Inside prison, outside the law

On Aug. 25, a brilliant late summer morning, John Geoghan was posthumously sentenced to death on a Boston sidewalk by a jury of his peers. The defrocked priest and accused molester of 147 children had died two days earlier, strangled in his Massachusetts prison cell with his sock and shoelace. But for the small knot of passersby squinting at his picture through the glass of a newspaper box, his trial was just winding down.

"Good," hissed a mother, the toddler on her hip sucking a blinding green Popsicle. "What if he'd got out?"

The crowd stood for a moment in silence. "Got what was coming to him," an old man confirmed. For this jury, justice had been served.

But whose justice? Not the courts': Only three states - Louisiana, Florida, and Montana - allow death as a legal penalty for sex crimes. (Louisiana's law, the only one used in decades, is expected to soon be appealed to the US Supreme Court.) Massachusetts law forbids the death penalty altogether. Although Geoghan's case touched off the Boston priest abuse scandal and epitomized its most intimate violations, he had been found guilty at the time of his death in only one molestation case. His sentence was nine to 10 years.

Yet many Americans, not just those Bostonians by the newspaper box, reacted to news of Geoghan's murder with little more than a shrug. That reaction, prisoner advocates and ethicists argue, is dangerous because it tacitly accepts - even encourages - the ruthless system of inmate vigilante "justice" that may have motivated Geoghan's killer. It is also, they say, one of the main reasons such abuses are allowed to continue behind locked doors.

"I don't want to play Solomon," says Leslie Walker of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, who represented Geoghan in the months before his death and was the last one from her office to see him alive. "Can the guilt be spread around? Sure. Is the classification system that put a frail pedophile in a unit with a homophobic murderer responsible in some way for this death? Yes.

"Does society - do people on the outside who look the other way, who don't want to know that systematic abuse by inmates and by guards goes on inside US prisons every single day - do they have some responsibility, too?" she asks. "I think so. It's happening in our name and with our tax dollars."

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Every year, tens of thousands of inmates in state and federal custody are attacked. The exact number who die is difficult to determine: According to the nonprofit Criminal Justice Institute, in 2000, the most recent year for which figures have been compiled, 55 inmates were murdered, 39 died "accidentally," and 118 died for unknown reasons. The California nonprofit Stop Prisoner Rape estimates that 1 in 5 men is raped in custody. The group's cause got unprecedented recognition last week when President Bush signed into law national legislation supporting study of the issue.

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