A man who has been imprisoned for flooding a hospital’s website with traffic to protest their abuse of a teen girl was prevented from attending his father’s funeral by a judge with an apparent conflict of interest.
The man, Martin Gottesfeld, was arrested in 2016 for the online attacks he waged with the hacking group Anonymous against Boston Children’s Hospital and Wayside Youth and Family Support Network for their horrid treatment of Justina Pelletier.
Justina was taken to the Boston Children’s Hospital in 2013 for gastrointestinal issues while already dealing with mitochondrial disease. The hospital bizarrely concluded that Justina was actually dealing with some sort of mental health issue and she needed to cease all further treatment for mitochondrial disease. When her parents refused to follow the hospital’s orders by citing Justina’s mitochondrial disease diagnosis by Tufts Medical Center, the hospital asked for the state to intervene.
Justina was placed under state custody for 16 months, where she spent most of the time locked in the hospital’s psychiatric ward and sent to a troubled teen facility, all while being denied her mitochondrial treatment. She was allowed little contact with her parents, and they were prohibited by the state from speaking out to the media. Justina was eventually released back into her parents’ care in 2014.
Gottesfeld used the online attack against the hospital’s donations page as a means to protest what was happening with Justina; now he faces up to 25 years in prison.
Gottesfeld’s attorney filed for a temporary release so he could attend his father’s funeral on April 1. The release was opposed by the Boston acting U.S. attorney, and it was denied by a judge because “she didn’t feel that there had been a significant change in circumstances,” according to Dana Gottesfeld, Martin Gottesfeld’s wife.
“His mother was so distraught that her only surviving son wouldn’t be there that she canceled it,” Dana told The Daily Wire.
The magistrate judge who denied Gottesfeld’s motion, Marianne Bowler, has ties to the Boston Children’s Hospital, as she was research assistant at the Harvard Medical School. Her husband, Dr. Marc Pfeffer, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Boston Children’s Hospital is the school’s “primary pediatric program.”
Additionally, Dana said that the acting Boston U.S. attorney who opposed the motion, William Weinreb, was following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Carmen Ortiz, a Barack Obama appointee. Dana called Ortiz’s attorney’s office “very politically motivated,” pointing to Ortiz’s zealous prosecution of internet activist Aaron Swartz, which resulted in Swartz committing suicide.
“They find nonviolent crimes and then they smack people with over 30 years in prison, felony convictions, high restitution costs … they just are trying to get notches in their belt. ” Dana said. “And many people just end up killing themselves.”
Dana told The Daily Wire that she hopes Attorney General Jeff Sessions will step in and get the case dropped.
“We’re just asking him to do the right thing,” Dana said.
RedState blogger Jim Jantis accurately summed up the situation with this passage:
It is utter hypocrisy that prosecutors want to put a man behind bars for something he did trying to help save Justina Pelletier’s life, while doing nothing to the people who put her in danger in the first place. Boston Children’s Hospital and the Boston Department of Children and Families violated Justina’s human rights. They violated her parents human rights. Yet no one from Boston Children’s Hospital or the city government is even facing criminal investigation.
I’m not condoning criminal action of any kind here. Being a vigilante is not something I would recommend to anyone.
However, from what I have seen of this case, Marty Gottesfeld may have broken the law but he did so in order to prevent an even greater crime from occurring. Selectively prosecuting Gottesfeld while doing nothing to the Harvard institution that imprisoned Justina Pelletier or to the city government who abetted the violation of the Pelletier’s rights smacks of cronyism, corruption, and frankly, tyranny.
And now they’re making it worse by keeping Gottesfeld from attending his father’s funeral.
This article has been updated.