it comes down to it. For the rest of us, evidence now spells out clearly the travesty of justice this case was — and still is.

“We are disgusted with the lack of integrity in Congress, the Senate, The White House and the U.S. Supreme Court. We will stop these pretenders from stealing our freedom and our universal human rights.”

— By Arthur Brennan, quoted from “Forty years later, a new call to protest” (August 21, 2011).

Justice Delayed for Father MacRae

Gordon MacRae is escorted out of the Cheshire County Superior Courthouse in Keene, N.H., Sept. 23, 1994.

PHOTO: JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A list of officers with credibility issues calls his 1994 conviction into question.

The Wall Street Journal

By Harvey Silverglate | October 10, 2022

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PREFACE

The long saga of Fr. Gordon MacRae is likely to soon end

By Harvey A. Silverglate, Esq — November 11, 2022:

To the readers on my opt-in list of those who have chosen to receive my occasional columns and articles:

Many of you are likely familiar with the case of Father Gordon MacRae, the Catholic priest in New Hampshire who got caught up in the massive child sex abuse epidemic that engulfed the Catholic Church some time ago, remnants of which continue to come to public attention even now. This abuse scandal is particularly well known to Boston-area residents since The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for its reporting of the scandal — a scandal that resulted in the exile of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law to a minor position in Rome in order to keep him safe from potential indictment for turning a blind eye toward widespread abuse. The ground-breaking work of the Spotlight Team resulted in an Oscar-winning motion picture entitled “Spotlight.”

However, as the legendary baseball player (and pundit) Yogi Berra once said: “It ain’t over until it’s over.” A startling development in the MacRae case indicates a quite decent possibility — I would say a probability — that post-conviction litigation almost certain to begin shortly will exonerate and free Fr. MacRae.

Harvey Silverglate, Esq

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Father Gordon MacRae has been in prison since 1994, when a New Hampshire jury convicted him of sexual assault and he was sentenced to 33½ to 67 years. The charges against him were “built by a determined sex-abuse investigator and an atmosphere in which accusation was, in effect, all the proof required to bring a guilty verdict,” the Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in 2013. Father MacRae has maintained his innocence all along.

A new development will soon provide Granite State courts an opportunity to reconsider Father MacRae’s conviction. The state attorney general has published a so-called Laurie List of law-enforcement officers with credibility problems. The list is named for State v. Laurie, a 1995 case in which the state supreme court overturned a conviction after exposure of a detective’s dishonest conduct.

The list initially included Detective James F. McLaughlin of the Keene Police Department, who was the lead investigator in the MacRae case. He made the list for alleged “falsification of records” in an unrelated case in 1985. Detective McLaughlin successfully petitioned to have his name removed from the list, but the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism sued to learn who had been removed. (Detective McLaughlin has declined to respond to local press requests for comment on the list.)

Father MacRae plans to ask a court to throw out his conviction, arguing that Thomas Grover, his only accuser at trial, testified falsely at Detective McLaughlin’s behest. As Ms. Rabinowitz has documented, Detective McLaughlin’s own reports showed that he attempted a sting by writing a letter to Father MacRae and forging the signature of Jon Grover, the accuser’s brother. According to supporters of Father MacRae who run the website BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com, Detective McLaughlin failed to produce and maintain recordings of interviews with alleged victims, despite making adamant statements about the importance of recordings in child-abuse investigations.

In a May 1994 lawsuit, Father MacRae alleged that Detective McLaughlin accused the priest of having taken pornographic photographs of one of the alleged victims. No such photos were ever found. (Detective McLaughlin filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, which the judge denied. After Father MacRae was convicted in September 1994, the judge dismissed the suit without prejudice.)

Ms. Rabinowitz wrote a series of stories about such cases beginning in the late 1980s. False and implausible accusations of child sexual abuse led to conviction and imprisonment of innocent people from New York and Florida to Washington state.

All this happened because “believe the children” became a nationwide mantra. Society has a duty to protect young children—but also to assess accusations rationally and fairly, especially when they’re improbable, spectacular and horrifying. Journalists, too, must maintain a level of skepticism when cases as improbable as these arise. Any reporter who covers the legal system should have recognized the high probability that these accusations were false.

Most of the defendants in these cases were ultimately released, but their lives had been ruined. The recent development in Father MacRae’s case offers hope of another such bittersweet vindication.

Harvey A. Silverglate is a Boston-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer.

