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	Former L.A. Priest Pleads Guilty to Sexual Abuse of Boys Associated Press, carried in Union-Tribune December 3, 2007 http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20071203-1841-ca-calchurchabuse.html LOS ANGELES – A former priest who figured prominently in the sex abuse scandal that plagued the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese pleaded guilty Monday to molesting two boys and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Michael Stephen Baker, 60, was sentenced as part of a plea deal entered in Los Angeles Superior Court. The announcement of the agreement came on the same day the archdiocese paid a large share of the $660 million it has agreed to provide to settle cases with more than 500 alleged victims of clergy abuse. About $500 million was wired to victims as part of the largest payout by any diocese since the scandal emerged in Boston in 2002, said Ray Boucher, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Baker is considered by some to be a symbol of the archdiocese's reluctance to deal with problem priests. "The sentence they're going to give him is a pittance compared to the destruction that he has created," Boucher said. Baker was charged in 2002 with 34 counts of molestation involving six victims, but those charges were dismissed a year later after the U.S. Supreme Court voided a California law that allowed the prosecution of cases involving acts that occurred before 1988. Baker's plea involved the sexual abuse of two boys between 1994 and 1998, when he was a priest in Los Angeles. One of the victims was an altar boy, and some of the incidents occurred in rectories. Neither victim was in the courtroom. But with the former priest sitting at the defense table wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, a half-dozen people came forward to tell the judge that Baker abused them or a family member. There were similar elements in several of their stories, with the incidents leading to drug and alcohol use, depression and sometimes thoughts of suicide. Matt Severson, whom authorities said was one of Baker's early victims, recalled being 9 when he first met "Father Mike." Baker was a family friend, and tickling by the priest eventually turned to fondling and within a year to kissing and oral sex, Severson, now 40, said in court. "I felt trapped in an alternate universe between fear and silence," he said. According to the archdiocese, Baker had told Cardinal Roger Mahony in 1986 that he had molested young boys from 1978 to 1985. Mahony did not notify police but sent Baker to a residential facility that treated priests for sexual abuse problems. In the years that followed, Baker was assigned to nine different parishes but barred from having one-on-one contact with minors. He violated those restrictions three times, according to church personnel file summaries that the archdiocese has released. Mahony removed Baker from the ministry in 2000. In January 2006, Baker was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport as he returned from a vacation in Thailand. Authorities said outside court that the investigation into clergy abuse was ongoing. "We are not done," said Bill Hodgeman, an investigator with the district attorney's office. "We will go where the competent evidence takes us."
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