AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)
Second church official admits he didn’t know that touching a child ‘intimately’ was a crime just a day after fellow brother said he wasn’t aware paedophilia was illega
By SARAH DEAN
A second Marist church official, who held high positions in the order up to 2012, has said he didn’t know touching a child ‘intimately’ was a crime and would need to get legal advice to find out.
Alexis Turton, who was until 2012 head of the orders’ professional standards office, has told the Royal Commission into Institutional Handling of Child Sexual abuse, he only knew sexual intercourse with a child was a crime in the 80s.
He was giving evidence in the case of former brother Gregory Sutton who was jailed in 1996 for 67 counts of sexual abuse against boys and girls in NSW, Queensland and the ACT.
On Wednesday, it was also revealed that three days after it became known that police were investigating Sutton, Turton put the paedophile on a plane to Canada.
Turton denied repeatedly that he knew police were involved when he sent Sutton for ‘intensive therapy’ to the Southdown clinic in Canada.
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