BishopAccountability.org
	'Hand of God' Screens in Rome Next Week; Cardinal Mahony Adds More Attorneys; and More Subpoenas to Come, with First of 15 Jury Trials So Far July 9 City of Angels [United States] June 15, 2007 http://cityofangels3.blogspot.com/2007/06/hand-of-god-screens-in-rome-more.html Friday Roundup: The documentary "Hand Of God" goes to Rome next week to be seen first time by an Italian audience. Joey Cultrera's film about the sexual abuse of his brother Paul by the late Rev. Joseph Birmingham when they were growing up in Salem, Mass. screens June 22 for the Italian Parliament. Traveling from the Boston area to present the film are Kathy Shaw of Barre, Mass., who produces the daily Clergy Abuse Tracker, and Robert Costello and John Harris of A Matter of Truth, as well as attorney Daniel J. Shea of Houston, Texas, and Massachusetts. A coalition of groups including Anticlericale.net, the Italian Radical Party and the Transnational Radical Party arranged this screening. Cultrera made the film after he learned his older brother Paul had been abused by a Catholic priest when he was 14 years old, and after the Church his parents helped finance and build (Saint Mary's Italian) was being forced to close by the Archdiocese of Boston. The closing of this church was due in part to offset financial losses the diocese had incurred in the settling of hordes of clergy abuse cases. More on the aberration of paying sex abuse settlements from parish funds in future posts on this blog. . . There Will Be More Subpoenas Served On Mahony From taped interview. . . Katherine Freberg allowed me to run my tape recorder while I asked her some questions. In honor of my new transcription job (yay!) I'm transcribing parts of it here. I asked her if the hearing June 12 was about Mahony's Interrogatories 1-8: KF: No, this was four motions to compel the archbishop to answer questions and produce documents in the Hagenbach cases. Q: Are you getting any documents from the church? KF: Yes. They have started producing documents. They're documents that should have been released a year and a half ago but they are finally producing. You know, it's a battle . . . Q: The subpoena for Mahony to testify was filed in a Kreutzer case. Will he be testifying in the Hagenbach and Caffoe cases as well? KF: Yes. Q: Will that one subpoena apply to all the cases? KF: No. We would have to issue a separate subpoena to Cardinal Mahony in each one of the cases and then they may move to quash those subpoenas. Q: Are you going to ask him to testify? KF: Yes. ===== More Document Diving Wednesday What I could in the ongoing problem with access to documents in the Clergy Cases. When I go to open a document, a lot of stuff still comes up blank. But I'm working on it. Another Team of Attorneys for the Archbishop Cardinal Roger Mahony has added another firm to his team of attorneys. I found this stream of 8 Notices of Association of Counsel as the lead Church Attorney firm Hennigan et al add Bonne, Bridges, Mueller, O'Keefe & Nichols to the teams of church attorneys now representing "Defendant Doe 3, Archdiocese, or John Doe 1, defendant, or Defendant Doe 1 -- All of them the archdiocese, all of them more attorneys and they don't come cheap. That, folks, is what the Roman Catholic Church is doing with your dollars when they pass the basket each week. That and paying off sex abuse settlements When the Money Should Be Coming from the Vatican. The Radical Party (one of the groups sponsoring screening of Hand of God in Italy) was born nearly 50 years ago. It was founded by then young leader Marco Pannella. They stand up against the so-called "Concordato," which gives the Catholic Church the tax exemption (about three billion euros a year). Benito Mussolini gave the church tax exempt status in 1929 in order to get support for his regime. Here is how Report to the People of God came up in Kreutzer Cases Resulting in Church Attorneys trying to get the Report thrown out as evidence as it's "irrelevant." (See June 12 post.) In the trial brief for the Kreutzer cases plaintiff attorney Steven Brady from San Francisco introduced Report to the People of God as evidence with these words: "Independent of specific acts of misconduct by Sister Frances Catherine, there is the evidence of defendant's own corporate policies as admitted in its Report to the People of God on February 17, 2004. "In this document defendant's highest corporate executive has admitted that in the 1970s and 1980s the defendant pursued a policy of dealing with complaints of sexual misconduct by priests was to handle them 'pastorally and privately' with no attempts to investigate the claims rigorously and no assistance to the victims." Judge Fromholz on June 6 denied the Church Attorney Phillip Baker's motion to quash the Report to the People of God as evidence. Okay here we go again. I'm on page 5 of 8 reading Brady's brief. I go to get page 6 and I get . . . . Error. Please make sure this file can be accessed by. . . . . The Ongoing Saga of Missing Documents and Blank Screens When You Finally Open a Document.. Can Anyone Tell Me If There Is a Law Regarding Public Access to Documents in Civil Trials???? As of Wednesday access to documents was still iffy in Los Angeles Superior Court Room 106. It got really weird last week, a new glitch. You can get to the screen with the link to the document. You click on the link, Java opens, you are about to read and then. . . The screen is just blank. It says it's "open" "done" and the screen is just blank. I got really weirdly chilled when this first happened. It was June 6th. Whenever I tried to open any document that had anything to do with the Kreutzer Cases and Mahony's testimony, I'd click the document name was on the screen, I'd open it. And the screen was just blank white. Gave me a chill. . . . However, Wednesday afternoon after I went once more to the courtroom to talk to the clerks about this, and I could hear the judge's voice coming from the chamber so he may have been able to hear me, I went back downstairs to Room 106, and voila, the documents started opening. I do have a little bit of paranoia and can imagine patterns and cause and effect conspiracies sometimes. But it still strikes me as a little bit strange that access to the documents had been totally seamless since I started writing this in January. Then Steven Brady served a subpoena on Mahony and all of a sudden the documents went to blank white screens and "Access Denied" error messages. Whatever, it looks like the powers that be finally fixed the problem. Good thing. I was starting to do Document Jones. At a June 6 hearing I almost grabbed a file out of a plaintiff attorney's hands because it was a legal document and it had been so long since I'd been able to read one. . . . Note the LA Times reporter told me it didn't matter as "those computers are always going down." No they aren't Introducing another new law firm in the Archbishop's team of attorneys Bonne, Bridges, Mueller, O'Keefe & Nichols who specialize in appeals Go to the website of Bonne, Bridges, Mueller, O'Keefe & Nichols and first thing you see is a blond lady's picture and this invitation: Vangi Johnson answers your questions about Civil Appeals. A little lower you can click on this pseudo news story written by Vangi Johnson in the Bonne Bridges News Brief for June: Recent U.S. Supreme Court Holds State's Lien Limited to Amount of Recovery Allocated to Medical Expenses Apparently the new law firm signed to join the team of Church Attorneys specializes in appeals. Stay tuned.
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