CONNECTICUT
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Sep 24, 2014
“Is there something in the drinking water up there? What the hell is wrong with the MEN representing the Hartford Archdiocese?…I come back to the same image, over and over again, how do these LAWYERS and CHURCH LEADERS stand upright?”
The occasion for this email outburst, from retired Philadelphia police captain Michael Skiendzielewski, was the — on the front page in the Hartford Courant – that the Archdiocese of Hartford is appealing a $1 million judgment in a priest molestation case on the grounds that the case unconstitutionally relies on Connecticut’s extension of its statute of limitation for sexual abuse.
The judgment came in 2012, after a trial in which a jury took just four hours to find the archdiocese negligent and reckless in its supervision of Ivan Ferguson, a priest who, testimony showed, admitted to the late Archbishop John F. Whealon that he abused two boys in a Simsbury rectory in 1979. After Ferguson received treatment for alcoholism, Wealon, at the priest’s request, reassigned him to a school for boys in Derby. There he and a friend repeatedly abused the victim and another boy between 1981 and 1983. Ferguson died in 2002.
In seeking to have the verdict overturned, the archdiocese’s lawyers argued before the state Supreme Court Monday that the victim’s lawsuit was filed unconstitutionally because the statute of limitation prevailing at the time of the abuse had expired. There’s no question that this is a legal mare’s nest.
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