NEW MEXICO
The New Mexican
Milan Simonich Jul 9, 2017
Happenstance can change lives. In rare cases, it can even lessen human suffering that’s been unrelenting for 30 or 40 years.
New Mexico is home to one such story. It involves attorney Brad Hall and 68 of his clients. All of these clients initially identified themselves in court documents as John Doe. But they were not faceless people, not to Hall and eventually not to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.
Since 2012, Hall has obtained financial settlements for 67 of his John Doe clients who said they were molested during childhood by Catholic priests. The other client, John Doe No. 68, a man living in Santa Fe, just filed suit last week against the archdiocese and former priest Jason Sigler, who was a serial predator of boys.
Sigler, now 78, is living on the west side of Albuquerque, where he settled after serving nine years in prison in Michigan for molesting boys at a parish. Six of Hall’s clients say Sigler also sexually abused them while he was assigned to parishes in Northern New Mexico.
Hall deposed Sigler in some of the cases, an exercise in redundancy. Sigler arrived with a criminal attorney at his side and refused to answer any questions on the grounds that he might incriminate himself. By invoking his Fifth Amendment privilege, Sigler protected himself against a return to prison.
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