THE JOURNAL INQUIRER August 13, 2007

A MERE CONTRIVANCE?

A Response to Chris Powell’s Article, “Connecticut’s Weird Priorities; and Goodbye Lapointe” (08/04/07)

By Kate Germond, An Investigator With Centurion Ministries

Working to free an innocent man without the gift of a DNA potential for exoneration is grueling and exhausting work. For an August 4th editorial in the newspaper that covered the Lapointe habeas hearing reduce this formidable endeavor to a “mere contrivance’ is insulting and shows a remarkable lack of knowledge of what was attempted and what happened at the hearing.

As you lay out so deftly in the first paragraph, this is primarily a confession case. And despite the fact that, I believe a truly impartial analyst would conclude the confessions were at best false and at worst highly suspect. However, the public at large including judges and jurors have a very difficult time believing that an innocent person would confess to a crime they had nothing to do with. This despite the countless DNA exoneration cases where that is exactly what had happened.

Your editorial is somewhat schizophrenic. You cheapen our efforts to free Mr. Lapointe and yet you seem to get that a wrong occurred. And even why it occurred. Mr. Lapointe was no match for a ambitious newly minted interrogator who knew exactly who he had in his sights. The shock isn’t that they got a confession, rather how long it took to get the preposterous statements. And then that the police and prosecutors and the courts embraced them and continue to this day.

The starkness of the taped interrogation of Karen Lapointe by one of Mr. Lapointe’s interrogators was breathtaking in its raw emotion. Listening for two hours to a detective harshly grilling a woman who was clearly confused by the tone and questions, was mesmerizing and terrible. She was clearly answering to the best of her ability, while being threatened with incarceration and the loss of their son, questions about her husband’s whereabouts on the night of the murder of her Grandmother. Despite the threats she consistently maintained what she had stated the day after the crime, that her husband was home with her the night of the crime. This was no “mere contrivance”. This was authentic raw courtroom drama that we presented.

What happened at the hearing was an attempt at putting a time frame on the arson, a very key element in the crime. Another element was to figure out when the victim died from the horrible events that were visited on her. And finally to present to the judge what wasn’t done by Mr. Lapointe’s lawyers at his trial and habeas hearings that could have led to a different jury verdict. This was no smoke screen. These were vital issues discussed at this hearing, under very strained conditions.

And by the way Mr. Lapointe’s defense team is not “underwritten by a group of supporters involved with the mentally impaired and false confession issue”. It is supported entirely by Centurion Ministries a small organization in Princeton New Jersey whose sole mission since 1983 is to free the wrongly convicted, whatever the elements of the case. No other agenda. No one has ever described our efforts before as a “mere contrivance”.

Kate Germond, Princeton, NJ