This one’s confusing. First we have this report saying:
A policeman’s son testified Tuesday that he withdrew from friends, sports and school clubs, and began a long descent into heroin addiction, after he was molested by two priests and a Catholic school teacher by age 11.
The former priest, Edward Avery, is said to have done this:
According to the trial witness Tuesday, defrocked priest Edward Avery made him do a striptease dance and engage in oral sex after a Saturday afternoon Mass in 1999.
“He just sat there with this eerie smile. Like he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but there,” the accuser testified. “He said, `This is what God wants.'”
The accuser said he walked home afterward and took a shower.
Avery has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the impish, slightly built altar boy. But the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, 66, of Wyndmoor and ex-teacher Bernard Shero, 49, of Levittown are fighting the charges at trial.
The alleged abuse (Avery plead guilty) has left the victim shattered.
The accuser was expelled from a Catholic high school in ninth grade and asked to leave a private Christian school two years later. He said he now works for relatives in Florida, and, after 23 stints at rehab, has been sober for 12 months.
He told jurors that he didn’t tell his parents about the abuse because he thought he’d get in trouble. He described the priests and nuns at his school as “almighty.”
“They’re basically another parent, but a little holier,” he said.
It appears to be a cut and dry case. But not so fast. Now we have this. In a “bombshell” moment, Avery has recanted his confession.
Ten months ago, defrocked Catholic priest Edward V. Avery began serving a sentence of 21/2 to 5 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexually molesting a 10-year-old altar boy from the Northeast.
On Thursday, Avery, 70, returned to a Philadelphia courtroom and recanted his guilty plea – denying any contact with the alleged victim and tossing into turmoil the trial of a former St. Jerome’s parish priest and a schoolteacher charged with serially sexually assaulting the same boy in 1998 and 1999.
His actions will have a ripple effect for other sex abuse cases as well.
Avery’s testimony could also affect last year’s landmark clergy sex-abuse trial that ended with the conviction of Msgr. William J. Lynn.
Lynn, 62, was convicted June 22 of child endangerment for placing Avery in position to abuse the St. Jerome’s altar boy. Lynn, once a top aide to Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, was the first church official nationwide convicted of covering up or enabling clergy sex abuse, and was sentenced to three to six years in prison.
After hearing of Avery’s testimony Thursday, Lynn’s lawyer said he planned within days to ask Superior Court or Lynn’s Common Pleas Court trial judge to reconsider Lynn’s case.
Why would Avery confess to something he didn’t do?
Bergstrom said he believed Avery’s recantation. “I think they forced him into this plea, and they made a deal for him that he couldn’t turn down.”
On the witness stand Thursday, Avery said as much. Questioned by Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti, Avery told the Common Pleas Court jury that he pleaded guilty “to avoid a more lengthy prison term. I didn’t want to die in jail.”
Later, under questioning by Michael McGovern, the lawyer for the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, Avery said that as he neared trial with Lynn in March, “I was looking at 60 years in prison. Every motion we filed had been turned down, so my options were less and less and less. So that’s why I chose to plead.”
If you’re wondering how all this will play out, we have this:
From a legal standpoint, Avery’s change of heart is unlikely to affect his status. The extensive colloquy – a question-and-answer between judge and defendant about the trial rights being abandoned – makes it clear that a person who pleads guilty has few, if any, ways to appeal.
Oy.
