A Brief History of the National Center for Reason and Justice
The National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ) was incorporated on April 5, 2002, and dissolved on May 15, 2024. Any opinions expressed in this document are our own and do not necessarily reflect the thinking of any Advisor or Board member. Some may disagree with us. This is a personal history.
While Bob Chatelle was Executive Director during the NCRJ’s entire existence, Jim D’Entremont made clear at the outset that he would accept no formal role because he didn’t think he could make the necessary time commitment. Nevertheless, he often attended Board Meetings as acting Clerk and worked on our cases, especially offering much needed support to prisoners. As Bob Chatelle’s partner, he was informed of everything that was going on.
We have put together a brief account of the events leading up to the NCRJ’s founding, its notable successes and failures, and the events leading to its dissolution.
Salem Revisited
On January 14, 1697, the Massachusetts General Court proclaimed a Day of Contrition for the injustices perpetrated during the Salem witch trials of 1692-’93. The day of fasting and prayer was a gesture of atonement for the wave of hysteria leading to the executions of 20 innocent townspeople and up to 200 cases of wrongful imprisonment.
On the 300th anniversary of the Massachusetts Day of Contrition, criminal justice advocate Carol Hopkins, head of the San Diego-based Justice Committee, organized a second Day of Contrition event, enlisting the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) as co-sponsor. The 1997 event focused on victims of false accusations and wrongful convictions for child sexual abuse. These included innocent teachers and caregivers caught up in the national panic over alleged sexual abuse in nursery schools and daycare centers. At the time, most of those convicted were still in prison.
We had become acutely aware of child-abuse scares as members of the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression (BCFE), an arts advocacy organization defending the free speech rights of artists. These included photographers such as Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose non-pornographic depictions of child nudity had been demonized by the far right – especially if their work had been funded by the besieged National Endowment for the Arts or any other public source. Many artists were engulfed by the overlapping sexual predation and “Satanic ritual abuse” panics of the 1980s and ‘90s.
The 1997 Day of Contrition conference took place at Salem, Massachusetts, near the sites of the 17th century witch panic, the trials it generated, and the resulting imprisonments and executions. The event had been booked into the auditorium of Salem’s Peabody-Essex Museum, whose collection includes original witch trial documents and an array of supplementary material. In response to the strident demands of child protectionists, however, the museum’s management disinvited the conference at the last minute. Fortunately, the nearby Hawthorne Hotel had no problem letting the Justice Committee occupy a large function room for two days on very short notice.
We attended the event in its entirety, meeting for the first time investigative journalist Debbie Nathan; criminal defense attorney Michael Snedeker, who had won baseless abuse trials on the West Coast; and Frank Kane, an Acton, Massachusetts, father of three, accused by his daughter (who later recanted) in a case that never went to trial. In groundbreaking articles for the Village Voice, Debbie Nathan had been the first journalist to question the daycare cases cogently and in depth. She later co-authored, with Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, an important book about child-abuse fright-waves generated by the sex panics of the 1980s. Debbie would later become a principal founder of the NCRJ and for many years a Board member. For most of the NCRJ’s lifetime, Mike Snedeker would serve as President of the Board. Frank Kane would serve as Treasurer from inception to dissolution.
At Salem we also met two people who would become indispensable members of our Board of Advisors, social psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, author of The Myth of Repressed Memory, and veteran journalist Donald Connery, whose books on criminal justice include Convicting the Innocent.
People whose lives had been mangled by false accusations of sex crimes were present at the conference, along with members of their families. We connected with many who had been accused, convicted, and freed after serving significant prison time. Violet and Cheryl Amirault, whose Fells Acres daycare center in Malden, Massachusetts, was the target of wild allegations, had recently been released after eight years at the state penal institution for women at Framingham. Kelly Michaels, a New Jersey nursery schoolteacher charged with bizarre acts of abuse, had served five years of a 47-year sentence before her conviction was summarily thrown out by the state supreme court. Also present were Noel Fuster, son of still imprisoned Florida daycare operator Frank Fuster; Peggy McMartin Buckey, her son Ray, and other central figures in California’s notorious McMartin Preschool case, an epic upheaval ending in no convictions; people swept into “ritual abuse” vortices in Bakersfield, California, and Wenatchee, Washington; and many more.
The Bernard Baran Case
After the conference, Bob and Jim kept in touch with a number of fellow attendees by email, telephone, and in person. That April, Bob joined Carol Hopkins in organizing a support rally for the Amirault family at a church in Harvard Square. He connected with Jonathan Harris, an MIT professor who had created a website about the Fells Acres case and others he had researched. From Jonathan’s website, he learned about Bernard Baran, the first person in the U.S. convicted during the daycare hysteria. Because his family was poor and unable to obtain proper legal representation, Baran’s short, ugly 1985 trial had characteristics of a lynching.
