MASSACHUSETTS
NBC Boston
By Eli Rosenberg and Marc Fortier
Convicted pedophile priest Paul Shanley is scheduled to be released from prison this week.
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represented Shanley’s victims and numerous other victims of the Catholic church child sex abuse scandal in Massachusetts, told NBC Boston that Shanley is set to be released on Friday. He is currently being held at the medium security Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater.
Shanley, one of the most notorious figures in the clergy sex abuse scandal, was sentenced in 2005 to 12 to 15 years in prison for raping a boy repeatedly at St. Jean’s Parish in Newton in the 1980s.
District Attorney Marian Ryan confirmed that Shanley is set to be released, but didn’t say exactly when. Upon release, she said he is scheduled to begin 10 years of supervised probation. He is not allowed to have contact with children under the age of 16.
Ryan said her office is not legally permitted to seek that Shanley be confined further without expert testimony that he meets the legal criteria for civil confinement as a “sexually dangerous person.”
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