Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Benjamin LaGuer’s New Legal Team

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For some reason the embed function isn’t working. Click here to see the NECN segment with LaGuer’s new team.

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  1. They mentioned that this retired judge, now working for LaGuer, helped to overturn the Fells Acre Day Care verdicts.  It will be interesting to see whether they get anywhere this time.

    • were not overturned.  Violet was released after she agreed not to attack her conviction.  Gerald received parole or a commutation I believe.

      • Braude said something about the judge working on behalf of the Amiraults and either he misspoke or (more likely) I misheard.

  2. his appeal denials, probation denials, and even upholding of his conviction by the SJC might be because….he’s a rapist?

    • LaGuer is the victim. . . .  the system is guilty.  I have followed the LaGuer case since the beginning.  There was very strong evidence pointing to his guilt.  The revisionists have been hard at work for about two decades now but will not succeed.  His best shot was last year when Attorney Rehnquist was duped into representing him.  This guy has received hundreds of thousands in free representation to no avail.  The guy was found guilty of the most heinous sexual assault on a profoundly disabled woman.  Those tilting at this windmill should be ashamed.

        • LaGuer is the one who pushed for the testing.  When it pointed to him as the predatory rapist he then attacks the testing due to contamination.  The DNA evidence did not convict him, it was not even available at trial time.

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          p>When the innocence project moves for DNA testing they advise the client that the test can either exonerate them or implicate them.  LaGuer rolled the dice and was further implicated. The result was no new trial, not a conviction.  Get the facts right and take back the night.

      • Knife used by assailant to threaten victim seen by Lt. Hebert on table, not submitted into evidence.

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        p>Phone with four fingerprints proven not to be LaGuers, lost.

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        p>Fingerprints, lost.

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        p>The sock found at the crime scene belonging to the assailant, lost.

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        p>The pepsi can he drnak out of with a partial fingerprint, lost.

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        p>The collected garments from LaGuer’s home that had nothing to do with the crime are now showing up as “found at the crime scene”.

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        p>The more likely suspect, the one with a history of sexually assualting members of his own family knew the victim and used to stay on her couch when his mother locked him out of the house for drinking. He ended up being arrested after Laguer was already in jail. For what? Rape. He also confessed to a bartender that he was the one who committed the crime against Plante (the victim).

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        p>LaGuer was convicted by an all white all male jury with the only piece of evidence being the testimony of the victim and her ability to identify him. She was insane and never should have been allowed to testify since she thought all dark skinned males were the one who did it.

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        p>Yup, this was an air tight case… lol!

        • John, I’m interested to know your ideas about what the new defense team is going to do. As I have said here, and as alluded to here, I think they are going to say that the DNA evidence contradicts the victim’s story that she was raped. (I think that is a poor idea, for reasons given here and elsewhere in the older threads). But your comment focuses on Gomez, suggesting that you continue to believe that the victim was raped and that the issue in the case is just one of misidentification. I believe you still serve as co-chair of the Free Ben LaGuer Committee, so maybe you have some insight into what theory we are going to see pursued?

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          p>TedF

          • I wish I could be more help in the matter, but I no longer help with the campaign like I had in the past. I suffered a severe attack of “LaGuer fatigue” and have been sitting it out on the sidelines. People sometimes need to distance themselves from this outrageousness to protect their own sanity. If LaGuer’s supporters are correct in his innocence this case is worth grieving over.

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            p>My conscience won’t let me leave this issue, but my health and ability to conduct myself in business dictate that I take care of my own business before helping others.

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            p>My experience tells me that con artists are good at fooling people because they practiced. LaGuer has no criminal record to provide us with any reason to believe he simply turned “mad dog” and committed a chilling crime out of the blue. We can make that leap of faith or we could simply listen to the facts and piece together the fact that someone who used to sleep in her house was known for violence against women. Someone who admitted he did it to his bartender.

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            p>The lack of physical evdidence to support a rape charge has always been a point of contention, I think you are just hearing it from a new person who may have made it an emphasis.

            <

            p>Honestly, even if LaGuer was guilty I would still want to see a new trial on the basis of how many proceedural blunders were committed throughout the case by police and prosecutors. If the state’s case is as strong as they claim let them defeat him in court under fair conditions with a mixed jury. Then we can be done with this once and for all without the egg on our face from how outrageous this case has become.  