Baran was an openly gay nineteen-year-old daycare worker at the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a small industrial city near the New York border. At a time when the AIDS pandemic was spreading locally, portrayed as a product of boundless perversity, a Pittsfield jury was easily convinced that Baran’s sexual orientation made him prone to rape toddlers. Baran was found guilty of three counts of child rape and five counts of indecent assault and battery. He was sentenced to three concurrent life terms.
Across the United States in the 1980s and early ‘90s, hostility to the progress of gay visibility and gay civil rights — and fear that diseased homosexuals would lure trusting children into their sordid lairs — filled the air like blended smoke. Singing zealot Anita Bryant had mainstreamed her indefatigably repeated notion that “homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore they must recruit our children.” Her “Save Our Children” campaign dovetailed neatly with the rise of AIDS as the 1980s began. Hard-core conservatives, religious and secular, grew firm in their conviction that transgressive sex would be America’s undoing. A situation arose where Christian fundamentalists became allies of Dworkinite feminists. Recovery Movement liberals obsessed with the imagined nastiness of sexual freedom aligned themselves, often unwittingly, with homophobes, religious fanatics, and enemies of reproductive rights. The term “sex predator” was coined and weaponized. Many of the daycare and primary school abuse cases began with parents of a little boy accusing a male worker of being a predatory queer. As far as we have been able to determine, however, Bernard Baran was the only daycare defendant who was actually gay.
A ray of hope for Baran and others broke through on June 12, 1998, when Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein granted Gerald Amirault’s mother and sister, Violet and Cheryl, a new trial. They had already been released on appeal after serving eight years at MCI-Framingham, the women’s state correctional facility. Although Gerald remained in prison, Bob and Jim were jubilant, and expected a harder look at his case by saner people.
But the Amiraults still await exoneration. Unfortunately, the “liberal” Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, ever protective of the child protectionists who made the Amirault case a cause célèbre, would later overturn Judge Borenstein’s decision.
For a while, however, the Borenstein ruling did sustain an illusion that the tide was turning. Shortly afterward, Bob received an email from Debbie Nathan saying the time had come to help Bernie Baran, whose case she had discovered while researching the book Satan’s Silence. She provided his mother’s telephone number and urged Bob to call her. He did so. It was a sad call. Bertha obviously loved her son very much, but had given up hope of ever again seeing him free. She did, however, give Bob his mailing address.
Baran was being held at an institution for sex offenders, the Massachusetts Treatment Center, part of a prison cluster at Bridgewater, Mass. We eventually established contact with him, but the process took months. He had previously received offers of help from people who reached out to him, raised his hopes, then left him alone and disappointed. For a few years prior to 2000, his lawyer of record was a Salem attorney who had all but forgotten him. Promising Baran nothing but friendship, Bob and Jim pledged never to abandon him. And went to work, telling Baran’s story to friends, relatives, business associates, casual acquaintances, and strangers, including some who would have preferred not to hear it.
The narrative of blatant injustice did pique the interest of attorney John Swomley, a fellow member of the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression. John offered to arrange a face-to-face meeting at the Massachusetts Treatment Center, where he had clients. Bob finally accompanied John to the Treatment Center in June 1999. Baran was nervous and probably a bit mistrustful, but his answers to John’s questions were forthright and verifiable. Bob liked him very much.
On the way back to Boston, John told Bob he wanted to be Baran’s lawyer, but could not afford to do the case pro bono. Bob would have to raise some money. A short time later, Bob banded together with Debbie Nathan and criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate to found the Bernard Baran Justice Committee (BBJC). The three founders each contributed $100 to start a bank account.
A short time later, John Swomley would be leading a legal team in pursuit of “lost” exculpatory evidence in the Baran case: unedited video footage of child interviews that had been shown in edited form to the grand jury that indicted Baran. Pamela Nicolson and Eric Tennen, lawyers attached to Swomley’s law firm, would soon begin to construct a new trial motion.
As Swomley persisted, people took notice. On the downside, the Boston Sunday Globe ran an egregious feature whose tone was set by a large photo tweaked to make Baran look sinister. The photo hovered over a large-type caption, The Molester. Far more positive coverage appeared in a February 2002 issue of The Nation, when columnist Katha Pollitt published a powerful column urging people to contribute to Baran’s defense fund. For a long time, however, the Nation piece was the closest the Baran case would come to an accurate account in the mainstream press. We compensated for the lack of interest by means of a “Friends of Justice” blog Bob created and updated regularly, and occasional events such as a well-attended forum at Berkshire Community College, where John Swomley, Donald Connery, and Bob Chatelle presented the facts of the case.
Coverage in the gay press was sparse, though some useful crossover reaction occurred when Jim wrote the first of several features on Baran for The Guide, a Boston based gay publication, late in 1999. The article was brought to the attention of a criminal justice advocate who wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal about the case. The letter attracted important supporters (not including WSJ editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz, a passionate defender of the beleaguered Amirault family, but perhaps less receptive to the plight of a working-class gay man). In 2003, however, lesbian journalist Jennifer Vanasco managed to publish a factual account of Baran’s predicament in the Chicago-based LGBTQ newspaper Windy City Times, stirring additional interest and attracting the attention of documentary filmmaker Daniel Alexander. Nevertheless, gay publications widely ignored the case until it concluded.
