CLEVELAND (OH)
cleveland.com
October 2, 2018
By Cory Shaffer
Sixteen years before the public release of a groundbreaking grand jury report that detailed decades of sexual abuse at the hands of Pennsylvania’s priests, Cleveland’s top prosecutor launched his own inquest that uncovered allegations against more than 140 priests in the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland spanning decades.
Unlike residents in Pennsylvania, Ohioans never got to see the vast majority of the allegations or learn the names of priests named as abusers and still had access to children.
A Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judge ruled in 2004 that the state’s laws that cloak the work of grand juries in secrecy outweigh the public’s interest in learning the body’s findings, after then-Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason reversed his earlier stance that he would support a full release of the report.
In the wake of the release of Pennsylvania’s case, Cuyahoga County’s current prosecutor, Michael O’Malley, said his hands remain tied by the ruling and does not see a way to secure the report’s release.
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