FALL RIVER (MA)
Boston Globe
By Jonathan Saltzman and Charles Radin, Globe Staff | December 20, 2005
A state appeals court overturned yesterday the conviction of a Fall River man who had been jailed on charges of molesting two adolescent female relatives, citing an ''egregiously improper" closing argument last year by a Bristol County prosecutor who invoked the clergy sex-abuse scandal.
The three-member panel said that an assistant Bristol County district attorney, Jennifer Rose, should not have mentioned the scandal in the Catholic Church to suggest why two sisters waited a year to tell their mother that Luís Vázquez had molested them in late 2000 or early 2001.
Rose's argument was especially improper, the judges said, because Vázquez was tried in Fall River District Court at the time a petition regarding James R. Porter, the former priest, was pending in Bristol County Superior Court. Fall River is in Bristol County, and, the judges said, ''the Porter case and the wounds that it caused to the Fall River community again were in the public eye."