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	SJC Denies Ex-priest Paul Shanley’s Bid for New Trial By Rachelle Cohen Boston Herald January 15, 2010 http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100115sjc_denies_ex-priest_paul_shanleys_bid_for_new_trial/srvc=home&position=recent The state’s highest court today affirmed the 2005 conviction of pedophile priest Paul Shanley and along with it the introduction of so-called “repressed memory’’ of victims in prosecuting cases of sexual abuse. In denying Shanley’s appeal, the unanimous Supreme Judicial Court decision rejected a laundry list of grounds raised by his legal team, including whether his conviction raised statute of limitations issues (it didn’t, the court said) or an abuse of judicial discretion (again, no). “There was no abuse of discretion in the admission of expert testimony on the subject of dissociative amnesia,’’ the court found, using the term used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association – the virtual bible of psychiatry and psychology. The case, which came to trial in 2005, involved a then 27-year-old victim, who testified to being abused by Shanley from the age of 6 until he was a 13-year-old. He testified that Shanley used to pull him out of religious classes at Newton’s St. Jean’s Parish. However, the victim also testified that he had repressed the memory of his abuse for years only realizing that he was a victim after he began reading about cases in Boston and looking at photographs of Shanley in the papers and on the Internet. At the time he was stationed at an Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. “The victim’s testimony about what he remembered of that abuse constituted the core of the evidence against the defendant at trial,’’ said Justice Robert J. Cordy, writing for the court. And so it was the use of repressed memory itself that was also ultimately put on trial, and today as earlier in the case found to be a legitimate psychological disorder that could explain the inability of abuse victims to report their abuse in what courts would usually consider a timely fashion. Shanley, now age 79, who had been sentenced to 12 to 15 years on two counts of child rape, remains in prison.
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