Archdiocese Attorney Says No Evidence of Child Porn Found

Star Tribune
October 4, 2013

http://www.startribune.com/local/226487371.html?page=all&prepage=1&c=y#continue

Washington County is looking at the priest’s activities as far back as 1995. A victims’ advocate called for an investigation of the archdiocese leadership.

An attorney for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis said Friday that neither police investigators nor a computer forensics expert found evidence to support allegations by a former archdiocesan employee that one of its priests had viewed child pornography on his computer.

Tom Wieser, an attorney for the archdiocese, said some “false inferences” have been drawn from police reports that seem to imply that child pornography was found on the priest’s old hard drive.

The St. Paul police, Ramsey County and Washington County all indicated they would consider new investigations should evidence supporting the allegation — which surfaced anew Thursday — prove compelling. Meanwhile, the Hugo resident who first discovered pornography on the computer and reported it nearly a decade ago said he had kept a copy of what he found and provided it to police.

The former archdiocese employee, Jennifer Haselberger, 38, said in a deposition last month that she resigned from her job as chancellor for canonical affairs because top church officials failed to pursue her allegations last fall. Haselberger said child pornography had been copied from the priest’s old hard drive and stored on discs in a vault.

In a deposition for an unrelated case last month, Haselberger said that she reported the allegations to authorities and quit. She could not be reached for comment Friday and her attorney did not respond to messages.

The archdiocese released a statement Friday that didn’t address the specific case but said, “It is critical to understand that our standard is zero tolerance for sexual abuse of a minor or vulnerable adult and absolute accountability.”

Records show that St. Paul police investigated Haselberger’s allegations from at least February through July. They obtained three discs from the archdiocese that contained thousands of images. One disc was made by a state computer forensics expert who was hired through a private investigations firm. The other two were made by the Hugo man who first discovered the pornography and reported it to the archdiocese a decade ago.

After reviewing thousands of images on the discs, police closed their investigation without referring charges, saying they found no child pornography.

But some of the police reports suggested that the computer forensics expert found at least one image of a prepubescent boy performing oral sex on another male. That information appears to have come from a written report by the investigative firm. Police never actually obtained that report, however. It appears that officers were summarizing some of Haselberger’s conclusions as factual.

Police reports indicated that Wieser, the archdiocese’s lawyer, declined to share a copy of the forensics report last spring when he turned over the discs, but left open the possibility that he would do so. Wieser said no one from law enforcement ever contacted him to discuss it. He said the archdiocese is prepared to clarify the matter with law enforcement.