HARRISBURG (PA)
Associated Press
August 17, 2018
By Marc Levy
Attorneys general around the U.S. have been largely silent this week about any plans to conduct an investigation like Pennsylvania’s that uncovered widespread child sexual abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses, although New York’s top prosecutor is an exception, saying she is exploring teaming up with the local district attorneys.
The comments by the New York attorney general’s office Friday come on the heels of a sweeping grand jury report that also accused a succession of bishops and other church leaders of helping to keep quiet allegations against 300 “predator priests” who had victimized more than 1,000 children.
Attorney General Barbara Underwood has directed her criminal division to reach out to local district attorneys to see if they can “establish a partnership on this issue,” her spokeswoman, Amy Spitalnick, said in statement. “Victims in New York deserve to be heard as well.”
In New York, the attorney general, unlike district attorneys, doesn’t have the power to convene grand juries to investigate such abuses. Two, in Westchester and Suffolk counties, already have.
Meanwhile, many state attorneys general have a narrow scope of investigative authority, unless a local prosecutor refers a case to them. That’s ultimately how Pennsylvania’s grand jury investigation began.
In 2013, a diocese’s settlement with 11 men who accused a Franciscan friar of sexually abusing them at a Catholic high school in northeast Ohio more than two decades earlier stoked complaints that the friar had abused boys at a Pennsylvania school in the late 1990s.
The friar, Stephen Baker, 62, killed himself shortly afterward, but the district attorney in Cambria County began investigating the matter before referring it to the state attorney general’s office.
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