Monthly Archives: February 2013

Pennsylvania: Home to Two High-Profile Child Sexual-Abuse Scandals, Eyeing Change

February 27, 2013

By DAN FASY

Our Facebook page is updated weekdays to apprise interested parties about the many aspects pertaining to child sexual abuse. We cull reports from world media and provide links for readers. By its nature, the page can seem unremittingly grim.

Now and then, however, news comes along that at least seems to ameliorate the inevitable feelings of hopelessness about the fight against pedophilia. One such report is emerging from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. What better place, one would think, than a state that has been home relatively recently to a couple of the world’s most high-profile stories of child sexual abuse.

The following is from an article earlier this year in the Uniontown Herald-Standard:
“A group of state lawmakers who said they were frustrated that the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky and the [Philadelphia] Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals were not enough to move legislation out of committee last year, announced plans Wednesday [Jan. 23] to reintroduce a bill that would remove the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse.
“Where the statute of limitations has expired, Democratic Reps. Mike McGeehan and Louise Bishop said another bill would open a two-year window that would allow victims of child sexual abuse to report their story to file civil lawsuits.
“‘It is time to put victims first,’ said Bishop, who said she was 12 when her stepfather began to sexually abuse her.
“‘I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “I knew if I told my mother, it would hurt her. I knew if I told my sisters and brothers I [would be] talking about their father and they wouldn’t like it and I would be even more isolated than I was. And if I told my grandfather, he would take his legal shotgun and would have blown his head off.”
Those of us who deal daily with the realities of pedophilia are eminently aware of the power sex-abusers have over young victims. One recent news report described how many pedophiles are turning toward abusing ever-younger children with hopes that the victims will lack the comprehension and wherewithal to inform adults about what has happened to them.
The two House bills in Pennsylvania would get rid of the statutes of limitation in criminal and civil child-sex-abuse cases and also would grant those whose S.O.L. periods have expired two more years to bring cases. While the proposed legislation amounts to favorable news to many, it’s well worth noting that similar bills died at the end of the state’s most recent legislative session.
Advocates speak of the S.O.L. bills (similar efforts have been successful in California and Delaware) as a means of confronting Pennsylvania’s Catholic hierarchy.
“Marci Hamilton,” the newspaper story explains, is “an attorney known for her expertise in church and state law and the author of a book on how the country can better protect children from predators. [She] said: ‘The only way the truth will come out is if this Legislature has the guts to look at the Catholic conference and say we want the truth and we’re not playing your game of secrecy anymore.’”
Another expert in Pennsylvania added that institutionalized cover-ups of pedophilia also have been attempted in such organizations as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Boy Scouts of America, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Hassidic Jewish community.
But child advocates worry that the attempt at S.O.L. reform will once again languish in Pennsylvania. The frustration of advocates was caught particularly well by writer Tara Murtha in a Jan. 29 piece in Philadelphia Weekly when she quoted Jeff Dion of the National Center for Victims of crime:
“After all the grand jury reports, after Penn State, after the release of the Boy Scout secret files, after the criminal convictions of church officials who knew that they were not going enough to protect kids . . . what is PA waiting for?”
Pedophiles, he added, “know they don’t need to keep kids quiet forever. Just long enough.”

Our attorneys are highly experienced in childhood sexual abuse law and offer free initial consultations to potential clients. We are also willing to assist other attorneys in sexual abuse cases. Please call 206-257-3590, or email us directly. Conversations will be kept confidential, and even if you are unsure about a lawsuit, often we can direct you to the assistance you need. You will be treated with compassion and respect.

Toll free: 855-529-4274
Tim Kosnoff, direct: 425-837-9690
Dan Fasy, direct: 206-462-4338
Kosnoff Fasy, Seattle office: 206-257-3590

A 50-State Map of Reported Child Sexual-Abuse Cases within the Catholic Church

February 6, 2013

By TIM KOSNOFF

Certain Americans may miss seeing online and in various print media a blue-and-red-hued map indicating the state-by-state horse race that was the United States presidential election of last fall.

