BishopAccountability.org
	Latest Vermont Priest Misconduct Trial Begins By Kevin O’connor Rutland Herald December 3, 2008 http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081203/NEWS03/812030295 BURLINGTON — At first glance, they’re the same child-sex charges in the same court that sparked a record $8.7 million verdict. But with a different accuser, a different judge and a different jury, Vermont’s Catholic Church is hoping for a different outcome. The state’s largest religious denomination, socked this spring with a ruling of negligence in its 1970s hiring and supervision of a pedophile priest, pleaded for leniency Wednesday at the start of its third trial of the year involving the same retired clergyman. “Looking back on it, we can say it was ill-advised because we have the benefit of hindsight,” church counsel Thomas McCormick said. “The present is how do we, as a judicial system, deal with an organization’s responsibility for decisions made 36 years ago?” Twenty men have filed civil lawsuits in Burlington’s Chittenden Superior Court alleging the statewide Roman Catholic Diocese was reckless for not telling their childhood parishes about past sexual abuse of boys by former priest Edward Paquette, who served in Rutland in 1972, Montpelier in 1974 and Burlington in 1976. In the first trial in May, a jury rejected the diocese’s defense that it wasn’t liable for the priest’s misconduct and awarded plaintiff Perry Babel, a 40-year-old Burlington native, $950,000 in compensatory damages and an additional $7,750,000 in punitive damages. But in a similar trial in August, the diocese altered its defense in a case brought by another 40-year-old Burlington native, Thomas Murray, by expressing remorse for priest misconduct it said it tried to curb. A jury went on to deliberate for three days before announcing it couldn’t agree on a verdict, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial. The diocese again is expressing regret in the case of David Navari, a 43-year-old Burlington native who’s now a businessman in Takoma Park, Md. In a trial that began Wednesday, Navari’s lawyer, Jerome O’Neill, said his client was an 11-year-old altar boy at Burlington’s Christ the King Church when Paquette groped the fifth-grader’s genitals on two occasions in 1977. “We will show you that this diocese had a pattern and practice of aiding and abetting its priests in molesting children,” O’Neill said in his opening statement. “It covered it up for years. It’s only with lawsuits like this that the truth comes out.” Read the full story in Thursday's Rutland Herald.
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