The police found in LaGuer's apartment socks and shorts matching the victim's description.
LaGuer was staying next door to the victim during all times material to the investigation.
The victim said that LaGuer had attempted to access her apartment a few days previous to the assault, again placing the attacker in the apartment building on another occasion.
The victim repeatedly identified LaGuer as her attacker, both from non-suggestive photo lineups and later in person. One day after the vicious assault the victim said that she had been attacked by the dark man who she had seen using a key to the apartment next door to hers. Who was in that apartment? Ben LaGuer.
When the police first met LaGuer in the apartment he was wearing the exact same outfit as was described by the victim, gym shorts and mismatched colored striped athletic socks. Little things like this ring true. When one lounges at home they sometimes habitually wear similar outfits, hence Mrs. Kravitz's housecoat and curlers. The jury could well have inferred this conclusion about LaGuer.
When the police first met with LaGuer they found a long deep scratch on his back. He first stated that he had scratched it on a nail at a bar and then later at trial said that he had scratched it a week prior to the date of the assault on a splinter or nail on a picnic table. A little thing, but the truth is easy to remember as it really happened. A contrivance is much harder to consistently maintain.
He originally told the police he was home the whole night of the attack but at trial had three alibi witnesses testify that he was elsewhere at the time of the assault. The truth doesn't change but fairy tales do.
Blood found at the scene (type B) matched LaGuer's but his tampering with his saliva sample prevented this evidence from being heard by the jury.
Although not known at trial, but known to us now, his DNA is found in the pooled sperm sample collected from the victim.
This is just some of the evidence. I am not a LaGuer junkie but I know there are more facts than this that point to LaGuer's guilt. There are many people out there, unjustly accused, unjustly convicted, who warrant your help. This guy is just not deserving of your efforts and goodwill. Find someone who does.
John Hosty is the same guy who believes that police are never justified in breaking up a house party.
Hey John, tell uss about the strawberries now.
Certain persons here want to argue the merits of the case. The issue is the not the merits. The issue is, a new trial. And they are not willing to do either the legal research that will give them the points that are required to get the new trial, or, after having done their legal research, to have done the evidential research to support their desire for a new trial.
but Mr. Hosty wanted me to provide the facts upon which I place my conviction that LaGuer is guilty. He has tried for a new trial 8 times. He will keep on trying and will always have fresh marks on the outside to raise more $$$.
Creating points that win a new trial is best left to those who do so for a living, and that is not my business. I offer my arguments in the LaGuer case as a point of intellectual curiousity that we might wonder why we have all these discrepencies in a single case, any one of which might bring the public's eye were it not for the callus that people have developed for Ben LaGuer.
Move on if you want, I am not convinced he is guilty and I want to find people that wish to talk about it. It that too much for you to handle?
Your version of the truth is filled with inaccuracies, or outright lies if they are intentional. Anyone interested in the truth can take your post apart point for point. For example, you say:
The victim never metioned her assailant by name, and when Det. Carignan tried to imply she had, she corrected him.
The first officer on the scene reported the door as having been jimmied. He also reported as having seen the knife laying on a lamp table that the assailant threatened the victim with. Somehow neither of these clues make it into the prosecutor's version of what happened.
This is untrue. The police found gym socks that did not match the one that was left behind by the perpetrator. You do know that they have this in evidence, right?
The prosecutor's examination of the victim was so muddled that a sidebar was called right in the middle of it, and the judge even admitted he was confused as to what was being said. In the same testimony Mrs. Plante also said that she had only seen LaGuer one single time when he was entering his apartment. What she means when she speaks is a mystery because she was completely insane at the time of trial.
In 1983 everybody wore gym shorts and tube socks, it was summer for God's sake! I wore them around too, this is too common to mean anything.
If the victim had scratched her attacker, which she told police she did not, there would have been DNA evidence in her rape kit from under her fingernails. This absence flies in the face of this point and in my eyes disproves it.
Ben's witnesses are still bitter after 24 years about not getting their fair chance to testify to the facts correctly. If given a new trial it will be interesting to see what is said.