Perhaps interested parties might find another colorful U.S. map to be instructive. It’s done up in a veritable rainbow of colors, the brightness of the cartography scarcely coordinating with the dark details indicated in the map http://bishop-accountability.org/priestdb/PriestDBbydiocese.html.

The document is the work of a group called Bishop Accountability. The advocacy organization compiles evidence of child sexual abuse relating to crimes and accusations from Catholic dioceses in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. It’s quite a staggering scheme of details.

B.A. made headlines by releasing some 6,000 documents relating to the highly publicized child-sexual-abuse scandals in Philadelphia http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2013/01/24/latest-news-philadelphia-catholic-church-sex-abuse-scandal/

For a macro reckoning of crimes and transgressions throughout the country, go to the map indicated by the url above.

Point and click, for example, to Washington state. Highlighted are the Archdiocese of Seattle and the diocese of Spokane and Yakima.

Click Seattle. You’ll find a grid indicating nearly three dozen Catholic Church officials whose accusations are documented with details and links to news reports. The officials’ status is either “accused,” “sued,” “settled” or, in just one case, “convicted.” That would be Paul Joseph Conn, about whom it’s written in the website grid:

“In 5/88 Conn was charged with five felony counts of indecent liberties with minors. In 7/88 he pleaded guilty to molesting six boys between the ages of 11-13. Also admitted to abuse of others police did not know about. Sentenced to 4 yrs in prison. Also a former supervising priest of another abuser, James McGreal. Civil suit settled with archdiocese in 1996. Laicized.”
“Laicized” indicates that Conn was “secularized,” or driven from official church involvement.

Click Yakima. Thirteen names are given. None has been convicted.

Spokane? Only one among the 39 who have been accused and/or sued has been convicted. That would be Louis Wayne Ladenburger, about whom the Bishop Accountability notes indicate:
“Arrested 5/07 for sexual battery of teenage boys at Idaho school for troubled boys where he was a counselor. Admitted being a sex addict. Order revealed 2 past allegations of “inappropriate relationships.” Sent for treatment both times. Placed on restricted leave in 1993. Laicized in 1996. Pleaded guilty 11/07 just before trial. Sentenced to 5 years 3/08. Worked in dioceses of Stockton (twice), Tucson, Portland, El Paso, Spokane, Seattle, Sacramento, Reno, and Phoenix; aka Wayne 1963-74.”

If the 86 names populating the B.A. rolls in Washington state seem to amount to a staggering number, consider that Portland, Oregon, alone has 72 on its list. This is well behind Philadelphia, with 132, and Boston, with 251. Twenty-two of the latter were convicted with just one winning acquittal.

It’s worth noting that the volume of those accused of child sexual abuse doesn’t necessarily correlate with the size of the general population within a diocese region. New York’s number of accused Catholic officials is a relatively scant 63 while the database for the Los Angeles Archdiocese has 259 names.
What the casual observer no doubt will note is the cumulative numbers: hundreds of dioceses in the United States alone; thousands of names of accused and/or convicted pedophiles.

Bishop Accountability, then, is to be thanked for taking on the grim ongoing task of quantifying and qualifying Catholic Church-related crimes and accusations. I think of the growing B.A. database as the repository of the epoch. Its value certainly has earned the financial support of this law firm. The U.S. map at its website ought to garner the concern of everyone dedicated to mitigating what has amounted to decades of institutionalized child sexual abuse.

Our attorneys are highly experienced in childhood sexual abuse law law and offer free initial consultations to potential clients. We are also willing to assist other attorneys in sexual abuse cases. Please call 206-257-3590, or email us directly. Conversations will be kept confidential, and even if you are unsure about a lawsuit, often we can direct you to the assistance you need. You will be treated with compassion and respect.

