PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Priest Abuse Trial Blog
Ralph Cipriano
“I will never really know what happened.”
Those were Patricia Bukowski’s last words on the witness stand Wednesday, when she was asked for the final time what happened back in 1996, when Father James J. Brennan was alone in his apartment with Patricia’s son, Mark, who was only 14 at the time.
The reason why the defense lawyers in the courtroom were smiling was you could almost hear the man who asked Patricia Bukowski that last question, Father Brennan’s lawyer, William J. Brennan, already rehearsing his closing statement.
If the victim’s own mother has reasonable doubt about what happened that night in the priest’s bedroom, how can you, the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, also not have that same reasonable doubt?
That’s the way some people in Courtroom 304 saw it, the people who think that Father Brennan and his co-defendant, Msgr. William J. Lynn, are being railroaded by an anti-Catholic prosecution and press.
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