The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ordered some sex offenders removed from the online register of sex offenders, in effect hiding them from families and children who could be at risk.
The Court ordered a higher burden of proof in estimating the likelihood that an offender would strike again.
The Boston Herald reports that offenders who could be removed include a man who attempted to rape a woman while she was jogging, an man convicted of repeated sexual assaults of a 9-year-old girl, and a man who assaulted a 4-year-old girl in front of other children as the girl “pleaded for him to stop.”
The attempt to keep the identity of sex offenders from the general public was precisely the thing that Catholic Church in Boston was condemned for doing, points out Phil Lawler, former editor of the Archdiocesan newspaper The Pilot. Like the Massachusetts Court, the Church decided that repeat behavior could not be predicted.
The current Oscar-worthy movie Spotlight starring Michael Keaton deals in depth with the Boston Globe exposé of priest sex scandal and that began a global campaign to stop largely pederast behavior among some clergy.
The modus operandi of the Church in Boston, led by now-disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, was to place offenders into treatment and then move them to another parish but also not to tell the new parish that they had a sex offender in their midst.
Lawler, an outspoken critic of how the Boston Church handled the issue and who subsequently wrote The Faithful Departed, a book about the collapse of Catholic culture in Boston, says,
What caused the sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church? Too many bishops chose to protect abusive priests rather than innocent children.
Now—right here in Massachusetts, where the whole mess exploded some thirteen unlucky years ago—the state’s highest court has made the same appalling decision: to protect the predators at the expense of the children.
The Boston Globe has not yet announced the assignment of a team to expose the danger posed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse