On 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. [...] 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.
This would be a critical problem with the seal of the confessional, yes. Something which allows a man to knowingly let the innocent pay for the crimes of the guilty when he could do something about it ...
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.
And this would be a problem with prosecutors who favor convictions over the truth. Granted that the truth in this case is difficult, at best.
One wonders what the good father would have done had New York had the death penalty. What he would have done had the murderer lived longer. Granted that he advised the murderer to come forward, he still knew that the lives of these innocent men were being destroyed and he did nothing else. And if, as the priest insists, it was not a formal confession, then he has no excuse for ever keeping the secret. He was not bound by the seal of the confession if there was no confession. He certainly has no reason for keeping the secret for four years after the man died. (And a side issue: if, as he insists, it was no true confession, he has opened himself to a charge of obstruction of justice. His "role as a counselor" does not protect him from the dictates of the law in the way that the confessional does.)
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. [...] 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.
And that lawyer should be strung up by his balls; regardless of the result, I hope he loses his license to practice in any state -- at the very least, it should be suspended for the length of time those two men have served, combined, which would be 26 years or thereabouts. Because he didn't want his client to throw away his life, he threw away the lives of two other men who never once harmed him. He
effectively suborned perjury -- to be sure, the guilty man never testified, but by advising him not to come forward, the lawyer was guilty of concealing material evidence and witnesses, and of obstruction of justice.
Towle's testimony yesterday was key to the appeal because it added credibility to other people who testified that Fornes had named himself, Peter Ramirez and Carlos Ocasio as the killers, and had exonerated Morales and Montalvo. One of those people to testify was Anthony Servino, a Morales lawyer and former Westchester County prosecutor. Servino testified yesterday that -- apparently after he met with Towle -- Fornes came to see him in January 1989 on the day that Morales and Montalvo were to be sentenced and confessed to the slaying. "He kept saying, 'I did the crime, I'll do the time,'" Servino said. "He said it wasn't right that they were convicted." Servino said he filed a motion to set aside the guilty verdict. But Fornes obtained a lawyer, Stanley Cohen. In a subsequent hearing, he invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify. So Servino took the stand and testified to what Fornes had told him.
And, of course, in the face of all this, prosecutors continue to argue that the sentence should stand. It will ruin their conviction rate. They can't punish the man who confessed to the crime, so someone should be in prison. Despite several people attesting to it, there's no proof that he confessed. And so on, and so on.
Fr. Towle will, of course, be absolved of his sins against those men by his superior confessors -- probably has been already. One wonders how those men will feel, should they ever get out of prison.
There is a great deal wrong with our system. It's biased against the poor, allows all sorts of extraneous prejudice, privileges process above the truth at times. But it's all we've got, and whatever its flaws, it's got no chance of working if people withhold relevant information for no good cause.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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