PORTLAND (ME)
Press-Herald
February 12, 2020
By Megan Gray
Last year a judge ordered Ronald Paquin to serve 16 years in prison for sexually abusing a boy on trips to Maine in the 1980s.
A former Catholic priest is appealing his conviction for sexually abusing a young boy on trips to Maine in the 1980s.
Ronald Paquin, now 77, was found guilty in 2018 of 11 counts of gross sexual misconduct. A York County jury acquitted him of similar charges related to a second boy. A judge sentenced him last year to 20 years in prison with all but 16 years suspended.
Paquin was one of the priests exposed in the early 2000s by a sweeping Boston Globe investigation into clergy sex abuse. He pleaded guilty in 2002 in Massachusetts to repeatedly raping an altar boy between 1989 and 1992, beginning when the victim was 12. He spent more than decade in prison and was defrocked in 2004. Once he was released, he was indicted on criminal charges in Maine, and he was arrested in 2017.
Paquin is now incarcerated at the Maine State Prison in Warren, and he did not attend oral arguments Wednesday at the Maine Supreme Judicial Court hearing in Portland.
His attorney, Rory McNamara, raised multiple issues on appeal, but the justices focused on two during the hearing Wednesday.
McNamara argued first that the trial judge should have required the prosecutor to disclose the victim’s criminal history to the defense attorneys, saying that information was not available to the defense attorneys, but should have been available to the prosecutor through a federal database. The details of the victim’s criminal record were not disclosed during the trial or the appeal hearing.
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