Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift should be tarred and feathered and run out of the state. She refused the unanimous recommendation of the Governor's Board of Pardons to free an innocent man, because she is afraid of a political backlash in her re-election campaign.

Aren't the people in Massachusetts lucky to have a governor who refuses to allow basic issues of justice to get in the way of narrow calculations of her self-interest? Politicians are fakes, but isn't Ms. Swift laying it on too thick? How can we even pretend to respect public officials when Gov. Swift intentionally keeps an innocent man in jail simply because she is afraid to offend the evil people who framed him?

In the lead editorial on February 21, the Wall Street Journal gave Gov. Jane Swift the contempt she has earned: "She joins the long line of the ambitious and the self seeking, prosecutors and politicians, who chose expediency over justice." [Send email to Governor Swift at [email protected], for snail mail, etc, see Massachusetts Governor - Contact Information.]

Massachusetts has Harvard, M.I.T., and lots of liberals. With liberal credentials all about them, people in the state think of themselves as sophisticated. But the truth is that when it comes to justice and frame-ups, Massachusetts has made no progress since the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century.

Gerald Amirault was framed along with his sister and mother 16 years ago on fabricated child sex abuse charges by an ambitious prosecutor who used the name recognition he gained to run successfully for attorney general and unsuccessfully for governor. Among other unbelievable and absurd charges, he accused the Amiraults of raping children in their day care center with butcher knives.

Everyone who has read the charges on which the Amiraults were convicted recognizes that the charges are far less believable than the accusations at the Salem Witch Trials three centuries earlier. Massachusetts might have some sophisticated people, but none of them were on the jury.

State judges finally pried Amirault's sister and mother (now deceased) from the clenched claws of Massachusetts' despicable prosecutors, who go to far greater lengths to keep innocent people in jail (so as not to have to admit a mistake) than to put guilty ones there.

The Amiraults were victims, along with many other day care providers, of the 1980s child sex abuse witch hunts set in motion by "child advocates" and ambitious prosecutors looking for high profile cases.

There were many cases of wrongful conviction—all now overturned except for Gerald Amirault.

The child abuse witch hunts continued into the 1990s. In a last hurrah, witch hunters managed in Wenatchee, Washington, to put 26 innocent parents in prison and to sell their children into foster-care or adoption. But the citizens of Washington State proved to be far more sophisticated than the befuddled souls in Massachusetts.

The bizarre allegations and obvious police and prosecutorial misbehavior brought investigative reporters and innocent project law professors down on the Wenatchee injustice system like a ton of bricks. Every single conviction and coerced plea bargain has been overturned. All the wrongfully convicted are free.

What remains to be accomplished in Wenatchee is to indict and put on trial the Child Protective Service officials, police, prosecutors, and judges who participated in the intentional frame-ups of innocent people. Whatever the crime rate in Wenatchee, it doesn't approach the crime rate in the city's "justice" system.

Perhaps the indifference to justice in Massachusetts merely reflects the dogma in politically correct university towns that there is no such thing as justice—just class justice, race justice, gender justice, transgender justice, lesbian justice. Gerald Amirault isn't guilty of child abuse, but he is guilty of being a "hegemonic white male." It's just as well to have him in prison. That's where all hegemonic white males belong, or so teach the cultural Marxists, who are over-represented in the Massachusetts educational establishment.

Jane Swift's re-election campaign will be a test of Massachusetts' citizens. Will voters re-elect Gov. Jane Swift, a person whose name is synonymous with cowardice and an utter lack of integrity?

Paul Craig Roberts is the author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

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