This is a lie. The blood once finally verifed was from the victim, and type “O”. The reason they had put that it was type “B” was because they took the information off his dog tags, and lied, saying they matched it forensically. The reason I can say this with surety is because Ben is not type “B”, it was a typo on his tags. Far be it from me to accuse that the State Police Crime Lab may have made an “error”.
There was no sperm found at all, which confounds the victims claims that she was raped intstead of beaten half to death and robbed. The DNA tests that were done took all samples and looked for a match to Ben LaGuer. Collectively they found .03 nanograms. 1 nanogram is the size of a piece of dust floating in the air. You'd have more DNA on your shirt from talking to someone for 5 minutes than there was on all the evidence put together, and remember he supposedly was raping her for 8 hours. There are several DNA experts who have put in writing that they think the DNA evidence was tainted, and the test botched. I'll take their word over an armchair expert any day.
I can see why you are so convinced now Joe, you are going off outdated information that is simply untrue. You really should try reading http://www.benlaguer…
We can agree to disagree. You prefer to think that an ambitious, young, bright kid who had never been in trouble his whole life and was just coming back from Germany suddenly visciously raped his elderly neighbor without motive. He is somehow so savy that he is able to fool the prison shrink into classifying him as not sexually dangerous, and stops just short of saying that they must have the wrong man.
I prefer to believe that the man who committed this crime was someone who was deeply disturbed, and had a history of sexual assault, even on members of his own family. I prefer to believe in the guilt of a man who has this type of motive over a man with no apparent motive.
The victim knew the latter well enough to allow him to sleep on her couch when his mother wouldn't let him in the apartment because he was drunk. Should we go into how he was arrested for rape after Ben LaGuer was imprisoned, or should we talk about his confession to a bartender on tow separate occasions? What's the chance this woman knew TWO RAPISTS who looked so similar one's own father couldn't tell them apart at a distance? That would be one HELL of a coinsidence, huh?
About any of that, EaBo? It's more fun to take potshots from the peanut gallery, for sure.
I mean gosh, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you got pwn3d.
This issue has been debated and talked about ad naseum. I've made my points. Basically John is tilting at windmills at this point. I give him credit for being determined but nothing is going to come of his efforts.
So no at this point after arguing the merits of this case it's time to move on, as your boy Soros would say.
…Mr. Hosty is LaGuer posting here under another handle. Isn’t there a LaGuer web site on which he could prattle on about this topic?
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He has made his points regarding the merits, and he doesn’t want to argue the legal issues regarding what is necessary to get LaGuer a new trial. It’s almost become comical.
At no point did the poster say that the woman called LaGuer by name. The poster mentioned what the assailant was wearing and that the victim said what the assailant was wearing. It was the poster that mentioned LaGuer's name. No refernce was made to the victim using Laguers name. So in the first few paragraphs John Hosty was way off base. Perhaps John needs reading for comprehension lessons?
Much like Kyledeb here and my “buddy” Asa at RMG, John is a one trick pony that doesn't want to hear differing viewpoints. Asa may be a bit more curt but the end result is the same.
P.S. Can you turn off the WYSIWYG as the default for replies and have “no format” be the default. All of the “fancy” HTML tricks I've learned don't work with the WYSIWYG.
Yes the story is somewhat complicated but not one of you mention a DA named John Conte who in thirty years never admitted to a false conviction.
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NEVER MIND CONTE’S secret filing cabinet in his office with the evidence to this case that he held and YES the evidence seal was broken ……..MY MY
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Anyway this is a clear case where Our Justice system failed EVERYONE……it is well past time to admit our failure.
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Bottom line if WORCESTER DA JOHN CONTE was held responsible for his actions none of us would have to wonder what happen in this case.
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As long as we spend our time banging at each other more corruption occurs in Massachusetts every day………
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This site needs to concentrate on making changes in Massachusetts we are over taxed, political patronage has ruined our state, our children are stolen by DSS for profit, all while insurance companies rob us blind.
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Just to mention a few directions some positive work could accomplish.
