NEW YORK (NY)
Daily News
May 15, 2019
By Trevor Boyer
A 98-year-old retired Catholic priest accused of possessing child pornography will never be fit to stand trial so charges against him should be dismissed, his lawyer argued in a motion filed on Wednesday at Bronx Supreme Court.
Monsignor Harry Byrne resides at St. Lawrence Friary Infirmary in Beacon, N.Y., and requires total care for all his basic needs, according to the filing. If accepted, the motion would dismiss the 74-count indictment that the priest faces.
“He is irreversibly infirm,” his attorney, Marvin Ray Raskin, told the Daily News. “There’s a lot of hope for rehabilitation, but there’s no practical expectation.”
Byrne was an activist priest who worked to create affordable housing in the Bronx and Manhattan, and he remained outspoken on church issues even after his retirement in 1996.
He faces 37 counts of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child and another 37 counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child. He turned himself into police on Oct. 31, 2017, and pleaded not guilty.
Byrne “had dozens of photographs on his computer of girls 8 to 14 years old performing sex acts with men or posing naked,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said in announcing his indictment in 2017.
Prosecutors charged that Byrne used internet search engines to find the pornography online. The illegal images were found in a forensic sweep of the priest’s computer by the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad, officials said.
In a July 2010 blog post, Byrne railed about the Catholic Church’s mishandling of the pedophile priest crisis.
“Bishops … quietly reassigned miscreants and thereby exponentially multiplied the number of victims,” he wrote. “In the U.S., not one cover-up bishop has been arraigned before church authorities for his part in the scandal.”
Byrne, who was chancellor of the Archdiocese of New York from 1968 to 1970, was living at the St. John Vianney Center for Retired Priests in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The probe, which was started five months prior to his indictment, was based on complaints from the home, officials said at the time.
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