Eventually, the Baran case came to the attention of a midwestern businessman who was appalled and offered generous support – provided he could make tax-deductible donations. This would mean obtaining 501(c)(3) status. Dedicated to advocacy for a single case, the Bernard Baran Justice Committee was, however, ineligible.
The Birth of the National Center for Reason and Justice
After discussion among the BBJC founders and other justice advocates, we decided to create a nonprofit organization focused on helping all persons falsely accused or wrongfully convicted of crimes against children. At the time, offshoots of the Innocence Project were exonerating wrongfully convicted persons across the U.S. by means of DNA analyses. They did not, however, pursue cases that could not be solved by DNA testing. We hoped to fill that vacuum. The cases we chose to sponsor typically lacked DNA evidence because there was no crime.
Our first step was incorporation, which meant choosing a name and acquiring officers. Accountant Francis X. Kane, once employed by the False Memory Foundation, readily agreed to serve as Treasurer. Hugo Cunningham, a Sovietologist who happened to be a strong Amirault supporter, agreed to be Clerk. Dan Finneran, a passionately dedicated New York lawyer who played a key role in Kelly Michaels’s successful appeal, accepted our invitation to serve as President despite his precarious health.
We formed a five-member Board of Directors. Initially, the Board comprised Debbie Nathan; Michael Snekeder; author Mark Pendergrast, whose books include Victims of Memory; journalist/author Judith Levine, whose books include Harmful to Minors; and scholar Bernard Rosenthal, author of Salem Story and other books on the Salem witch trials. Bob, already serving the function of executive director, was named Executive Director.
We also assembled an Advisory Board: Dr. Robyn Dawes, psychologist and author of House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth; false confession expert Dr. Richard Leo, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, author of Police interrogation and American Justice; memory expert Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, listed in 2002 by the Review of General Psychology as one of the 100 most influential psychological researchers of the 20th century; Dr. Debra A. Poole, a child psychologist whose books include Interviewing Children: The Science of Conversation in Forensic Contexts; feminist social psychologist Dr. Carol Tavris; and Boston-based criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate, former President of the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU.
The day after our incorporation, the Board’s first order of business was to formalize our commitment to the Baran case by making the NCRJ’s sponsorship official. Sponsorship had to be conferred unanimously by the Board of Directors. In this instance, there was minimal discussion before the unanimous on-line vote. The case had already been worked on for more than a year under the aegis of the Bernard Baran Justice Committee. Everyone knew the details well and considered it a starkly deplorable miscarriage of justice.
The Board went on to discuss and approve several other deeply flawed Massachusetts cases. These included two additional Berkshire County abuse convictions Bob and Jim had discovered while researching the Baran case. Soon after Baran received official sponsorship, the Board extended that status to Pittsfield school bus driver Robert Halsey, who had allegedly ravaged two primary school boys, and Pittsfield man Bruce Clairmont, serving 12 years in prison for sexual abuse of his young son and daughter. His ordeal began when his wife, during a bitter divorce, caught the children “playing doctor” and concluded, with nudges from a therapist, that they had been taught depraved behavior by their father.
The NCRJ also agreed to take on fiscal sponsorship and incidental support of the highly politicized, massively deranged Fells Acres Day School case, in which children had allegedly been sodomized with knives, forks, and other implements, tied naked to a tree in full view of passing traffic, raped by a “bad clown,” forced to drink urine, sexually assaulted by the Star Wars robot R2D2, stripped to pose for kiddie-porn photos in a secret room, and subjected to countless other degradations at the hands of daycare proprietor Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, and son Gerald. The latter, presumed to be the “bad clown,” had been tried in 1986, found guilty on nine counts of child rape, and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in prison. Tried jointly in 1987, his mother and sister were sentenced to eight to 20 years. No physical evidence was presented at either trial.
The Amiraults were convicted on the basis of child interviews driven by blatant leading questions and spiced with children’s interactions with “anatomically correct” dolls.
The women were released on appeal after serving eight years. Violet, who died in 1997, did not live to see that appeal overturned two years later. Cheryl remained free, with controversial constraints. Gerald remained in prison. The NCRJ’s Frank Kane, a longtime visitor, began visiting with Bob, Jim, or both.
The Board’s first wave of cases was by no means confined to Massachusetts. Also approved for sponsorship were two Texas cases: that of Bruce Perkins, a married South Texas businessman convicted of such outré exploits as forcing his granddaughter to have sex with a dog whose penis he then cut off; and Austin, Texas, daycare providers Fran and Dan Keller, convicted of “Satanic ritual abuse.” We also agreed to investigate the Lorain, Ohio, case of handyman Joseph Allen and school bus driver Nancy Smith, said to have collaborated on the rape of busloads of Head Start preschoolers.
