Today, Brian McGrory’s column is about what a reprobate he thinks incoming Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis is. Why? Because Davis still won’t admit that he screwed up in the case of Dennis Maher, who was exonerated through DNA evidence after serving 19 years in Massachusetts prison for rapes he didn’t commit.
Obviously, Davis should apologize.
My point, however, is that McGrory seems to have missed the connection between Maher’s case and that of Ben LaGuer, as to which McGrory enjoys saying that Deval Patrick showed “fundamentally bad judgment.” So let me spell it out, Brian: before you do the DNA test, you don’t know what the result is going to be. It’s this remarkable feature of our universe having to do with the arrow of time, and other immutables.
We’ve been over this again and again, but the McGrorys of the world don’t seem to get it. Before LaGuer’s DNA test, there were good reasons to think he was innocent. That’s why he had lined up as big a cadre of supporters as he had, and why folks like Deval Patrick were willing to underwrite a DNA test. They thought that LaGuer would end up like Dennis Maher: walking into a courtroom, DNA results in hand, on his way to exoneration.
As we know, it didn’t work out that way for LaGuer. But again, the whole point of DNA testing is to figure out whether or not you’ve got the right guy in prison. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. If you do, it doesn’t mean that the folks raising the questions were wrong to do so. Doesn’t McGrory get that? It’s not that complicated.
