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	Supreme Court Declines to Stop Order on Release of Diocesan Documents The Georgia Bulletin October 6, 2009 http://www.georgiabulletin.org/world/2009/10/05/US-1/ WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The U.S. Supreme Court declined Oct. 5 to intervene in orders by Connecticut courts requiring the Diocese of Bridgeport to release thousands of pages of material from 23 lawsuits settled against six priests who were sued in sexual abuse cases. With no comment, the court declined to take the appeal from the diocese, filed after the state Supreme Court upheld a Waterbury Superior Court's order in 2006 that the diocese release documents to four newspapers that sought access to them. The diocese had sought to keep sealed more than 12,000 pages of depositions, exhibits and legal arguments in the lawsuits, most of which were filed in the mid-1990s. The cases were settled by the diocese in 2001 for undisclosed amounts of money, with the agreement that the documents would remain sealed. The following year, The New York Times, later joined by the Hartford Courant, the Boston Globe and The Washington Post, filed suit to see the documents. The newspapers described them as a key part of the church's record of how charges of clergy sexual abuse were handled. A statement from the Bridgeport Diocese did not address when it would release the documents.
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