Good News for a Change: The Bernard Baran Case is Over!

The Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle reports today that Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless held a press conference at 11 am, at which he announced that he will not appeal the court of appeals ruling and will not attempt to re-try Bernard Baran, which means the case is finally over.

Baran was convicted in 1985 in a blatantly unfair trial of having molested a bunch of little boys and girls at a day care center where he was working.  Baran, an openly gay man, was apparently "set-up" for this prosecution by a hysterical family that may have been trying to cover its own tracks on the issue of child abuse, and the local prosecutor, Daniel Ford, jumped into the thing with glee, riding the resultant publicity to election to the Superior Court bench.  Baran, serving a life sentence, continued to proclaim his innocence, but he served 21 years until a group of intrepid supporters raised the money necessary for a proper investigation of the case, which resulted in a ruling in 2006 by Superior Court Judge Francis Fecteau that Baran's conviction had to be vacated due to the incompetent legal representation he had received. 

Probably in deference to the original prosecutor, who as noted above is now a sitting trial judge, Fecteau fought shy of finding that there was prosecutorial misconduct in the case, and didn't even address the issue that Baran was deprived of a public trial -- a right guaranteed in the federal Bill of Rights in criminal cases -- when the judge excluded the public and press from the courtroom during the testimony of the alleged child victims (many of whom, by the way, have long since recanted their stories of molestation).  Apparently seeking to vindicate his predecessor's actions, or perhaps to win favor with Judge Ford, the current D.A. appealed Fecteau's ruling, only to run into a real buzz-saw at the court of appeals, where Judge Lenk not only affirmed Fecteau's ruling on incompetent representation, but found the "public trial" violation by itself would be sufficient to reverse the conviction and that, although Judge Fecteau did not make the necessary findings in his opinion to support a conclusion to this effect, the trial record suggested prosecutorial misconduct as well.

If Massachusetts has an adequately functioning system of prosecutorial and judicial ethical oversight, somebody about now should be launching an investigation into the ethics of Judge Ford, and somebody in the state government should be figuring out some suitable compensation to Mr. Baran for wrongfully taking 21 years of his life, putting him into a state prison system where he suffered physical abuse and deprived him of his young adulthood.  The state bears some responsibility here.  Who wiill take up this issue now that Baran is vindicated and freed?

Comments

[Sue Katz]

Thanks for this. I bet his innocence gets a tiny fraction of the coverage his trumped-up "crimes" got.