Our first Annual Meeting was held in New York on November 7, 2002. Sadly, Dan Finneran, our designated President, did not live to attend that gathering. He was replaced by the similarly accomplished Michael Snedeker, who served as President until the NCRJ disbanded.
One of the topics discussed was the prospect of broadening the scope of the NCRJ. When the NCRJ incorporated, our primary concern was providing fiscal sponsorship for defense funds of people falsely accused or wrongfully convicted of crimes against children. Some Board Members argued that the NCRJ should be doing more than “mopping up” the mistakes of the past and do something more “cutting edge” about the child sex-abuse panic. One Board member said, “Issues and anxieties around child/adult sex that really does occur (in practice or imagery) haven’t been and aren’t being addressed.” The Board member also pointed out that law-enforcement agencies were performing sting operations on the internet, but few were examining what was going on or challenging the practice. People brave enough to examine issues – such as Board member Judith Levine, whose 2002 book Harmful to Minors caused an uproar – had been demonized by both religious conservatives and child-protectionists on the left.
While no motions came out of this discussion, the consensus was to proceed cautiously, but not timidly.
A Long Wait for Victory
During our early years, we focused on our sponsored cases, beginning with the Baran case. We added several, including some high-profile cases, such as:
- Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen (02/26/04)
- Jesse Friedman (06/30/04)
- Gunther Fiek (10/24/03)
- Frank Fuster (02/23/05)
- Father Paul Shanley (02/25/05)
- Father Gordon MacRae (11/18/07)
- Victor Rosario (01/01/08)
- The San Antonio Four (12/05/08)
- The Yankton Four (05/26/2011)
By 2002, Bob and Jim had been visiting Bernard Baran at the Treatment Center frequently for over two years. When Bob had out-of-town work commitments, Jim visited alone, or with active or potential supporters from as far afield as Seattle. Bob and Jim had enlisted their friend Joe McGrath to accompany them to Salem and retrieve Baran’s case records from his immobile, about-to-be former lawyer. They lugged three shopping bags bursting with documents back to Boston on the Salem Ferry. One of the bags contained a complete trial transcript that validated suspicions that the trial had been a clumsy homophobic revel.
Bob and Jim went to Pittsfield, met Baran’s mother and other family members, researched local press coverage of the case at the Pittsfield Public Library, and rooted through boxes marked evidence at Berkshire Superior Court. They visited the grounds of the shuttered Early Childhood Development Center, where Baran had found employment through the Federal youth job-placement program, CETA. Baran had been assigned to that position despite his written request for a job working with the elderly. (At trial, Prosecutor Dan Ford had implied that Baran had finagled his employment as a childcare worker, and had behaved, once hired as such, like “a chocoholic in a candy factory.”) While in Pittsfield, Bob and Jim also met and talked with people familiar with the procedural rules and physical layout of the daycare facility where Baran had allegedly victimized preschool children. What Baran was supposed to have done there was thought to be highly unlikely, if not impossible, in such an open, watchful environment.
Nevertheless, the certitude of true believers in Baran’s guilt transcended fact and rationality. While the cultural bias that viewed Baran as a likely child rapist was (and is) shot through with homophobic folklore, solid LGBTQ support for Baran did not materialize. Many LGBTQ activists are quick to cite the fact that most sexual abuse of children is the work of heterosexual males, often family members. When confronted with a queer adult accused of sexual misconduct with one or more children, the LGBTQ mainstream tends to side with his or her accusers before bothering to look at the evidence. Typically, they revert to the mantra “We are not child molesters!” and then turn their backs. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force) refused to pay any attention to the Baran case. The Boston-based Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) wanted nothing to do with the NCRJ. Efforts to spark some interest at The Human Rights Campaign resulted in rude dismissals. It was a long time before most of the gay press (The Guide and The Windy City Times being notable exceptions) so much as acknowledged the existence of the Baran case.
For four years, the NCRJ investigated sponsored cases and prospective ones, publicized efforts to free imprisoned sponsees, visited prisoners, and raised funds. A stream of donations, often earmarked for individual cases, arrived and were processed and acknowledged by Bob and Frank Kane. Heartbreaking requests for help from prisoners and their families and friends began filling the NCRJ’s P.O. mailbox. Bob kept in close touch with Board members, individually and as a group. Advisors were often consulted or became involved in discussions.
Bob soon found himself conducting NCRJ business seven days a week. In July, 2004, the Board voted to allot him a modest monthly stipend to help maintain his health insurance. For the remainder of the NCRJ’s existence, that stipend made Bob the organization’s sole paid employee.
The NCRJ’s first major victory happened on June 13, 2006, when Judge Francis Fecteau granted Bernard Baran a new trial.
On December 4, 1999, less than six months after taking Baran’s case, John Swomley had filed a motion to gain access to unedited videotapes of child interviews that played a key evidentiary role in the case, although the grand jury had indicted Baran on the strength of heavily edited videos. The trial jury did not see the tapes in any form. The word from Downing’s office was that the tapes could not be found, and, given their age, would probably be unplayable if they were. The judge granted a continuance so that the D.A. could keep looking.
