AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 28 July 2015)
In March 2015, Victorian Catholic priest Father Leslie Sheahan, now 84, was jailed for three months for indecently assaulting a nine-year-old girl in one of his parishes forty years ago. In July 2015, immediately after leaving jail, he was charged in court again with indecently assaulting two more girls from another of his early parishes. He is now awaiting the outcome of this new court case.
In both court cases, the charges were laid in the Ballarat Magistrates Court by detectives from the Sano Taskforce in the Victoria Police sex crimes squad in Melbourne.
Father Leslie John Sheahan belongs to the Ballarat diocese, which covers the whole of western Victoria, extending to Mildura in the state’s far-north, to Horsham in the far-west and to Portland on the south-western coast. The city of Ballarat is where the bishop is based.
The March 2015 case
In the March 2015 court case, Sheahan pleaded guilty to “unlawful/indecent assault” of one girl. The offence was committed in 1970-1971 and therefore the charge was laid according to the criminal statutes existing at that time. (For crimes committed since the 1980s, the statutes include revised laws relating to sexual penetration.)
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