SJC MULLS BLOCKING CHAPMAN’S RELEASE
In the closely watched case of serial child rapist Wayne W. Chapman, the state’s highest court continues to weigh a request by one of his victims for an emergency decision blocking his release.
In a memo to the Supreme Judicial Court, Wendy Murphy, the attorney for the male victim and three other petitioners, said the reports of two psychologists appointed by the company Forensic Health Services are insufficient to justify his release because they constitute a “delegation of state authority to private, for-profit decisionmaking without any public oversight or accountability.”
Chapman, a child rapist convicted in three states and a suspect in the 1976 disappearance of a 10-year-old Lawrence boy, was sentenced in 1977 to 15 to 30 years in prison for raping two Lawrence boys. After he completed his sentence in 2007, he was civilly committed as a sexually dangerous person.
Murphy called the decision to release Chapman “absurd” and noted that the psychologists, Gregg A. Belle and Katrin Rouse Weir, each met with the 70-year-old for only one hour before concluding he no longer posed a threat, and their reports remained sealed at the time the state Department of Correction notified his victims that his release could occur as soon as the following day.
In the commonwealth’s response to Murphy’s petition, attorney Mary P. Murray said the state shared the victims’ concerns about Chapman, noting that three juries and the Department of Correction had opposed Chapman’s release in 2009, 2012 and 2016, each time he sought it. Three psychologists from the Community Access Board also think he remains sexually dangerous, Murray said.
But Chapman’s attorney, Eric Tennen, argued that as soon as a place can be found to accommodate his client’s unspecified “medical issues,” he is entitled to be released because Belle and Rouse Weir found him to no longer pose a threat.
Tennen argued that Murphy’s clients lack the right to intervene “because the harm they claim stems from an alleged lack of notice. But Chapman has no duty to provide notice; only the commonwealth does.”
“Additionally, no statute or regulation gives any crime victim an expressed or implied private right of action to sue or intervene in the discharge proceedings of an individual,” he said. “If the Legislature intended the extraordinary relief petitioners claim, it would not have omitted this power from the list of victims’ rights.”
Brendan Moss, a spokesman for Gov. Charlie Baker, said the governor intends to file legislation of his own to prevent cases like Chapman’s.
“The administration does not support the release of Mr. Chapman,” Moss said in a statement, “and plans to file legislation to increase penalties and improve court proceedings for sexually dangerous persons.”
A decision from the SJC on Murphy’s emergency petition is expected any day.