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RELATED, by David F. Pierre, Jr. and The Media Report: “Twice Is a Charm? Wall St. Journal Again Profiles Stunning Case of Wrongfully Convicted Priest Fr. Gordon MacRae”

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Addendum by the Author, Harvey Silverglate

“In today’s Wall Street Journal, I have a column about a long-lingering miscarriage of justice that might, I suggest, be on the verge of producing justice at long last. The subject is the Catholic priest Father Gordon MacRae who has spent many years in prison for a crime that I, along with many others, feel strongly that he did not commit.

With regard to this particular genre of cases, I recommend that you read Dorothy Rabinowitz’ 2003 book entitled No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. Ms. Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer Prize for her path-breaking exposes of wrongful convictions in child sex-abuse cases (including, but not limited to, the MacRae case).

“Those of you from Massachusetts might remember our own local version of this false-accusation phenomenon that swept the nation during a time of particularly intense vulnerability and gullibility. We had the prosecution/persecution of Bernard F. Baran, Jr., out in Western Massachusetts, whose innocence ultimately got him released from a lengthy prison sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baran (Full disclosure: I worked on the Baran case, along with fellow Massachusetts criminal defense counsel John Swomley and Eric Tennen.) Massachusetts was also, shamefully, the location of the prosecution/persecution of the Amirault family, which is featured in Ms. Rabinowitz’s aforesaid book. (Full disclosure: I represented defendant Gerald Amirault at his parole hearing. The Parole Board granted parole. One member of the Board confided to me that the Board was convinced that the crime never happened, but it had the power only to release an innocent convict from prison, not to grant pardons. Gerald to this day wears an ankle-bracelet, a heavy burden for an innocent person.)

“Those interested in the problem of wrongful convictions are also advised to take a look at a recently-published book by Northeastern Law School Professor Daniel S. Medwed, entitled Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get out of Prison. And, of course, an occasional visit should be paid to the website of The National Innocence Project, co-founded and still led by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Similarly, there is the Boston-based organization dubbed The National Center for Reason and Justice, led by Robert D. (“Bob”) Chatelle. (Disclosure: I am on the organization’s advisory board. The NCRJ also sponsors the defense of Fr. Gordon MacRae.) And the problem of wrongful convictions is not reserved to state prosecutions. Consider my 2009 book (updated in 2011) Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

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.”

New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name

By Brian Fraga | National Catholic Register

March 18, 2015

CONCORD, N.H. — Imprisoned for 21 years after his conviction for crimes he adamantly denies he committed, Father Gordon MacRae says he is “cautiously hopeful” that the federal courts will give him a new opportunity to prove his innocence.

“I know that Supreme Court decisions and precedents have made it very difficult for innocent defendants to have a case re-heard at this level. Most people who judge the justice system by TV’s Law and Order don’t understand the steep uphill climb,” Father MacRae told the Register in an email message Tuesday, after his attorneys presented oral arguments on behalf of his habeus corpus appeal at U.S. district court in Concord, N.H.

Father MacRae, whose story is told on the These Stone Walls blog, has been incarcerated in the New Hampshire State Prison since his September 1994 conviction on one count of sexual assault and four counts of felonious sexual-assault charges. Now 62, Father MacRae was a parish priest in the Diocese of Manchester, N.H., when the alleged victim accused Father MacRae of molesting him several times when he was a 15-year-old boy in the early 1980s.

In court documents, Father MacRae’s attorneys argue that “newly discovered evidence,” which include allegations that the accuser concocted his story for financial gain, establishes Father MacRae’s “actual innocence.” His lawyers argue that innocence should override any time limits or procedural bars that prevent a new hearing of the case.

The March 7 “hearing, for which there is no decision yet, was not a hearing on the merits, but solely on whether case law and procedure will even allow for a hearing on the merits,” Father MacRae said.

“Again, plea deals and the justice system work really well for guilty defendants, but for the innocent, not so much. It should be a grave concern to Americans that 97% of criminal cases are resolved by plea deals. Those who risk a trial risk their lives,” he added.

Turned-Down Plea Agreement

Father MacRae took that risk in 1994, when he turned down a plea deal that would have carried a maximum three-year prison term. Maintaining his innocence, he took his chances at trial, which ended in guilty verdicts after 10 days of testimony. In November 1994, a judge sentenced Father MacRae to an aggregate prison term of 33½ to 67 years.