After multiple court dates, Downing brought in the edited videotapes that had been shown the grand jury that handed down Baran’s indictment. He claimed there was nothing more to find, but he was ordered to keep looking for the unedited tapes.
Downing’s obstruction persisted until December 15, 2003, when he suffered a fatal heart attack while shoveling snow. His first assistant DA, David Capeless, took over. Swomley filed a new-trial motion on June 16, 2004. Meanwhile, Capeless miraculously “discovered” the missing tapes in a box stored in the late D.A. Downing’s office. Swomley obtained most of the tape cassettes on September 17, 2004. The tapes showed children who had said nothing happened being badgered, coached, bribed, and fed leading questions until they provided the answers their interrogators wanted. They documented sleazy usage of “anatomically correct” dolls. The tapes amounted to crucial evidence leading to the granting of a new trial. Evidentiary hearings were held, and Fecteau took his time writing a bullet-proof decision. Baran was released on bond on June 30, 2006.
Capeless of course appealed the decision, resulting in further delays. He took a full fourteen months to file his appeal. The Massachusetts Appellate Court held hearings on Capeless’s appeal beginning on February 12, 2008. On May 15. 2009, the Appeals Court, in a strongly worded decision, unanimously rejected Capeless’s appeal. In their opinion, Baran did not receive “anything close to a fair trial.” The judges warned that further appeals from the Berkshire County D.A. risked charges of prosecutorial misconduct. Capeless finally threw in the towel. Baran walked free on June 9, 2009. His family, friends, and supporters were still feeling the exhilaration of his victory five years later, when he would die of an arterial occlusion.
The NCRJ Expands its Mission
There would be many changes to both the Advisory Board and Board of Directors during NCRJ’s twenty-two years of existence. Robyn Dawes died. Debra Poole resigned. Joining the Advisory Board were journalist and author Donald Connery (now deceased), social psychologist Evan Harrington, clinical social worker Susan Robbins, psychologist Leonore Tiefer, and psychologist James Wood.
There were also major changes to the Board of Directors. As noted, Dan Finneran died during the NCRJ’s first year. Bernard Rosenthal, Mark Pendergrast, and Debbie Nathan resigned. Hugo Cunningham resigned as Clerk and became Resident Business Agent. Joining the Board were sociologist and author Emily Horowitz and anthropologist and author Roger Lancaster.
Throughout the year, Board members kept in touch via conference calls, online group discussions, online votes on procedural changes, business matters, and whether to accept or reject proposed new cases. For the first 15 years, the Board’s annual gathering was held face-to-face at people’s homes in New York or Boston. It was normally held in October. An exception was 2003, when the meeting was scheduled to take place the day after the NCRJ’s September 8 New York fundraiser. The successful event centered on a screening of Andrew Jarecki’s documentary Capturing the Friedmans. Speakers included Bernard Baran’s mother and niece, John Swomley, Katha Pollit, and Jesse Friedman, whose tale of wrongful conviction was told in Jarecki’s film.
As years passed, Board members expressed a wish for an expanded mission. At the 2014 annual meeting and in subsequent annual meetings, the issue was seriously discussed. Some Board members felt we needed to select cases based not solely on innocence but on political and educational importance. If cases met these criteria, innocence would not even be essential if the accused were victims of bad laws or over punishment.
Another consideration was that Innocence Projects were now considering the sorts of cases that NCRJ had been sponsoring, and that they had vastly more resources than NCRJ. We knew we would never be in a position to provide pro bono legal assistance.
Longstanding NCRJ policy dictated that no case should be accepted for sponsorship without unanimous consent from the Board. No innocence case Bob subsequently brought to the Board overcame this hurdle.
Nevertheless, we continued to work diligently on our existing caseload. Over our remaining years, nine more people were exonerated: Dan and Fran Keller, Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, the San Antonio Four, and Victor Rosario. Of the remaining cases, fifteen were paroled, one took a plea bargain, and three served their full sentences. Four remain in prison: Khemwatie Bedassie, Gunther Fiek, Frank Fuster, and Gordon MacRae.
The NCRJ’s support for its sponsees went beyond publicizing their cases and raising money. We provided monthly stipends for indigent prisoners. NCRJ members often developed close personal relationships with prisoners and their families. Bob, Jim and NCRJ Treasurer Frank Kane became very close to Bernard Baran, taking his phone calls, corresponding by letter, and visiting him in prison nearly every week for seven years. They also became close to his family, especially his mother, Bertha Shaw. They remained close to Baran until his death.
Bob, Jim, and Frank Kane also became close to the Amirault family, and were included in a number of their family gatherings. Jim attended nearly all of Paul Shanley’s trial. He visited Shanley frequently during the ex-priest’s 12-year incarceration and after his release. Bob kept close contact by phone and by mail with Gunther Fiek, Bruce and Carol Perkins, Joseph Allen, and others. In 2018, he traveled to Columbus, Ohio, for Allen’s fruitless commutation hearing. Although he had resigned from the Board, the late Bernard Rosenthal stayed closely in touch, taking particular interest in the politicized, racially tainted Smith-Allen case. He visited Joseph Allen in his Ohio prison, and wrote a book, Injustice in Ohio, about the case.
