PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
By Ralph Cipriano
for Bigtrial.net
Here’s a switch. More than a decade ago, after former District Attorney Lynne Abraham got a judge to serve multiple subpoenas on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the archdiocese in a civil case has talked a judge into serving a subpoena on Abraham’s successor, District Attorney Seth Williams.
In a lengthy investigation that preceded a groundbreaking 2005 grand jury report on the church, D.A. Abraham got a judge to approve a series of subpoenas that pried open the archdiocese’s secret archive files. The files, kept under lock and key in a safe, contained some 45,000 pages of documents detailing what the grand jury described as “countless acts of sexual depravity” committed by 169 priests over four decades against hundreds of children.
But on March 12, ruling in the civil case of former altar boy “Billy Doe,” Common Pleas Court Judge Jacqueline F. Allen approved the serving of a subpoena on the D.A.’s office, over the objections of the former altar boy’s lawyers.
Court records don’t say what the archdiocese’s lawyers are seeking. But since the archdiocese has recently deposed two detectives from the D.A.’s office, it would be logical to assume that the archdiocese wants to see the D.A.’s confidential files from his flawed investigation of Billy Doe.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.