Breaking a six-week silence, Catherine T. Geoghan – convicted priest John Geoghan’s sister – issued a statement Wednesday regarding her brother’s murder and the official investigation that followed it. Catherine Geoghan’s letter touches on allegations that corrupt behavior of prison guards is being covered up and that Geoghan was denied certain basic human rights in the final days of his life. Among other instances, the letter suggests mistreatment at the hand of guards and asks why Geoghan was transferred to one of Massachusetts’ maximum security correctional facilities when his record did not indicate violent tendencies.

John Geoghan’s career in the priesthood ended in the worst kind of disgrace: he betrayed parishioners, violated trust and committed unspeakable crimes that will never fully be rectified. He did not deserve sympathy or any respite whatsoever from the full weight of the law. But Geoghan was still a human being, and it would be fundamentally wrong for people to allow hatred of what he did in life to blind them to the possibilities of foul play surrounding his death.

Catherine Geoghan’s letter suggests prison guards falsified reports of Geoghan’s behavior that would warrant a transfer out of the medium security prison to which Geoghan was originally assigned. It also criticizes the current investigation, alleging that many inmates have been told by the Department of Corrections to keep quiet, and in addition that Geoghan’s final weeks were marked by harassment and intentional mistreatment – facts, his sister suggests, that are being systematically smoke-screened by the accused parties.

Whether or not the involved prison officials did what Geoghan suggests, prison guards in general have not only a job requisite, but an obligation to protect prisoners. They are not harbingers of vigilante justice they are there to maintain civility within prisons and allow the goal of the American prison system to carry through: to incarcerate convicted felons so that they might repent and be rehabilitated, or barring that, keep them properly isolated from a civilized society. Mistreatment of Geoghan by prison guards would not be the first time that correctional facility officers have taken ‘justice’ into their own hands, and the public must realize that as despicable a human being as Geoghan was in life, he still deserved basic human rights within the facility that his crimes landed him.

Following Geoghan’s murder on Aug. 23, many of his victims understandably expressed mixed emotions, many saying that his death did nothing but aggravate the situation further and that they took no solace in it. These pages would never offer Geoghan an ounce of sympathy, but could never condone actions of prison guards who are failing to do their jobs out of a twisted sense of ‘justice.’ If Geoghan saw mistreatment in his final days, then those who inflicted or allowed that treatment to happen did nothing but make the situation worse. His death calls for a far more thorough and open investigation of American prison facilities, and a much-needed realization that it is the law – not individual people – that manages justice.