PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2013
By Ralph Cipriano
for Bigtrial.net
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, has called for an investigation of the local district attorney’s office. He wants to know if any prosecutor had a financial stake in the criminal convictions of three priests and a former Catholic school teacher.
In response, the disciplinary board of the state Supreme Court has assigned disciplinary counsel Donna M. Snyder to investigate.
Meanwhile, the National Catholic Reporter, the paper that led the way in exposing the national scandal of clerical sex abuse, has run an editorial questioning the credibility of the district attorney’s star witness.
Here’s what NCR had to say about the witness responsible for putting three priests and a former teacher in jail: “The discrepancies between Billy Doe’s accounts to the archdiocese and later to the grand jury are not minor, they are utterly different versions of reality.”
The NCR editorial also called into question the conduct of the district attorney’s office: “Years of elaborate deceptions by Catholic leaders are hardly avenged if the response is more cunning deception by civil society.” That’s why NCR labeled the D.A.’s convictions, which may have relied on a phony plea bargain, “a shallow victory.” The newspaper called on Seth Williams to answer the questions originally posed by this blog months ago, questions that the D.A. continues to stonewall.
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