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  Priest Is Sentenced in Internet Sex Case

New York Times
October 12, 2000

A Roman Catholic priest who served a parish in Staten Island was sentenced today to four months in a halfway house and four months under house arrest for traveling to New Jersey to have sex with someone he thought to be a 15-year-old boy.

But the person in New Jersey was actually an undercover F.B.I. agent who had begun conversing on the Internet a month earlier with the priest, the Rev. Morgan J. Kuhl, then based at St. Mary of the Assumption, according to charges filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. F.B.I. agents later uncovered evidence that Father Kuhl had had sex with boys in New Jersey and New York, a prosecutor said.

Father Kuhl, 33, who pleaded guilty in June to a single charge of traveling interstate to have sex with a minor, was also fined $3,000 by Chief Judge Anne E. Thompson of Federal District Court.

The judge accepted defense arguments that Father Kuhl suffered from diminished capacity because of compulsive sexual behavior.

The New York Archdiocese said Father Kuhl became administrator of St. Mary in November 1998. An administrator runs a parish until a pastor is appointed, celebrating Mass and handling the budget.

 
 

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