In their appeal, Father MacRae’s current attorneys — Robert Rosenthal of New York City and Cathy Green of Manchester — contend that Father MacRae was denied his constitutional right to effective counsel, adding that his original lawyer’s conduct “undermined [his] own case, served the state mightily and assured the conviction.”

Rosenthal and Green also suggest that Father MacRae’s conviction occurred during the midst of a “moral panic that infected law enforcement, the public, media, judicial system and verdicts.” The corresponding era, the attorneys say, has since been widely recognized as fostering “a wave of unjust sexual-abuse accusations and convictions,” many of which have since been reversed and vacated.

“A dispassionate analysis of MacRae’s conviction reveals it to be just such a case — built on lies, overzealous police work and defense counsel’s actions that were wholly contrary to MacRae’s interests,” Rosenthal and Green said.

Diocese of Manchester

Meanwhile, Father MacRae said the Diocese of Manchester has not been in recent contact with him nor shown any support. In the early 2000s, Father MacRae said diocesan officials expressed concern that he had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced and even promised legal assistance.

“Then the 2002 Dallas Charter happened, and both mercy and justice went out of the world for accused priests,” Father MacRae told the Register.

Thomas Bebbington, director of communication for the Diocese of Manchester, told the Register that the diocese “has not been involved in any of the appeals filed by Gordon J. MacRae, nor has the diocese provided funding for these appeals or legal counsel.”

Said Bebbington: “Since this is a civil matter in which the diocese is not involved, we have no additional information to release. We continue to pray for all involved and for the vitality of the Catholic Church in New Hampshire.”

A central figure in Father MacRae’s new appeal in federal court is his accuser, identified in court documents as Tom Grover, who was 27 when he accused his former parish priest in Keene, N.H., of having molested him as a teenager. Father MacRae’s attorneys say Grover, “a drug addict and alcoholic, with neither a job nor prospects,” looked for a payday and sued the Diocese of Manchester, for which he won almost $200,000.

However, the attorneys say there was no corroborating evidence and not a single witness to the alleged sexual abuse, “though it was to have happened in busy, populated places.” Rosenthal and Green say Grover has since admitted to friends and family that he lied about the alleged molestation and that he has confessed to perjuring himself at trial.

“Grover’s addictions continued after trial, and his rap sheet continues to grow, with charges of all sorts of things, from traffic infractions to violent crimes in at least three states and Native-American jurisdictions,” Rosenthal and Green wrote.

State’s Response

However, Richard Gerry, the warden of the New Hampshire State Prison, who is named as the defendant in Father MacRae’s appeal, has moved to dismiss the appeal as untimely.

Through his attorney, Gerry said the appeal does not address the nature of the evidence presented at the priest’s 1994 trial, the performance of the prosecution or defense counsel or the fairness of the trial itself. Father MacRae’s attorney’s statements that they have new evidence to prove innocence, Gerry said, are “not new,” and any claim of actual innocence “is suspect at best.”

The petition, Gerry’s attorney said, “is almost entirely based on attacking the credibility of the victim … determinations made by the jury two decades ago. His newly discovered evidence provides nothing more than additional avenues of attack on cross-examination through witnesses of whom he was well aware at the time of trial.”

To date, the New Hampshire state courts have not looked favorably on Father MacRae’s post-conviction petitions. The New Hampshire State Court denied his direct appeal in June 1996. In April 2012, Father MacRae filed a petition for relief with the Merrimack County Superior Court, arguing that his defense lawyer at trial refused to conduct critical discovery, failed to object to the prosecution’s expert testimony and “literally” provided the state with the defense case before trial. However, the court never held a hearing on those issues and denied the petition in July 2013. The New Hampshire State Supreme Court subsequently declined to review the lower court’s decision.

Financial Assistance

Father MacRae said the state court system’s refusal to hear his case was “very frustrating, and it could happen again.” He said donations to his defense fund helped his case get a new hearing in federal court.

“Yes, in fact, the hearts and generosity of others are the only reason we got to this point,” he said.

Father MacRae has also been assisted by journalists and organizations that have taken up his cause.

Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz’s critical articles on the conviction led to renewed efforts to review the case. The Boston-based National Center for Reason and Justice has endorsed Father MacRae’s effort for a legal review and investigation. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and other organizations have also expressed support.

In 2007, Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus asked the priest to write a “new chapter in the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison.” The result, Father MacRae said, is his blog, These Stone Walls.

Register correspondent Brian Fraga writes from Fall River, Massachusetts.

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The above article was first published in the National Catholic Register on March 18, 2015.