Texan Board Member Debbie Nathan formed bonds with the San Antonio Four and their families. The four Latina lesbians were alleged to have subjected two young girls to unspeakable lesbian witchery (invented by a vengeful relative) during a weekend of babysitting in 1994. The NCRJ was alerted to the case by an Alaskan supporter who had set up a website in the women’s defense. Debbie found local supporters, got the Innocence Project of Texas involved in the case, and connected the women with a filmmaker, Deborah Esquenazi, who went to work on a documentary, Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, that premiered at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in 2016. The evening before the premiere, the NCRJ held a forum on the case at an East Side bookstore. Speakers included Emily Horowitz, Debbie Nathan, attorney Mike Ware of the Texas Innocence Project, exoneree Kelly Michaels, and the San Antonio Four, recently freed and declared innocent under a Texas statute that enables such a declaration.
Debbie Nathan also traveled to South Dakota to investigate the Yankton Four, members of the Yankton Sioux Tribe convicted of child rape on the basis of coerced and evidently false confessions. (The complex case is now in the hands of several state Innocence Projects and the National Innocence Project.)
In addition to prison visits, social visits, correspondence, and phone calls, the NCRJ provided financial help to our more indigent prisoners with monthly payments to their commissary accounts. The organization paid for the services of fire investigators who found that the 1982 Lowell, Massachusetts house fire that killed eight people, including five children, was not the work of an arsonist. Their forensic conclusions enabled Victor Rosario, a bystander framed by police, to walk free after serving 32 years of a life sentence for arson and murder. The NCRJ also paid private investigator Martin Yant, who had helped turn the Smith-Allen case around, to look into the case of Gunther Fiek, a Peruvian-born martial arts instructor serving 90 years for alleged molestation of young students. His conviction rode a classic wave of community panic. Bob Chatelle provided a blog for Fiek for a time, and still supports his protestations of innocence.
A New Direction
The NCRJ had several concerns that were not being addressed:
- The injustices created by the ineffective sex-offender registries.
- One-day-to -lifetime civil commitment of people who have completed their sentences for real or imagined sex crimes.
- Hyper-punishment of people convicted of sexual offenses.
- Criminalizing teenage sexual behavior.
- The ever-expanding child-pornography laws coupled with no clear definition of child pornography. In practice, it was child pornography if law enforcement and prosecutors said it was.
- Residency restrictions for registered citizens.
Board Members worked hard to advance these goals – but usually in the course of their own careers, not as Board Members of the NCRJ.
Emily Horowitz, Judith Levine, and Roger Lancaster wrote articles, gave talks, and attended conferences. Horowitz published an important book, Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us. Roger Lancaster published the urgently astute Sex Panic and the Punitive State. In the fearless tradition of her Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children, Judith Levine published The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence.
The NCRJ did at last get involved with cases that were not about provable innocence, but had important political and educational value. Two of the most important were those of Native American Derek Logue, a registered sex offender battling the sex offender registry and facing lawsuits as a result, and Galen Baughman, a criminal justice activist and founder of the Center for Sexual Justice, fighting a personal threat of civil commitment in Virginia..
NCRJ members also got involved in local organizations that shared our expanded mission. As agents of the NCRJ, Bob Chatelle and Jim D’Entremont began meeting in July of 2015 with other activists at the American Friends Service Committee office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These meetings eventually led to the creation of a new organization: the Sex Offender Policy Reform Initiative (SOPRI). SOPRI continued to meet until the COVID pandemic, during which it continued to educate via its website and via sponsoring important – and well attended – public events. It also did effective lobbying.
It came as a surprise that many members of the Massachusetts legislature agreed with us and encouraged us – including powerful committee chairs and even own representatives. Wishing to keep their jobs, these allies were circumspect in their public statements. But one of the major things they did was lock bad bills in committee. Had these bills made it to the floor, they would have passed overwhelmingly.
SOPRI would not the COVID-19 pandemic, but an important part of it emerged intact: the Boston Reentry Network, now the Bay State Reentry Network. The network was founded by the late, wonderful Bill Canavan. Bill had been convicted of a sexual offense at a young age and confined for many years at the Massachusetts Treatment Center. When he got out, he had nothing, no sources of support. But through hard work and determination, he survived and became a paralegal. Bill was concerned that others should not have to go through what he went through. His primary concern, however, was that released former offenders do not reoffend, The slogan of the Boston Reentry Network, was “No more victims.”
Bill would pick people up on their release from the Treatment Center, find them a place to stay, help them get their ID, give them a phone, and get them registered. He also connected them to the network. Taking a cue from Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill believed that no one could help a former sex offender like another former sex offender. And it worked. People in the Bay State Reentry Network have an extremely low rate of recidivism.
Bob and Jim were not the only NCRJ folk who became involved in local activism.
