TRENTON (NJ)
New Jersey Monitor [Lawrenceville NJ]
April 28, 2025
By Dana DiFilippo
The Camden diocese has fought the case for seven years in secrecy
The New Jersey Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a long-fought case about whether a state grand jury can call out a private entity like the Catholic Church and recommend reforms for its public harms, like clergy sex abuse — or if such presentments are permissible only when they involve public entities and ongoing harms, as church attorneys contend.
The Catholic Diocese of Camden has been battling the state to prevent a presentment since 2019, when former Attorney General Gurbir Grewal vowed to investigate clergy sex abuse. He acted after a Pennsylvania grand jury returned a presentment against hundreds of priests who victimized more than 1,000 children over seven decades
Lower-court judges sided with the diocese and sealed the New Jersey case, so while the legal fight has continued for six years in secrecy, abuse victims were left wondering what happened to Grewal’s investigation. The Attorney General’s Office appealed to the Supreme Court for the final word, and the state’s top court agreed last month to consider the case and ordered some records unsealed.
Monday, Michael L. Zuckerman, the state’s deputy solicitor general, told the justices that trial and appellate judges erred by taking a “front-end, stop-the-presses approach” in preventing prosecutors from even taking the case to a grand jury and ruling on a presentment that does not yet exist.
“My frontline argument to you is that it is highly premature, inconsistent with the rule, for the trial court to have short-circuited this process before it could even start,” Zuckerman said. “And so for that reason, this court should simply reverse and remand for the process to go forward, possibly clarifying along the way that presentments can sometimes talk about non-governmental actors too.”
Any concerns about outing private individuals could be handled after a presentment is returned and before it is publicly disclosed, with a judge redacting or striking whatever they find concerning, Zuckerman added.
But attorney Lloyd D. Levenson, arguing for the Camden diocese, said clergy abuse was “long-ago conduct by private individuals that impacted only a fragment of the population.” Presentments must address “imminent” harms against a broad swath of the public perpetrated by public actors, such as government entities or public officials, so the lower courts were correct to thwart a presentment, Levenson added.
“If this court expands the scope of a grand jury presentment to include private individuals and private entities, conducting investigations in secret under the sole influence of a prosecutor with no opportunity to present a defense, the grand jury’s authority will be unlimited,” Levenson said. “Presentments were never intended to call attention to private conduct within private entities. We ask, respectfully, that this court affirm.”
He dismissed Zuckerman’s claim that barring a hypothetical presentment is premature.
“You’d have to be Rip Van Winkle to not realize what is going to come out of this,” he said. “I can tell you what’s going to come out of it: They’re going to say that from 1940 to the present, because that’s what the subpoena included, that there was problems in the Catholic Church with child sexual abuse.”
Abuse victims already have multiple avenues for justice — prosecutors can seek criminal indictments, and victims can sue for civil damages, Levenson said. He also cited a 2002 agreement between the state and New Jersey’s dioceses that required them to report all abuse allegations to public authorities. The state had five years to raise concerns about that agreement — but didn’t, proving that church has effectively “eradicated” the problem of sex abuse from its clerical ranks, he said.
Levenson also accused the state of “partisan” motives, questioning why prosecutors singled out the Catholic Church for investigation instead of other religious or private groups. He warned the justices that allowing the grand jury to weigh private entities’ conduct is “a slippery slope.”
“Where do you end this? Is the local rotary club, because it doesn’t admit women or minorities, subject to a presentment?” he said.
Several justices appeared unpersuaded by Levenson’s arguments.
“If the presentment does not exist, it’s hard to know if it’s based on partisan motives,” Justice Rachel Wainer Apter told him.
A presentment might not even have been returned had a grand jury heard the case, Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis added.
“It’s really difficult to speculate as to what a presentment — if 12 grand jurors even vote on a presentment — will look like, and trying to determine how to assess something that has not yet come into existence,” Pierre-Louis said.
The justices also mused over what counts as “public affairs or conditions,” which presentments are meant to address. Court rules and precedents don’t specify that “every single member of the public” must be impacted for a harm to rise to the level of a public affair or condition, Wainer Apter said.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner prodded Levenson about his complaint that Grewal announced his intention to secure a presentment in 2019, instead of just presenting the case to the grand jury without any public notice.
“Would we be here if the state had simply first started summoning victims to testify?” Rabner asked him.
State prosecutors have asked for an expedited review, with the Supreme Court expected to recess for the summer in June until October.
Victims react
Several clergy abuse victims watched the arguments from the packed gallery. Outside the courtroom afterward, many were cautiously optimistic about how the court will rule.
“I am hopeful. That’s the best I could say,” said Toni Latario of Alpha.
Latario said she was 11 when she first met her abuser, a Catholic missionary. Now 66, she’s a retired sergeant from the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office, where she ran the special-victims unit. She went public with her childhood abuse as an adult because she was concerned her abuser might have preyed on other children too, she said.
Kathy Leddy-Callahan of Bergen County, who said she was abused as a child, objected to shielding the names of abusive priests and any church leaders who hushed up abuse. Anyone else credibly accused, charged, or convicted of abuse would be publicly named, she added.
“Absolutely, the name should be revealed. Without question. That notion of a heavenly umbrella that protects is absurd, and it also attracts people who do that,” Leddy-Callahan said.
Mark Crawford, the New Jersey state director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, condemned the Camden diocese’s secrecy.
“They’re out there standing on that podium saying: ‘We’ve done all this for victims, we’ve put the truth out there, there’s nothing hidden.’ Then why is it they have worked so hard to suppress this investigation?” Crawford said.
He also disputed Levenson’s claim that clergy abuse no longer is a problem.
“That’s just not true. It’s accepted science that children who are abused don’t generally come forward for decades, if ever. So how can you say in the present, ‘Oh, nothing’s going on?’” Crawford said. “The whole truth has not been told, and that’s why it takes society and a grand jury investigation to one, expose what they still have hidden, and two, to help those victims who were abused heal.”