PENNSYLVANIA
Big Trial
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2016
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net
He was a Catholic priest with a secret life, posing on the Internet as “Katie Caponetti,” a teenage girl.
The priest would email a photo of a girl’s naked torso, or a video of a naked girl masturbating, and claim it was “Katie.” Then he would ask the girls he met online to send back naked photos and videos of themselves.
“A predator” who sexually exploited both teenage girls and boys was how Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella described Father Mark Haynes in federal court today. “He surrounded himself with children,” the prosecutor said. Throughout his 30-year career as a priest, he used his position to “sexually exploit and sexually abuse children.”
Defense Attorney Alan J. Tauber had a more entertaining explanation. He described the 56-year-old priest as a “woman occupying a man’s body.” According to Tauber, Father Haynes was a troubled soul who, while demonstrating an “extraordinary record of community service” as a priest at eight different parishes in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, never came to terms with his own “gender identity issues.”
In the end, U.S. District Court Judge R. Barclay Surrick decided that although there was “no question he did a number of good things” as a priest, Father Haynes’s crimes against children were so “outrageous” that his victims would spend “the rest of their lives” trying to recover. So the judge gave the priest a 20 year sentence, a $15,000 fine, and, upon his release, 10 years of supervised probation.
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