In New York, Board Member Emily Horowitz and veteran activist Bill Dobbs organized the New York Sex Offender Law Working Group. One of the group’s focal points is a lawsuit filed in Suffolk County against “Parents for Megan’s Law,” a self-appointed civilian watchdog group comprising mainly obsessed retired police officers. Parents for Megan’s Law monitors and harasses registered sex offenders through vigilante compliance checks and other methods of intimidation.
Frustration and Decline
While we were doing good work, people at the 2017 Board meeting felt frustrated that we weren’t doing more. We were limited in what we did by money, by time, and by limited expertise in areas such as working with the traditional media and social media platforms.
To do what we wanted to do we needed to raise a lot more money. To do that, we needed to expand our donor base. (Existing donors were primarily interested in helping innocent people in prison.) And expanding our donor base was difficult because so few people who shared our concerns knew about the NCRJ.
Because lack of media presence was such a problem, at the 2017 meeting the Board reserved a substantial sum to hire a media consultant. Unfortunately, we were unable to find someone available for the money we could pay.
Signs of discouragement set in. Two Board members who had been making monthly payments via PayPal or credit-card stopped their payments. As an economy measure, the 2018 Board Meeting was the first conducted not in person but by conference call. Dissolution was discussed, and these discussions continued at subsequent Board Meetings. Nevertheless, we agreed to send out a fundraising letter in November.
At the 2019 Annual Meeting, Judith Levine felt she could not write a fund-raising letter because we felt NCRJ had not done enough in the preceding year to justify it. Bob agreed to draft the letter, and Judith agreed to edit it.
At the 2020 Annual Meeting, the Board decided to delay the fund-raising letter because we had fallen short of our goals. One thing we had decided to do was Zoom conferences to publicize our issues. We decided to wait until we had done at least two before revisiting the issue. But no letter was written .
The worldwide surge of COVID-19, declared a pandemic in March 2020, soon contributed to group numbness. Suddenly people were working from home full time, and seldom venturing out. Mask requirements became widespread. “Social distancing” began to be enforced in public places. Museums, libraries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, and sports arenas were shuttered. Schools shut down nearly everything but “remote learning” via home computer hookup. Transportation was curtailed. For criminal justice activists, the nightmare was compounded by the fact that justice, already meted out at a painfully slow pace, nearly came to a standstill while the virus spread like wildfire through such facilities as the Massachusetts Treatment Center — with its complements of the dangerous, the over punished, and the wrongfully convicted– and Ohio’s Grafton Correctional Institution, where Joseph Allen was being held.
During the 2020-’23 pandemic and beyond, all NCRJ Annual Meetings were held via conference call or the Zoom internet platform. The networking devices were useful at a time of forced immobility, but may have had a distancing effect that contributed to a sense that the NCRJ had reached a dead end.
At the 2021 Annual Meeting, the Board, still feeling we had not done enough, was reluctant to authorize a fund-raising letter. Bob felt a letter was important because of a major breakthrough in the Nancy Smith-Joseph Allen case. The New DA in Lorain, Ohio, believed in their innocence and was moving to have both Smith and Allen exonerated. Nancy Smith had already been freed amid controversy, but she would be vindicated. Joseph Allen had been wrongfully incarcerated twice for a total of 23 years. Because we had put so many resources into this case, Bob felt we needed to share the good news with our donors.
The Smith-Allen case owed a great deal to the machinations of a corrupt district attorney, a conniving mother, and American mass gullibility. Head Start bus driver Nancy Smith was accused of delivering busloads of preschoolers to a den of iniquity where they were raped, tortured, and otherwise befouled by the demonic Black man Joseph Allen. After these orgies, the children were supposedly cleaned up, dressed, put back on the bus, and brought to school on time, so that no one would ever suspect those youngsters had just been central to a lewd group romp of Lupercalian proportions. Joseph might never have been charged with anything if a purported victim had not been told by a helpful policeman which man to single out in a lineup. The resulting trial, at which Joseph and Nancy laid eyes on each other for the first time, was a mockery of justice. Nevertheless, both defendants were found guilty. Nancy was sentenced to 30 to 90 years behind bars; Joesph was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
They remained in prison until 2009, when Common Pleas Judge James Burge discovered a sentencing irregularity that reopened the case. They were set free pending a new trial. Joseph Allen traveled to Alabama to visit relatives, then came to Boston to visit other family members, Bob, Jim, and Frank Kane. Unfortunately, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned Burge’s rulings in 2013. Nancy pleaded guilty and was allowed to remain free. Joseph was sent back to prison with a reduced sentence of 10 to 25 years. Then, in 2021, J.D. Tomlinson, the new Lorain County (OH) Prosecutor, revisited the case. The charges were dismissed. Nancy and Joseph were at last free and clear, with an apology from the prosecutor and open sympathy from the presiding judge.
The NCRJ’s 2021 letter did go out, solidly grounded in the Smith-Allen case, but it was the last fund-raising effort made by the NCRJ. At the 2022 meeting, no Board member felt a fund-raising letter should be sent.
