Former priest found guilty of rape
By Emanuella Grinberg
Court TV
EAST CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Court TV) -- Gasps echoed through the courtroom Monday when jurors handed down a guilty verdict to defrocked priest Paul Shanley for raping a boy at his parish in the 1980s.
The jury of seven men and five women took more than 13 hours over three days to convict Shanley on two counts of child rape and two counts of indecent assault and battery. He faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced on Feb. 15.
Shanley, 74, did not display any emotion as the verdicts were read. His niece, Theresa Shanley, who attended the trial regularly and served as a paralegal on the case, remained sullen during the pronouncement, but rushed to speak with him before he was led out of the courtroom.
After the verdict was announced, Shanley was taken into custody in the same building where the seven-day trial was held. He had been out on bail since December 2002.
Shanley's accuser, now a 27-year-old firefighter, smiled when the verdict was read, but could not hold back tears as jurors responded 'guilty' to each of the four counts. His wife struggled for composure and tightened her hold on her husband with each verdict.
The accuser described Shanley's assaults against him during emotional testimony that lasted three days. He said the abuse began in 1983 when he was 6 years old.
He told jurors that Shanley regularly pulled him out of Sunday catechism class for what he called "special duties" and molested him in locations throughout St. John the Evangelist Parish in Newton, Massachusetts, an affluent Boston suburb. The attacks included fondling and oral sex.
The accuser, unnamed in the media, said he repressed memories of the abuse until February 2002, when another student from the class brought similar allegations against Shanley.
His claims were eligible for prosecution because of a technicality in the statute of limitations in Massachusetts.
'The real hero'
Shanley's defense team refused to comment on the verdict before abruptly exiting the courthouse through a restricted entrance.
At a press conference, Middlesex County District Attorney Martha Coakley stressed the need for earlier discovery of child abuse over a revision of the statute of limitations.
"We need to get rid of the stigma of child abuse and enforce mandatory reporting requirements," she said, adding that the church is exempt from those laws.
While acknowledging the difficulty in pursuing a case based on such old memories, Coakley called the evidence a "perfect storm" of child abuse.
"Young people don't have the vocabulary to process sexual abuse," she said. "Especially back then, if that young man had told, would anyone have believed him?"
Assistant District Attorney Lynn Rooney said the case was the most difficult one of her career.
"The young man who toughed out something I had never seen in the courtroom is the real hero," she said. "Without his willingness to stand by me and do what I asked, we wouldn't be here today."
The accuser's testimony was the only material evidence in the case.
Repressed memories
The verdict came less than 30 minutes after the judge denied the jury's request to view portions of the accuser's journal.
The journal, which the man called an "emotional barfbag" -- as did the jury in its note -- contained his thoughts and feelings after recovering the memories. The entries read aloud during testimony, however, were not submitted into evidence, so they were not available to the jury, the judge said.
The clergyman was indicted in June 2002 on charges pertaining to the four accusers, but Middlesex County prosecutors shaved their case down to charges pertaining to just one accuser.
Throughout the trial, Shanley's defense tried to cast doubt on the credibility of the decades-old memories, highlighting the fact that the man contacted a personal-injury lawyer before a doctor or clinician, a fact the witness admitted on the stand.
The defense and the prosecution called their own expert witnesses to testify to the reliability of repressed memories. Both sides conceded that the topic of repressed memories is highly controversial and polarizing in the medical community.
Jurors left the courthouse together without giving media interviews, but one woman, when asked if the verdicts had been a difficult decision, replied, "Of course. What do you think?"
