Attorneys for clergy named in grand jury report on sexual abuse make case for edits

July 14--Lawyers for at least 12 persons named in a forthcoming grand jury report on sexual abuse in six of Pennsylvania's Roman Catholic dioceses have asked the state Supreme Court to give them an unprecedented chance to edit the report before its release.

In a common brief for all petitioners released in redacted form Friday afternoon, the attorneys said there are demonstrable errors of fact and interpretation in the report that, if left uncorrected, will deprive their clients of a state constitutional right to defend their reputation.

Court filings also provide more insight into the scope of the long-awaited grand jury report on clergy sex abuse.

The filings from attorneys indicate the grand jury report names 90 offenders, possibly from the Diocese of Pittsburgh alone, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The lawyers for current and former priests are asking the court to send the report back to the grand jury's supervising judge for, at minimum, a series of evidentiary hearings where the unnamed petitioners can present their cases.

That would be followed, where necessary, by redactions or corrections before the full report is released to the public.

Ordinarily, persons referred to critically in grand jury reports in Pennsylvania are given a chance to review those portions of the report that deal directly with them, and file a written response.

Those responses are released as an addendum to the report.

The petitioners in this case, however, have argued that the subject of matter of child sexual abuse is so horrific, that getting the opportunity to vent after the fact is meaningless.

Especially, they assert, when there are clear errors in the portions of the report that they have seen that can be relatively easily fixed.

The appeal in question is in response to an earlier ruling by the grand jury's supervising judge, Norman Krumenacker, finding that the petitioners' due process rights are adequately met by response requirement.

In Pennsylvania's secret grand jury process, prosecutors have total control over the witnesses who are called, and there is no opportunity for those witnesses to be cross-examined.

In criminal cases, charged defendants get that full chance to fight the charges against them in court.

But the report process -- usually used to advance recommendations for legislative or policy changes -- really does not afford that kind of right to trial to persons who might be named.

Some states have changed their grand jury procedures to cure that problem.

Krumenacker found, in a ruling issued last month, that giving petitioners the chance to present their own evidence to a grand jury "would... effectively bring the grand jury process to a halt, turning each investigation into a full adjudication."

He also contended that he, as the supervising judge, does not have the ability to redact or rewrite a grand jury report once it has been submitted.

But the petitioners countered Pennsylvania's grand jury law does not bar the protections they seek.

"It cannot possibly be... that a supervising judge is powerless to correct manifest error, no matter how serious or violative of fundamental constitutional protections the errors may be," the brief argues.

"This court must prevent the Commonwealth from conducting what amounts to a drive-by shooting of those without blame or guilt."

The petitioners conclude by noting that they want sexual abuse victims to have their say, and stated they agree that any founded abuses must be addressed.

"But a flawed report... will undermine rather than achieve the grand jury's laudable aims."

The names of the individual petitioners behind the last ditch effort for revisions remain under seal, and they likely represent a small minority of the persons named in the report.

It is possible, of course, that diocesan offices are funding their effort.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro's office could not be reached for comment from PennLive after the late release of the petitioners' redacted brief on Friday. Joe Grace, a spokesman for Shapiro, rejected accusations that the grand jury report is inaccurate, the Inquirer reported.

"There isn't a morsel of truth to their allegation," Grace said in a statement, the Inquirer reported. "Their desperate claim speaks volumes."

Speaking earlier this month, Shapiro stood by the report as "accurate," and called the legal filings "nothing more than a desperate attempt to stop the public from learning the truth about their abhorrent conduct."

The state Supreme Court issued an order last month blocking the release of the report to the public. The court said it was reviewing challenges filed by individuals named in the report.

Shapiro has argued that the report should be released to the public in the interests of justice. The attorney general's office had planned to release the report last month.

Several media organization have asked the court to release the report, including PennLive, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Associated Press.

The pending report covers alleged abuses by priests and the actions church officials took in response in the dioceses of Pittsburgh, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Allentown and Scranton.

Taken together, they minister to more than 1.7 million Catholics.

Grand juries had previously found widespread sex abuse by priests in the state's two other Roman Catholic dioceses, including in a landmark report in Philadelphia in 2005.

In 2016, a state grand jury report on child sexual abuse at the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese disclosed allegations of abuse by more than 50 priests and other clergy members against hundreds of children going back decades.

While the pending report is expected to be largely historic in nature, the petitioners here argue that the subject matter is the same thing as a criminal accusation -- one they will have no right-by-trial to defend themselves against.

In his denial of the motions for hearings, Krumenacker noted that the grand jury, in reaching its findings, heard from dozens of witnesses and reviewed over 500,000 pages of internal diocesan douments.

In addition, the current bishops of each diocese was invited to testify, and one, the Bishop of Erie, did.

To support the petitioners' assertions, the common brief presented four specific examples of what they described as clear error in the report, either due to incorrect facts, misinterpretations of documents, or misleading inferences drawn from unreliable sources.

Because of the secrecy surrounding the grand jury process, however, each of those specific claims is blacked out in today's release.

The Attorney General's office was due to filed its own sealed reply brief in the case on Friday. A redacted version of that response is expected to be released publicly on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court has indicated it will not hold oral argument on this issue, but instead decide the case based on the written filings. That ruling is expected to come this summer.

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