BishopAccountability.org
	Prosser Responds to Latest SNAP Comments By Natalie Arnold WBAY May 21, 2008 http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=8355473&nav=51s7cjko State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser is not at all interested in joining the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP) to push through a Child Victims Act (see related story). Prosser believes removing the statute of limitations for one crime could create a dangerous domino effect for other laws. He continues to defend the decision he made 30 years ago not to prosecute then-priest John Patrick Feeney on allegations of sexually assaulting two boys. For several months Justice Prosser did not want did not want to talk to the news media because he said he was concerned that he was going to be a witness in the Merryfield civil case, but now he is talking and he says he is angry at how he's been portrayed. He says SNAP has done nothing but unfairly attack him. Outagamie County's former prosecutor, now on the Supreme Court, does not regret for a second making the decision not to charge Feeney in the 1970s. "I don't think I have to apologize for making a sound prosecutorial judgment in 1978," he said. That's because Prosser says all he knew at the time is that there were attempted sexual assaults, not actual contact. "Of course I'm sorry that I didn't know more and that things weren't done, but I don't feel the judgment I made at the time -- I made it with the knowledge I had -- was the wrong judgment." Later, after Prosser was district attorney, one of the Merryfields said he was inappropriately touched. "No one said to me, 'Well, there's some other facts there that you didn't know about,'" Prosser said. Did he ask? "I don't recall that I asked, because I assumed that what I had been told was the story." Prosser said the Green Bay bishop kept him the dark, too, never revealing Feeney's already troubling reputation. Now Justice Prosser doesn't think that either side in the lawsuit against the Green Bay Catholic Diocese will want him as a witness.
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