UNITED STATES
Vox
September 17, 2018
By Tara Isabella Burton
Differing state laws make it harder for some states to coordinate investigations.
Justice is coming slowly for the victims of the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis. Since a Pennsylvania grand jury report last month identified hundreds of priests accused of molesting at least 1,000 minors over the past seven decades in that state, several other states have announced their own investigations into historical Catholic clerical child sex abuse.
The scope and scale of the Pennsylvania report was made possible by the state’s legal structures, which give the attorney general’s office a significant degree of power to conduct investigations through the grand jury system. However, each of the states below has taken steps toward centralizing the likely hundreds, if not thousands, of potential cases of clerical sex abuse that may have taken place over the past few decades.
Each state will take a different approach, due to the range of laws concerning the convening of grand juries and who has the authority to subpoena documents from Catholic dioceses. For the most part, attorneys general are trying to gather historical records from parishes and diocese to conduct these investigations. The vast stores of private documents relating to sex abuse, compensation of victims, and transfers of offending priests were instrumental in the formation and impact of the Pennsylvania report.
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