Toll free: 855-529-4274
Tim Kosnoff, direct: 425-837-9690
Dan Fasy, direct: 206-462-4338

Priyanka Prakash, direct: 206-453-0579
Kosnoff Fasy, Seattle office: 206-257-3590

Revising the Statute of Limitations in New York and Other States is the Right Thing to Do

By DANIEL FASY

No one can say that Margaret M. Markey hasn’t tried.

The New York State assemblywoman has been laboring in vain since 2006 to change the way that the Empire State has remained maddeningly negligent in facing a pressing need, articulated last May by the Queens Borough Democrat

Last spring she wrote to constituents:

“I held a series of informational events in Albany earlier this year to bring to the attention of Governor [Andrew] Cuomo and my colleagues in the Legislature to the wide-ranging problem of child sexual abuse in society.

“We looked at the recent revelations in the world of sports and learned about abuse in schools and institutions. We heard one of the state’s leading prosecutors speak about how current statutes of limitations in New York State need to be changed in order to bring justice to victims.
“A panel of legal experts spoke about the change that is taking place across the nation where other states are facing up to the challenge of providing justice and punishing perpetrators and those who hide them. My Child Victims Act of New York seeks to update our laws regarding this crime.

“Our New York State statutes of limitations are so lax that many perpetrators evade exposure by waiting out the short statute of limitations. I want to change that because pedophiles who are not exposed will continue to abuse yet more children in the future.”

She then urged readers to sign an online petition to help speed the cause.

Fast forward to a Jan. 2, 2013 story in the New York Daily News. The piece is about how, in the wake of revelations about possible decades-long cover-ups of alleged pedophilia at a Brooklyn, New York, prep school, Markey is insisting that the statute of limitations be dropped altogether in New York rather than being merely expanded. http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/poly-case-vicims-shouldn-limited-seeking-legal-action-article-1.1231848

The Daily News piece notes: “Current [New York] state law requires survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file a case by the time they are 23 years old. Previous versions of Markey’s Child Victims Act would have extended the deadline by five years.”

Making the deadline age 28 still would’ve been comparatively unfair. The fact is that a victim of pedophilia in Washington or Oregon has much longer to bring legal action than does a similar victim in New York, to say nothing of other states that provide relatively brief time periods before statutes of limitations expire.

It should be noted that the notion of “statute of limitations” usually is subject to what is called “tolling.” As a practical matter, tolling typically means that a victim’s statute “clock” time doesn’t start until after he or she reaches age 18. In New York, victims have just five years to seek justice for first-degree offenses. Other states like Washington and Oregon provide survivors more time to bring forward with a civil claim for sexual abuse.

Is New York the worst in this regard? Scarcely. The statutes in North Dakota and Tennessee provide victims reaching age 18 just one year to seek legal action. In Indiana and New Jersey it’s only two years.

Some would ask why these statute times are so important. I would ask them to remember what their lives were like when they were 18 years old, when much of the world was still very mysterious, when they were absorbed in issues relating to reaching adulthood, when peer pressure for so many reasons may have been at an apex in their lives.

Then, for those who have been fortunate not to have endured sex crimes when they were children, imagine what your frame of mind might have been if you had? Would you, at age 18, have had the emotional wherewithal much less the means and familial support to seek an attorney?

More likely, as we who deal with this know, it would have taken more time, more maturing before you would have become emboldened to bring such an abuse case to authorities.

And that, of course, is really all that Margaret Markey and those of us who support her are asking for: More time.

Our attorneys are highly experienced in childhood sexual abuse law and offer free initial consultations to potential clients. We are also willing to assist other attorneys in sexual abuse cases. Please call 206-257-3590, or email us directly. Conversations will be kept confidential, and even if you are unsure about a lawsuit, often we can direct you to the assistance you need. You will be treated with compassion and respect.

Toll free: 855-529-4274
Tim Kosnoff, direct: 425-837-9690
Dan Fasy, direct: 206-462-4338
Kosnoff Fasy, Seattle office: 206-257-3590