  3. I watched the clip. Mr. LaGuer’s new lawyers don’t come right out and say it, but I think their defense is going to be that the victim was never raped: the only new thing I heard on the clip was the claim that the absence of any male DNA in the “rape kit” casts doubts on the fundamentals of the victim’s story, i.e. (I think), she wasn’t raped.

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    p>This point was discussed here at BMG nearly two years ago, and at that time, Mr. LaGuer’s foremost defender on the site, Speaking Out, declined to take a position on it.  Indeed, I thought the position at the time was not that the victim hadn’t been raped, but that another man, Gomez, was the rapist. So which is it?

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    p>TedF

    • No, that’s not what they’re claiming, Ted. One of the lawyers specifically says “this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an offense.”

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      p>The DNA evidence criticism is not new news. Four testimonies from DNA experts have said the 2002 test was bunk. They do not seem like crackpots to me: One is a Harvard biology professor; the others are forensic experts from reputable schools.

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      p>From Prof. Hartl of Harvard:

      Dear Representative Story:
      I have examined the material you provided to me in the case of Ben LaGuer. I do not have anything much to add to the reports prepared by Dean A. Wideman and Theodore D. Kessis. Having examined these reports, I can join in agreement with their concerns that the DNA evidence in this case was very possibly tainted. The evidence in this case was collected at a time when standards for the handling of material for DNA typing was poor or nonexistent. The possibilities for mistakes were so serious that my colleague Dr. Lewontin and I were motivated to write a controversial article emphasizing the potential for errors, whether through acquisition and handling of the material or through misuse of statistics in interpreting the DNA types. (Lewontin, R. C. and D. L. Hartl, 1991 Population genetics in forensic DNA typing.  Science 254: 1745-1750.)

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      p>etc.

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      p>Their letters can be downloaded here.

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      p>We have gone around this mulberry bush on the blog before. I do not understand, and have never understood, why these letters seem to cause so little concern about the case among legal folks. I find your faith in the legal process that led to his conviction to be touching, but quaint.

      • I think that’s exactly what they’re saying, though they are too smart to say it explicitly.

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        p>

        The DNA evidence yielded a rather surprising conclusion, and something that I don’t think a lot of people have heard about.

        Meaning what?

        Which is that when the DNA expert examined samples from what we would now call a rape kit, taken directly from the victim’s body, they yielded no male DNA. Nothing from Ben LaGuer, nothing from anybody else. Which calls into question the fundamental account of this offense.

        Well, you’re not saying there was no offense?

        We’re certainly not saying that there was no offense, but we are saying that the physical evidence that we now see in the form of DNA evidence is fundamentally inconsistent with the account that the victim gave at the time of the trial.

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        p>The reason I don’t think the 2002 DNA tests matter much if at all is that even if what LaGuer says about them is true, that fact does not exonerate him. But as you say, this has all been hashed out before.

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        p>TedF

      • The trial had no dna evidence Charley.  You are a smart guy and know this and yet you create a false reality much like Gerry Callahan does every weekday morning.  Strange bedfellows I must say.

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        p>Accornding to the commonwealth brief that once was on LaGuer’s website the evidence at trial established:

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        p>The victim in this case told the police that LaGuer was wearing shorts and athletic socks with mismatched colored stripes but no shoes.  The jury could conclude from this that the attacker did not need shoes to get to the property and therefore lived in the same building.

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        p>The victim was attacked at night at approximately nine o’clock pm but that attacker took the keys out of the victim’s door earlier that afternoon.  Again, this allows the jury to conclude that the attacker lived in the building or had ready access to it.

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        p>The police found in LaGuer’s apartment socks and shorts matching the victim’s description.  

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        p>LaGuer was staying next door to the victim during all times material to the investigation.

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        p>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.

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        p>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.  

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        p>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.

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        p>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.

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        p>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.  

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        p>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.

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        p>Although not known at trial, but known to us now, his DNA is found in the pooled sperm sample collected from the victim.  

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        p>The long and short of all this is that this man is as guilty as Cain.  

