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	Former Priest Pleads Not Guilty to Child Molestation Chargesi Associated Press, carried in Monterey Herald March 16, 2007 http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/16920821.htm Los Angeles - A former Catholic priest already accused in a child molestation case pleaded not guilty Friday to separate charges of having sex with a 15-year-old boy. Michael Stephen Baker, 59, was arraigned on an amended felony complaint that includes one count of oral copulation of a person under 18, one count of sexual penetration of an unconscious person with a foreign object and three counts of sodomy of a person under 18. A gray-bearded Baker, who wore an orange jail-issued jumpsuit, appeared in court but looked down for most of the hearing. He was being held on $800,000 bail. Prosecutors alleged Baker had sex with a 15-year-old boy between March 1996 and September 1998 and accused the former priest of fondling the boy and sodomizing him after the youth fell asleep. Baker had already pleaded not guilty to eight acts of oral copulation involving another boy. Those allegations span a decade, beginning when the boy was 7, and carry a possible sentence of up to 19 years in state prison. Baker was removed from the priesthood by the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 2000. He was arrested in January 2006 at Los Angeles International Airport as he returned from a vacation in Thailand. On Friday, Superior Court Commissioner Catherine Pratt denied a defense motion to dismiss several of the charges. Baker was first charged in September 2002 but the case, along with those against nearly a dozen other former Los Angeles area priests, was dropped in 2003 due to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving the statute of limitations on child molestation. The archdiocese said in December it would pay $60 million to settle 45 lawsuits by people who claimed they were abused by priests, but as many as 485 others were still pending.
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