MASSACHUSETTS
NBC New York
[with video]
Convicted pedophile priest Paul Shanley has completed his prison sentence and is expected to be released this week.
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represented Shanley’s victims and numerous other victims of the Roman 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. He was defrocked after dozens of men came forward and said he had molested them when they were children.
During his trial, Shanley’s accuser, then a 27-year-old firefighter, said Shanley would pull him from Sunday catechism classes and rape and fondle him, beginning when he was 6 years old. The man said he recovered memories of the abuse as the clergy sex abuse scandal unfolded in the Archdiocese of Boston during the early 2000s.
“Even though he is an old man, and even though he’s served his time, I worry that, that No. 1, the population is still at risk, and No. 2, this is a terrible thing to put Shanley’s alleged victims through,” said Terence McKiernan of Bishop-Accountability.org.
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