Jeff Anderson Statement Praising Actions of Ramsey County Attorney in Charging Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis

Jeff Anderson & Associates
June 5, 2015

http://www.andersonadvocates.com/Posts/News-or-Event/1994/Jeff-Anderson-Statement-Praising-Actions-of-Ramsey-County-Attorney-in-Charging-Archdiocese-of-St-Paul-and-Minneapolis.aspx

The charges filed by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and John Choi today deserve high praise. The complaint is against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and it demonstrates and recites the problem to be a systemic one, a corporate one, by the top officials, by the Archdiocese, spanning years. It names 10 officials engaged in a pattern of conduct and alleges serious violations of law about which we have been concerned and addressing for years.

I have, in the past, been openly critical of the seeming inaction by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and John Choi in not charging the Archdiocese officials pertaining to Curtis Wehmeyer and others, and expressed frustration over a seeming lack of vigor. Today, I am praising the Ramsey County Attorney for taking this action. It is evident that it took that office a long time to carefully develop the evidence and to conduct their own independent investigation, armed with the documents disgorged in civil litigation and the depositions taken of the top officials, by interviewing witnesses and developing a body of evidence that has supported a criminal complaint against the Archdiocese as a corporation.

Naming the Archdiocese as a corporation implicates the wrongdoing and the failure to protect children by all of the top officials, past and present, and the scope of this demonstrates a serious systemic problem that, now, law enforcement has chosen to address in a definitive way. For that, we are grateful and it brings great comfort to the survivors and the many families who have never been able to understand why top officials have not been held accountable like ordinary citizens would be if they had made the choices this Archdiocese has.