          • From wiki:

            Advocate weeklies offer investigative journalism, national, state and local political coverage, commentary, and arts features and criticism, mostly from a liberal or countercultural point of view. They share some editorial content, but each has regionally focused news and opinion pieces, restaurant reviews, event listings, and advertisements. The newspapers have annual “Best Of” write-in contests, and subsequent issues that feature the winning businesses.

            The Advocates accept a wider variety of advertisements than mainstream newspapers, including ads for strip clubs, erotic massage services, adult book and video stores, etc., which columnists and readers have argued conflict with the newspapers’ avowed feminism.

          • …finality is important in this case. The victim is dead, and memories are faded by the passage of many years. The test cannot be whether the government could prove, today, that LaGuer is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The test is (speaking generally and roughly) whether LaGuer had a fair trial. As pointed out here, the issue of the victim’s history of mental illness was litigated in the original trial, and LaGuer, it seems, had the opportunity to call DiMartino, the woman who claims the victim identified all dark-skinned men as her attacker, but he chose not to do so for reasons known only to him and his lawyer.

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            p>TedF

          • Just look at his lies, his falsifying of evidence (saliva sample), the fact that he dressed as the attacker dressed, that he lived next door to the victim, that he said he was there and then said he wasn’t, the presence of a physical injury consistent with his being the assailant. He had the means and opportunity to commit this crime. Hell, he did commit the crime. I could go on and on but talking to you is like talking to my children, it doesn’t matter what I say because your mind is closed to reason.

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            p>By the way, your refuge in the fact that “the victim was mentally ill” is so scurrilous as to be beneath contempt.  You create the DNA smokescreen and when it is blown away you resort to attacking the now dead victim one more time.  I don’t know what you see in Mr. LaGuer, I guess you see a little bit of yourself.  Atta boy.  You are quite a guy.  Oh how I wish that you were Charley on the MTA and that you never returned.

            • Your first paragraph is a strong argument until the end.  But comparing Charley to a man that you (and I) believe is a rapist (“I don’t know what you see in Mr. LaGuer, I guess you see a little bit of yourself.”) is beneath contempt.

              • the fact that he went so low as to attack a dead woman warranted my comment in my opinion.  

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                p>People like you are what is wrong with the world.  Its okay to attack a dead woman’s reputation but it is not okay to comment on the motives of the attacker.  Charley raised the bogus DNA defense and when it is blown away he attacks the victim and when he is called out on that tactic his toadies scurry to protect him.  Peas in a pod.

                • I didn’t object to your point, I objected to the fact that you compared somebody to a rapist because the two of you don’t agree.

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                  p>If you would get off your high horse on occasion, you’d realize from my comment that I agree with you, and disagree with Charley.

                • so comparing him to someone in the gulag could be viewed by him to be a complement.  BTW, my horse is a teetotaler and has never been high.

      • It wasn’t available at trial, wasn’t used at trial.  It was done later, and came out, at least on paper, the wrong way for the defendant.  Now it seems like the test was lousy, so, at best, it is as if there were no DNA evidence.  The DNA tests are 100% not relevant.

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        p>There was some other evidentiary issue at the trial, but that has already been the subject of a failed appeal.

  4. on the one hand, with all that implies, AND as someone who worked for the Department of Correction for many years with first-hand daily (and lengthy) contact with felons serving long and serious sentences, I have to say I’m skeptical.  

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    p>I’ve spend a lot of time with cons, and I’ve seen every play in the book.  I have a very hard time accepting the idea that the system is so invested in keeping LaGuer in jail just because, what?, he’s Ben LaGuer?  I’ve had incredibly charismatic guys tell me to my face that they didn’t do it, that it was a conspiracy, that they’re innocent so many times I’ve lost count.  And guess what?  They’re not.

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    p>My gut is not sympathetic, given all the rigor this case has endured.   I’m sorry, I guess that makes me an epic fail as a liberal or as a socially concerned activist, but it is what it is.  It’s just too much.  

    • I don’t understand why being a liberal means that you must take every convicted rapist to be innocent.  There are many innocents in prison who deserve our help and our empathy but LaGuer has had 8 stabs at this and each time he has been rebuffed.  It is time for people to find another cause.  Keep your chin up Iris, you are a good liberal, don’t let other people get you down.

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