Thanks for freeing a predator
Wayne Chapman boasted about raping as many as 100 children, and fantasized about killing and cannibalizing children, but he’s now a free man, thanks to a misguided Middlesex County jury and this state’s badly broken civil commitment system.
Spare me the line about how he paid his debt to society. He most certainly has not. The debt for his horrific abuse of little children couldn’t be paid by a hundred lifetimes, yet this monster got a deep, deep discount for crimes that should have landed him behind bars for life.
Chapman was convicted of numerous grotesque crimes against 11 children in three states, yet he left the courthouse Friday in a Prius rather than a sheriff’s van, after being acquitted of charges that he masturbated in front of prison nurses. His defense was that he was just scratching himself, and that he suffers from Parkinson’s disease.
Witnesses testified the only rash he had was on his feet, and nobody thinks Parkinson’s disease causes uncontrollable masturbation, but the jury apparently bought it even though nurses testified that he waited until he was directly in front of them before he started “scratching.”
The jury wasn’t allowed to hear about Chapman’s past crimes, but they should have been, not because Chapman should be convicted of crimes for which he was not on trial, but to rebut the silly defense claim that he was not intentionally trying to sexually offend the nurses.
Whenever a defendant claims he didn’t intentionally or knowingly commit a crime, the law allows the prosecution to rebut the defense with evidence that the defendant knew exactly what he was doing. Wayne Chapman’s very long history of committing sex crimes would have helped the jury reject his Parkinson’s-mademe-do-it defense.
Here’s what they should have heard:
■ In 1966 he gagged and tied a boy to a tree in Pennsylvania and left him in the woods.
■ In 1967 he sexually assaulted a 12-year-old boy in Pennsylvania.
■ In 1971 he sodomized a 10-year-old boy in Pennsylvania.
■ Between 1974 and 1976 he sexually assaulted 11 boys in Massachusetts.
■ In 1976 he raped a 10year-old boy in New York.
■ In 1977, he was convicted of raping two boys in Lawrence and in August 1978 he was convicted of multiple sex crimes against four boys in Bristol County.
■ In November 1979 he was convicted of “Abominable and Detestable Crimes Against Nature” and sexual assault of two boys in Rhode Island.
Years after being locked up for child rape in Massachusetts, he was declared too sexually dangerous to be released under civil commitment laws. All his victims felt great relief, until two psychologists in 2018 decided he was safe for release.
Now, in 2019, a jury has decided to set him free.
One of Chapman’s victims, a client of mine named Bob, was horrified to learn of the jury’s verdict.
“I hope he doesn’t hurt anyone else, but I think the jury is going to find out the hard way that they made a terrible mistake,” Bob told me.
Perhaps aware of her mistake, one juror was seen crying Friday when she left the courthouse. Another of my clients who was brutally raped by Chapman was devastated by the news. Chapman showed him photographs of naked children tied to trees who Chapman said were dead, and said he would kill him and his family if the boy told anyone what Chapman did to him. But he told police and testified in court. But he still fears for his family’s safety, all these years later.
As a Level 3 sex offender, Chapman is at least required to register his address with the Sex Offender Registry Board.
But I have been informed that he left the address blank when he registered Friday. He could have been charged with a new crime of failing to register as a sex offender, but he corrected that, filling in the blank with “homeless” in Boston.
Unbelievable. So we don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, or whether he is near children.
Welcome to Massachusetts.