NEW YORK/VERMONT
Albany Times Union
By Brendan J. Lyons
Updated 9:38 pm, Friday, February
Albany
The Albany Roman Catholic Diocese will not have to turn over nearly 40 years’ worth of sexual abuse records after a federal appeals court on Friday ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit filed against the diocese in Vermont by a Warren County man who was taken across state lines and raped by an Albany priest.
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that a Vermont-based U.S. District Court judge, William K. Sessions III, erred when he ruled the Albany diocese had strong enough business ties to Vermont to be sued in that state, where the victim’s claim was not time-barred under the statute of limitations. The federal lawsuit, filed in Burlington, remains standing against the priest, Gary Mercure, who is in prison for raping two altar boys.
A three-judge panel that issued the decision also noted that had the diocese been forced release decades worth of internal sexual abuse files, that disclosure could not be undone if another court overturned the case on appeal following any trial.
“There is no evidence that this information has previously been disclosed. The cat is still in the bag, and the ensuing litigation will inevitably let it out,” the judges wrote. “Moreover, unlike a run-of-the-mill tort case, this litigation implicates significant confidentiality interests for the diocese, its priests, and (more alarmingly) other victims (and their families) who would likely be subjected to distressing depositions, revisiting pasts that would not otherwise be revisited in a case solely against Mercure.”
The judges compared their decision to dismiss the lawsuit to a 2010 ruling by the same court that barred pretrial disclosure of “confidential reports of undercover New York City police officers protected by the law-enforcement privilege.” They cited wording in the earlier ruling that “once the cat is out of the bag, the right against disclosure cannot later be vindicated.”
The 37-year-old man who filed the lawsuit was raped by Mercure in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, beginning in the late 1980s when he was an 8-year-old altar boy in Queensbury, according to court records.
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