RegularJoe used the name LaGuer rather than assailant. I was making the case that she had said she did not know who attacked her, therefore the name should not have been used in this context. I am reading her testimony right now and it is very hard to follow because the prosecutor leads her so much. This is a fact that even the judge addresses.
I find it interesting that when RegularJoe is challenged to say something substantive about the LaGuer case he links to the Commonwealth brief. And where did he find the brief? At the BenLaGuer web site! If he is going to reference that he should at least mention or post a link to all the other filings in the recent phases of the case. If he wanted to cherry pick he could have just as easily gone to John Silber's 2003 statement to the parole board which still makes good reading. Not known as a bleeding heart Silber is still in LaGuer's corner and he questions the validity of the DNA test. (As Charley keeps pointing out, so do several highly qualified DNA experts.) If you take the time to read Silber's statement you'll know why he takes the position he does. If that is tilting at windmills, then so be it.
Questions raised on this blog about distinctions between factual innocence and whether or not LaGuer has a legal claim to a new trial are legitimate but not very illuminating given the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of a forum. But to argue his factual guilt by cherry picking the web site that bears his name is just plain intellectually dishonest and the hallmark of a troll.
The victim's eyewitness identification of LaGuer as her attacker is sufficient, by itself, to prove his guilt–if you believe her, as the jury obviously did. Because the evidence at trial was sufficient to prove guilt, I don't see how you can get away with focusing only on the facts and not on LaGuer's entitlement to a new trial. Leave aside for the moment supposed procedural problems with the trial (e.g., the racist juror issue), and leave aside the DNA test that, in the best case for LaGuer as I understand it, would be inconclusive. LaGuer needs to show why we should not believe the victim's testimony decades later when the jury that heard her did believe her. How can he do this?
1. By a challenge to the victim's competency to testify truthfully. LaGuer now points to DeMartino's proferred testimony about the victim's mental health. Even if DeMartino's story is correct, it is merely suggestive, not conclusive–the jury might still have believed the victim. “Well,” say LaGuer and his advocates, “the jury never got to hear DeMartino, did it? So how do we know what the jury would have decided?” And so we see that thinking about this issue forces us to think about whether there is anything wrong with the fact that the jury didn't hear DeMartino, or rather, whether there is anything sufficiently wrong with that fact that a new trial is warranted. As Raj and I have argued, it seems pretty clear that DeMartino, who was known to LaGuer's lawyers at the time of the trial but who was not called as a witness, can justify a new trial now on grounds of “newly discovered evidence.”
2. By proof of an alibi or some other fact that would have made it impossible for LaGuer to have committed the crime, regardless of the victim's testimony. LaGuer tried to prove an alibi at trial and failed. I haven't heard of another attempt. Pointing to his good character and lack of a criminal history prior to this crime, as John likes to do, doesn't cut it. John writes that the alibi witnesses didn't “get a fair chance to testify to the facts correctly.” I'm not sure what this means, but again, it points to a potential problem with the trial and forces us to ask whether the trial was sufficiently flawed that a new trial should be granted.
3. By someone else's highly credible confession. Not terribly likely. In another thread, John has argued that a man named Jose Gomez confessed to the crime, but even “Speaking Out” admits, I think, that the witnesses to the supposed confession is nowhere to be found.
Maybe there are other possibilities? In any case, it seems to me that there's no purpose to talking about LaGuer's actual factual guilt or innocence given (1) that none of us know or can know the truth of the matter; and (2) that the evidence at trial was clearly sufficient if believed to convict him.
TedF
…it has become clear that Hosty and speakout want to argue the merits of the case, and not adduce the evidence required for a new trial. It is clear that it is a waste of time dealing with them, because all that they are doing is arguing one side of a case that was adjudicated in front of a jury 20 years ago and apparently affirmed on appeal many times thereafter.
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I sometimes click onto these threads just to watch them flail about. But they don’t even want to start arguing the legal issues that might get LaGuer out of jail. I guess computer storage for this website is cheap, considering the amount of space that has been taken on the “wash, rinse, repeat” effort by Hosty and speakout.
supporting my position were found in the prosecutor's brief. I have implored those snowed by folks like you to read the other side. If that makes me a troll so be it.