By Dylan T. Lovan
Kentucky.com
February 15, 2009
http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/695607.html
LOUISVILLE — When a retired Catholic priest faced dozens of sexual abuse charges a few years ago, Louisville's prosecutor asked the public to consider the potential crimes against children, not the church's strong ties to the community.
"We're not prosecuting a priest," Dave Stengel said in 2002. "We're prosecuting a pedophile who happens to be a priest."
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| AP - Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Stengel talked to reporters in Louisville last month after the arraignment of ?Pleasure Ridge Park High football coach David Jason Stinson, who pleaded not guilty to reckless homicide in a player?s heat-related death. Photo by Michael Clevenger |
The three-term prosecutor has waded into community-dividing cases before and since, maybe none more so than when he charged popular Pleasure Ridge Park High School football coach Jason David Stinson last month with reckless homicide in the heat-related death of a teenage player.
His message to the community echoed the one in his case against the priest.
"This is not about football, this is not about coaches," Stengel said. "This is about an adult person who was responsible for the health and welfare of a child."
Since the indictment in what is thought to be an unprecedented criminal case against a coach in a player's heat death, hundreds of parents, students, players and other supporters have rallied to support Stinson. It also has opened the 62-year-old Stengel to criticism.
"I'd say this coach's life is pretty much destroyed," said Ernie Sanders, a retired teacher and a graduate of Pleasure Ridge. He called for Stengel to resign in a letter to the editor in The Courier-Journal, saying the prosecutor "has a very flexible set of rules when applying the law."
But the criticism won't influence Stengel's decision-making, friends and former colleagues said.
"I have never known him once to ask what the public might think or what any interest group might think," said Jeff Derouen, executive director of the Public Service Commission, who worked for Stengel for seven years.
Stinson was overseeing a hot August practice when 15-year-old lineman Max Gilpin collapsed while running sprints; he died three days later. It was one of six heat-related deaths in high school and college athletics in 2008, but the only one in which the coach is facing criminal charges.
Stengel chose to lead the prosecution.
"It was just so huge, I didn't feel right in handing it off to anybody else at that point," Stengel said after Stinson's arraignment.
J. Allen Cobb, an ex-prosecutor who worked under Stengel until 2003, said his former boss is catching heat over the decision, as "if he were doing something for a higher office."
"Come on, politically this isn't the shrewdest of moves," Cobb said. "I've never known him to think about politics."
Stinson's attorney, Brian Butler, who also once worked under Stengel, said he was not surprised to learn that Stengel would be the lead prosecutor.
"I have nothing but positive things to say about my time with David," Butler said. "He's got a job to do, and so do we."
Stengel won a special election for the office in 1996 and has been unopposed in two elections since.
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