FORGIVE me, but this is not going to be a "lite" column. Justice mirrors
imperfect worldI wanted to tell you about a guy named John Date. He's one of those guys who got sucked into an imperfect legal system and was ground up.
It's a tragedy. He was charged with horrible crimes that he didn't commit -- a string of rapes in Manoa in 1981.
At 19 years old, he was branded the "Manoa Rapist" and thrown into prison to await trial.
He was described as "thin, blonde and baby-faced" by his attorneys. In other words, a perfect victim for the felons with whom he was thrown in with. That's the first tragedy of the story, that so-called "presumed innocent," pre-trial detainees used to be chucked into prison along with people already convicted of a crime.
In a high profile case of serial rape or murder, police have to act fast to make an arrest. But it is up to the prosecutor's office and a judge to step back and figure out if they've got the right guy based on evidence. Date was ordered held on $200,000 bail and sent to the Oahu Community Correct-ional Center.
He was terrified and rightly so. His attorneys would only say that he was "abused" in prison, trying to spare him some dignity.
Date told his attorney that he considered killing himself in prison because no one believed he was innocent and because of the horrifying conditions inside.
On Dec. 26, police arrested John Freudenberg for the Manoa rapes. The city prosecutor's office dropped all charges against Date.
THAT was the last the public heard about John Date. But it was not the end of his torment.
I received a letter this week from one of Date's relatives filling in the gaps of his life since the prison ordeal.
"John never got over the accusations," she wrote. "He became a heavy alcoholic and lived a lonely life."
He began to have encounters with police and was branded a troublemaker by some, she said.
"But I knew he was filled with pain. We cried together many times about the injustice that was done to him," she said.
Of course, you know where this is all going. John Date hung himself in April. It took this long for his relative to get the strength to tell me about it. She just wanted me to know what had happened since, as a police reporter 15 years ago, I had written about his case.
It would have been bad enough if he had merely taken his own life. But apparently paramedics were able to revive him. It was left to the family to make the painful decision to allow him to die in May.
John Date left behind a six-year-old son and a three year old daughter. His obituary was only three lines long.
Date's suicide attempt came just a month after the real "Manoa Rapist," Freudenberg, asked to be paroled. He is serving 13 life sentences after having eventually confessed to assaulting more than a dozen women.
I don't know if hearing that Freudenberg was seeking parole was what caused Date to try to kill himself. I do know that it devastated Date's family.
"I wonder if (Freudenberg) read Johnny's obituary in the paper," his relative wrote me.
Our legal system is imperfect.. It allows serial rapists like Freudenberg the possibility of parole. It throws innocent people like Date into prison to be abused. And it leaves victims scattered in the process.
But the system did change after Date's case. Pre-trial detainees now are kept separate from convicted inmates.
The system did catch the Manoa rapist. And he was denied parole and hopefully will continue to be denied parole for as long as his victims have to live with what he did.
Unfortunately, that's little comfort to John Date's family.