Pennsylvania’s Prosecutors Office believes it has a pattern of investigation that could put in jail some Catholic clergy involved in a child sex abuse scandal and evade the “protection” of the state’s sex crimes statute of limitations.
The Union’s second state prosecution recently managed to put behind bars former priest Robert L. Brennan, now 81 years old, who was initially charged with abuse in a 2005 grand jury report alleging sexual or inappropriate behavior with more than 20 children since the late 1980s.
At the time there was no deprivation of liberty for the alleged pedophile, but there was an arrangement paid for by the Archdiocese of Pennsylvania, an institution that overlapped for years multiple cases of perversion in which presbyters were involved with parish children.
The Harrisburg District Attorney’s Office now alerts others within the nation to be encouraged to carefully review the formality of the proceedings, because Bernnan’s arrest, although not directly for a particular act of statutory rape, is made possible because he lied to the FBI about his relationship with an accuser’s family. He now faces four counts of making false statements to federal authorities, according to the indictment.
Legal observers have seen as a workaround, the U.S. Attorney General’s Office opened a probe into Pennsylvania dioceses to build criminal cases against priests on charges that could not be thwarted by the statute of limitations. Making false statements is in accordance with the law.
Finding an inconsistency
In Brennan’s case perjury will lead to conviction, with charges that may seem less significant in comparison to previous allegations of sexual abuse. However, in their case and in most of those supported in the Pennsylvania Report, priests are covered by Pennsylvania’s lax statute of limitations on sexual offenses against minors, many of those charges were too old to pursue in court.
According to the indictment, federal authorities interviewed Brennan in Maryland in April on an issue related to the McIlmail case. The authorities claim that Brennan knowingly lied by saying that, prior to the criminal allegations and civil lawsuit, he did not know McIlmail nor three members of his family.
This is an opportunity that was opened against Brennan in 2012. One of the alleged victims, Sean McIlmail, agreed to file charges against the priest.
The man said his pastor began sexually abusing him in 1993 at Brennan´s Parish in Northeast Philadelphia when he was only 11 years old. But McIlmail, then 26, died of a drug overdose in Kensington days before the preliminary hearing. The Philadelphia District Attorney’s office closed the case.
Pain and impunity are installed in the men of law and in Pennsylvanian society, and with the example of Robert L. Brennan behind bars, they will seek to bring to prison other pedophile priests who have left untied ends that law can use to prosecute them.
Translated by: José Espinoza
Noticias Newswire
