MINNESOTA
Wall Street Journal
By TOM CORRIGAN
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has asked a bankruptcy judge for permission to hire a criminal defense team, after prosecutors in Minnesota filed charges against the archdiocese for allegedly failing to protect children from abusive priests.
In court papers filed Tuesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in St. Paul., Minn., the archdiocese asked Judge Robert Kressel to approve its application to employ two attorneys from Fredrikson & Byron P.A., a Minneapolis-based law firm.
The two attorneys are Joseph T. Dixon and Chelsea Brennan DesAutels, who will charge $400 per hour and $320 per hour respectively. Mr. Dixon’s fee represents a “substantial discount,” according to court papers.
For corporations in bankruptcy, expenses outside the ordinary course of business are typically subject to bankruptcy-court approval because those expenses could eat into limited resources that might one day be used to repay creditors or, in the archdiocese’s case, compensate alleged victims.
The archdiocese, home to 187 parishes and 825,000 parishioners, filed for chapter 11 protection in January in the face of mounting abuse-related lawsuits. The bankruptcy stemmed largely from the passage of the Minnesota Child Victims Act in 2013, which eliminated the statute of limitations for child sexual-abuse cases and opened a three-year window during which alleged victims can file civil lawsuits demanding compensation.
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