As DA Kamala Harris's Office Stopped Cooperating With Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse

[mr_lebowski]

134. Links don't work in the subject line ... here, let me help ...

http://www.sfweekly.com/news/zipped-up/

Maybe it's not QUITE so simple as the Intercept plays it ... The story is from 2005 ...

But Ingels was lucky. At his arraignment, his lawyers announced that he would postpone entering a plea. A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court — by a 5-to-4 vote — struck down as unconstitutional a California law that had extended the statute of limitations for prosecuting suspected sex abusers. The law — enacted during a national furor over sex abuse in the church — had allowed prosecutors to bring abuse cases against many clerics years after the alleged crimes had occurred. The Supreme Court decision — Stogner vs. California — said the retroactive lengthening of statutes of limitation from a few years to, in some cases, decades violated the Constitution's ex post facto clause, which prohibits the enactment of laws that criminalize behavior after the fact.

Along with many others, Ingels walked.

The Stogner decision stopped criminal investigations across California in their tracks. By ending any possibility of public trials in those cases, it also kept information on decades of alleged misconduct by Roman Catholic clerics from entering the public realm. Consequently, the decision kept secret the record of the church hierarchy's response — or lack of response — to reports of priestly misconduct.

In the eyes of victims' advocates and other critics, Archbishop Levada's handling of such cases has been notable for its lack of openness. Even after the Stogner decision ended the prosecution of Ingels, the archbishop continued to push for secrecy in sex abuse matters. And district attorneys of the three counties within the archdiocese's territory — San Francisco's Kamala Harris, San Mateo's James Fox, and Marin's newly appointed Ed Berberian — have taken what some other prosecutors view as extraordinarily questionable steps to help Levada keep records of clerical wrongdoing in Northern California from public eyes.