LONDON (ENGLAND)
Spear’s Magazine
December 10, 2018
To what extent do we have a right to reputation? And to what extent does that right fall away when an accusation is made of criminal conduct, asks reputation lawyer Jennifer Agate
In a recent decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court determined that the names of eleven priests accused of sexual abuse in a grand jury report should remain permanently redacted. A necessary measure, the court said, to ‘protect their constitutional right to reputation’.
The allegations were of the utmost seriousness, the report described by the Pennsylvania Attorney General as the ‘largest, most comprehensive report into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church ever produced in the United States’. While the names of 270 priests had already been made public, eleven were redacted. Those priests argued that they had not had the chance to respond to the serious allegations made against them, citing examples of serious factual errors in the evidence presented to the Grand Jury which, they said, could be easily rebutted. The court agreed.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.