Lawyers for former Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick filed a movement Monday to dismiss a case charging him with sexually assaulting a boy many years in the past, saying the 92-year-old once-powerful American prelate has dementia and isn’t competent to face trial.
McCarrick pleaded not responsible in September 2021 within the Massachusetts case that alleges the priest sexually abused the boy at a marriage reception at Wellesley College in June 1974. He is the one U.S. Catholic cardinal, present or former, ever to be criminally charged with youngster intercourse crimes.
His attorneys stated of their movement to dismiss that McCarrick was examined by a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science on the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who concluded the previous cardinal suffers from dementia, doubtless attributable to Alzheimer’s illness.
“While he has a limited understanding of the criminal proceedings against him, his progressive and irreparable cognitive deficits render him unable to meaningfully consult with counsel or to effectively assist in his own defense,” McCarrick’s attorneys wrote. They say McCarrick maintains his innocence of all expenses.
A prosecutor instructed the choose throughout a listening to earlier Monday at Dedham District Court that the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office can be hiring its personal skilled to conduct a second opinion on competency, based on David Traub, a spokesperson for that workplace. The prosecutors’ workplace declined additional touch upon the protection movement.
McCarrick, who lives in Dittmer, Missouri, faces three counts of indecent assault and battery on an individual over 14. He can nonetheless face expenses as a result of he wasn’t a Massachusetts resident and had left the state, stopping the clock on the statute of limitations.
Mitchell Garabedian, a widely known lawyer for church sexual abuse victims who’s representing the person accusing McCarrick, stated Monday that his consumer has “shown a lot of courage in coming forward to report the crimes and he intends to see this matter through to the end.”
“Experience has taught me that the closer in time to trial the more an accused priest becomes incompetent,” Garabedian stated in an e-mail.
No trial date has been set in McCarrick’s case.
The man instructed authorities throughout a 2021 interview that McCarrick, who was near the person’s household when he was rising up, started abusing him as a younger boy. Prosecutors say McCarrick would attend household gatherings and journey on holidays with them and that the sufferer referred to the priest as “Uncle Ted.”
Prosecutors say the abuse continued all through the years and occurred once more when the boy, who was then 16, was at his brother’s wedding ceremony reception at Wellesley College.
Prosecutors say McCarrick instructed the boy his dad needed him to have a chat with the priest as a result of the boy was “being mischievous at home and not attending church.” The man instructed investigators that they took a stroll round campus, and McCarrick groped him earlier than they went again to the social gathering. The man stated McCarrick additionally sexually assaulted him in a coat room after they returned to the reception, authorities wrote within the paperwork.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”