Hi X,
I love the way you said this, and boy do I agree:
But wishing brutality on another person turns you into the thing you wish to punish.
And here's something interesting to chew on, from today's NYT. The concept of priestly and psychiatric confidentiality is close to my heart:
July 17, 2001
In Court, a Priest Reveals a Secret He Carried
for 12 Years
By JIM DWYER
n a winter afternoon in 1989, a Jesuit priest
named Joseph Towle was called to the home
of a teenager in the Hunts Point section of the South
Bronx. Jesus Fornes, a young man Father Towle
had guided toward his first communion, had
something awful to tell the priest: he had killed a
man in Kelly Park.
For years after, Father Towle said yesterday, he
was haunted by that conversation, and by a secret
he felt he had to keep.
Mr. Fornes, the priest said, had told him something else: two other boys in the
neighborhood, who had had nothing to do with the killing, had been convicted of the
crime. On that winter afternoon, they were a few days away from being sentenced
to prison for a murder.
Yesterday, in a collision of sacred and secular obligations, Father Towle went to
court and testified about his conversation with Mr. Fornes, who died in 1997.
Before he stepped onto the witness stand, the Roman Catholic priest's credibility
was attacked by Bronx prosecutors, who said Father Towle would be violating
church law by disclosing the conversation. The Archdiocese of New York,
however, backed Father Towle yesterday and said his actions were appropriate.
The priest said he was trying do what Mr. Fornes would have wanted. Asked if Mr.
Fornes had intended for him to keep the information a secret, Father Towle, 65,
said, "I don't think he would ever expect me to do anything to his detriment or
anything that would be harmful to him."
From his work on the streets of the parish of St. Athanasius, Father Towle said, he
met many young people in trouble. "He was asking me what he should do," Father
Towle said of Mr. Fornes. "I told him that if he had the courage and the heart to do
it, that he should go to the court and that he should acknowledge that he was
responsible and the others were not."
On the day the other men were to be sentenced in 1989, Mr. Fornes did go to
court, and poured his story of remorse and guilt to a lawyer for one of the young
men, but it came too late: both men, Jose Morales and Ruben Montalvo, were
sentenced to a minimum of 15 years. The courts in New York State have rejected
their appeals. Mr. Fornes's direct testimony was never heard by a jury.
Father Towle's testimony, however, is a new development, and it is now being in
heard in federal court. The priest said that after Mr. Fornes was killed in Upper
Manhattan in 1997, he got in touch with the two young men in prison, and realized
that he might be able to help them gain their freedom.
He began to reconsider the nature of his meeting with Mr. Fornes eight years earlier,
and he wondered as he went about his life running a small middle school if he might
be able to share his secret.
Eventually, he submitted an affidavit that became part of a habeas corpus petition
now pending before Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan
thatsays the convictions of the men were constitutionally flawed.
In papers filed with the court, Allen P. W. Karen, an assistant district attorney,
argued that the statement made by Mr. Fornes to Father Towle would be
inadmissible as a matter of law and impermissible under church teaching. "Had
Reverend Towle consulted the New York Archdiocese, he would not have been
permitted to reveal this information," Mr. Karen wrote.
A spokesman for the archdiocese said last night that Father Towle had in fact
cleared his court appearance. "Father Towle, given the circumstances as we
understand it, was not violating any church law by testifying," said Joseph G.
Zwilling, the archdiocese's spokesman. "It was not a sacramental confession, in
which confidentiality would be absolute."
The situation was extremely unusual, Mr. Zwilling added. "In my 19 years with the
archdiocese, this is the first time I've heard of the circumstance like this," he said.
Father Towle went to some pains yesterday to revisit the circumstances of his
meeting with Mr. Fornes.
"What did you understand Mr. Fornes to be doing?" Judge Chin asked. "He asked
you to come to his home. Was he confessing, was he having a heart-to-heart talk
with you?"
Father Towle replied: "I am very careful about the use of the word `confession'; that
can be used in many different ways. It was a heart- to-heart talk where he was
feeling very badly that two of his friends had been accused and convicted of
something which he had done and it was his desire to do something to make the
truth appear."
The priest said confession was a matter between a "person and God," with the priest
acting as an intermediary. Such confidences could never be revealed, Father Towle
said. "Formal confession is when a person comes and confesses his sins with no
public purpose," he said. "He came to me precisely with a public purpose. From the
beginning, it had that intention."
Nevertheless, Father Towle said, he granted Mr. Fornes absolution for his sins at
the end of their meeting. "It was kind of tacked on," he said.
By the end of the day, the secular credibility of Father Towle's account was backed
by another source who also enjoyed a special relationship of confidentiality with Mr.
Fornes: his former lawyer, Stanley Cohen.
Back in 1989, Mr. Fornes went to the Bronx office of the Legal Aid Society and
was assigned to Mr. Cohen, who was then working as a Legal Aid lawyer.
Mr. Fornes "was very clear he had committed murder and these other men had not,"
Mr. Cohen testified. "He said, `I'm here because I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't live
with myself.' "
Unlike the priest, however, Mr. Cohen said he had advised his young client to keep
quiet. "He was going to throw his whole life away by going to court and saying he
did it," he said, adding that he felt free to testify about their confidential discussions
now that Mr. Fornes was dead.
The case arose from the murder of Jose Antonio Rivera on Sept. 28, 1987. He was
surrounded by a group of young men with whom he had an ongoing dispute. He was
stabbed and hit with a baseball bat. Mr. Morales and Mr. Montalvo were identified
by Mr. Rivera's companion, who had spent the hours before the murder drinking at
a bar. Their convictions rested largely on her testimony.
It was after the guilty verdict but before the sentencing that Mr. Fornes contacted
Father Towle and told him that Mr. Montalvo and Mr. Morales had not been
involved.
Now, Mr. Morales, 31, and Mr. Montalvo, 30, are being represented by Randa
Maher and Jeffrey Pittell.
Normally, the courts require direct testimony from witnesses and allow it to be
related by a second party — like Father Towle — only in exceptional
circumstances. Mr. Fornes's statement would have to qualify as "a declaration
against penal interests" for Father Towle's account of it to be admitted into court.
That means, basically, that Mr. Fornes knew he faced legal peril by talking to the
priest.
Judge Chin said Mr. Fornes probably did not expect that Father Towle would
reveal his words. "On the other hand, why would he lie to the priest?" Judge Chin
asked.
The judge said he would make his decision within two weeks. |
