ARGENTINA
inSerbia
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Father Julio César Grassi, a Roman Catholic priest in the Buenos Aires suburb of Morón, has been ordered to serve his prison sentence after a court ruling denied his pleas to remain under house arrest.
In 2009, the priest was convicted by a three-judge panel in the criminal court of Morón of sexually abusing a minor, a teenage boy. In that case, the prosecutor was seeking a 30-year sentence for the priest and eventually, the court sentenced him to fifteen years after finding him guilty of two of the seventeen charges he was facing, the most grave of those being sexual abuse and “corruption” of a minor.
Grassi repeatedly appealed the ruling and was rejected three times, including last week at his final appeal at the Supreme Court of Buenos Aires Province in the city of La Plata. That ruling paved the way for the priest to be taken back to the court that originally tried him in Morón for final sentencing. There, he tried to appeal once again, this time regarding the way the sentence would be served and not the length of the sentence.
The court in Morón then rejected that appeal, ordering Grassi to the original fifteen year prison sentence he received in 2009, minus one month that he served that year.
The case piqued the interest of people in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, a country and a region long associated with powerful catholic clergies and figures. The judicial system was criticized by many in Argentina for seemingly granting the priest many privileges that non-clergy do not enjoy, like receiving house arrest only one month after beginning his fifteen year sentence under certain conditions.
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