Connecticut’s highest court ruled on Friday that thousands of pages of documents from sexual-abuse lawsuits filed against priests in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport that had been kept sealed for more than a decade must be made public. The 4-to-1 decision by the State Supreme Court was the latest milestone in a seven-year legal fight between the Diocese of Bridgeport and four newspapers: The New York Times, The Hartford Courant, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.
The diocese claimed that the records would open old wounds, while the newspapers argued that they were an important part of the record of the church’s handling of sexual-abuse charges.
It is unclear when the documents will be released, or whether further appeals are planned. In a statement late on Friday, Joseph McAleer, a spokesman for the diocese, said officials there were “reviewing our options in response to this decision.”
The documents include depositions by victims, priests and leaders of the Bridgeport Diocese, which was overseen between 1988 and 2000 by Bishop Edward M. Egan, who later became the archbishop of New York. Cardinal Egan retired last month, after nine years in New York.
The documents covered by the court’s decision involved 23 lawsuits filed in the early 1990s. They represent sexual-abuse claims against five diocesan priests involving actions that the plaintiffs said occurred between the 1960s and the mid-’80s.
Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the New York Archdiocese, said the sexual abuse on which the initial lawsuits were based occurred before Bishop Egan took over as head of the Bridgeport diocese.
Under Bishop Egan’s leadership, the Bridgeport Diocese mounted a vigorous defense against the victims’ claims.
His defense theory, reported widely at the time, was that the diocese was not liable because diocesan priests were not employees of the diocese but private contractors.
The documents that the court ordered released on Friday were ordered sealed in the mid-1990s to avoid prejudicing potential jurors. The suits were all settled in March 2001, four months after Cardinal Egan left for New York, but the documents remained sealed. In 2002, The Times filed suit to obtain them. Other newspapers joined the suit.
George H. Freeman, vice president and assistant general counsel of the New York Times Company, said on Friday: “It’s gratifying that at long last these documents should see the light of day. It’s a shame that all the parties involved didn’t see fit to release these documents, which are so much in the public interest, without the need of all these years of litigation.”
In his statement on Friday, Mr. McAleer said the Bridgeport diocese was “deeply disappointed” by the decision. Among other things, he said, the ruling overlooked what he said was the compromised impartiality of a lower court trial judge, Superior Court Judge Jon C. Alander, who sat on a judicial committee charged with reviewing the issue of public access to court records.
The diocese claimed that assignment made him, in effect, an advocate on the side of the newspapers — a claim that the Supreme Court said was unfounded.
Mr. McAleer said that the decision ignored the state’s statute of limitation on the unsealing of court documents, which he said had passed before the newspapers sued.
“Sadly, the history of this case has been about access by the secular media to internal church documents of cases more than 30 years ago to suggest, unfairly, that nothing has changed,” the statement said. “This is despite the extraordinary measures the Catholic Church has undertaken over the past several years to treat victims with great compassion and dignity, and to put in safeguards and educational programs to ensure that such a tragedy will not happen again.”
Barbara Blaine, president of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, which has been highly critical of the way the church handled accusations against predator priests, applauded the decision.
In a statement, she said, “This much remains unchanged in the church: no matter what the cost, bishops will fight tooth and nail to the bitter end to keep hidden evidence that they ignored and concealed devastating child felonies.” +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Disclaimer
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Source (NYT)
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