For the months that followed, the NCRJ, with the exception of Bob, was inactive. By June of 2023, it because clear to Bob that no further fund-raising would be done, and that the NCRJ probably had no future.
Bob convened an online meeting between himself and the three Advisors he felt had been most involved with the NCRJ: Dr. Carol Tavris, Dr. Leonore Tiefer, and Attorney Harvey Silverglate. The sense of the meeting was that the NCRJ should move towards dissolution. Bob informed the Board of this meeting.
At the October 17, 2023, Annual Meeting, the Board voted unanimously to dissolve the NCRJ, and asked Bob to begin filing the paperwork. Dissolving a public charity in Massachusetts is a long and complicated process that requires the distribution of remaining funds to another Massachusetts charity (we chose the New England Innocence Project) and the assent of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Assent was granted on 15 May 2024. NCRJ filed its final 990 with the IRS in January 2025. NCRJ was no more.
Conclusion
When the NCRJ was founded, Bob’s hope was that we would be instrumental in helping free at least one innocent prisoner. Given the enormous difficulty of overturning a conviction, success was by no means certain. Nevertheless, we played important roles in freeing a number of innocents, beginning with Bernard Baran.
Bob believes it is important that an organization have a primary purpose that is clearly enunciated and agreed upon. This primary purpose should be clearly declared – for example, upon its website. Bob believed that the primary purpose of the NCRJ was to help free the innocent.
But it was clear from the first Annual Meeting that some board members wanted more from the NCRJ. As one Board Member said, “ we should be doing more than mopping up the mistakes of the past.” We should be attacking the underlying cause of wrongful convictions of people harming children – the child sex abuse panic. In short, some felt NCRJ should be political. Tax-exempt charitable organizations can advocate, providing they stop short of supporting or opposing candidates for public office.
Bob had no problem with an expanded mission at the time since he shared these political goals. Chief among them were abolishing sex-offender registries and civil commitment for people convicted of sex offenses, ambiguous and draconian pornography laws, and sting operations on the internet.
Eventually, those advocating for NCRJ being political felt that NCRJ should take no new cases unless the case furthered the political goals of NCRJ. The upshot was that NCRJ stopped adding to its caseload since any Director could veto sponsorship of a proposed case.
The NCRJ had chosen a most difficult mission. Because the child sex panic permeates our culture, fighting institutions such as sex-offender registries and civil commitment is very difficult. We learned that many elected officials agreed with us privately, but they feared losing their jobs if they agreed publicly. Nevertheless, they helped in other ways, such as locking up bad bills in committee.
We were honest about what we were doing in our fund raising. Fortunately, we always had enough news to share about what we were doing about our existing cases to reassure our donors that our innocence work was still being done and was important.
The primary reason, however, that we ultimately failed was that we lacked the resources to accomplish the goals we had set for ourselves. We never had sufficient money. And our Board Members were very busy people who had demanding careers.
At Board meetings we made good plans. But we lacked the resources in money and time to carry them out. We became more and more discouraged. We felt we weren’t doing enough to justify fund raising. And without fund raising, we could not and did not survive.
Appendix
Our Cases
* Indicates case overturned.
Sponsored since 04/28/02. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Sponsored since 05/28/02. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Sponsored since 05/28/02. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Sponsored since 05/28/02. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle
Sponsored since 05/28/02. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Sponsored since 06/21/02. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Jorge Sanchez
Sponsored since 07/29/03. Brought to the Board by Dr. Philip Kaushall.
Sponsored since 07/29/03. Brought to the Board by Judith Levine.
Sponsored since 10/24/03. Brought to the Board by Robert Rosenthal.
Sponsored since 02/26/04. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Sponsored since 06/30/04. Motion to sponsor by Emily Horowitz.
Sponsored since 10/06/04. Brought to the Board by Debbie Nathan.
Sponsored since 11/18/04. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Supported since 12/14/04. Brought to the Board by .Debbie Nathan.
Sponsored since 02/23/05 Brought to the Board by Mark Pendergrast
Sponsored since 02/25/05. Brought to the Board by Bob Chatelle.
Sponsored since 03/31/05. Brought to the Board by Mark Pendergrast.
Sponsored since 05/20/07.Brought to the Board by Susan Gillis.
Sponsored since 05/29/07. Brought to the Board by Lynn Malcom
Sponsored since 06/27/07. Brought to the Board by Emily Horowitz.
Sponsored since 11/18/07. Brought to the Board by Harvey Silverglate.
Sponsored since 01/08/08. Brought to the Board by Andrea Petersen.
Sponsored since 12/05/08. Brought to the Board by Darrell Otto.
Sponsored since 05/20/11. Brought to the Board by Judith Levine.
Sponsored since 05/26/11. Brought to the Board by Anna James. Vetted by Marty Yant.
Supported since 05/14/13. Brought to the Board by Debbie Nathan,
Mandee Lee James
Sponsored since 06/28/13.Brought to the Board by Mark Pendergrast.