Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy
“I think Cardinal McCarron was simply worried on your behalf. I expressed that poorly.”
“Thank the cardinal for his concern, Paul. Hope you can both keep the faith.”
SEVEN
“THE boss said that to you?” Donner asked. He’d overheard my short conversation with Mercer before the elevator doors closed to take us up to Part 67 of the Supreme Court, Criminal Term, of the state of New York, on the fifteenth floor of the monolithic and dreadfully outdated WPA-designed courthouse.
“Why? Can you see steam coming out of my nose and ears? Blood oath, Barry — you never heard what I said about Battaglia or the cardinal. I just needed to vent to a friend so I can calm down and focus on what we’ve got to do today.”
“I didn’t think I’d be making enemies in this job.”
“Nothing to get paranoid about. You won’t. This is a tough issue for Battaglia. He’s one of the city’s most visible Catholics in public office, and the church has been notoriously ineffective in acknowledging the problem of sexual abuse in its ranks.”
“Have you prosecuted other priests?” Donner asked as the doors opened and we made our way past paroled perps and bedraggled relatives waiting for short visits with imprisoned sons and husbands and brothers whose cases were also on the court calendars.
“I was a rookie when I handled my first complaint, a dozen years ago. A Dominican woman from Inwood had an eleven-year-old kid. The local parish priest took an interest in him when he started struggling in school.”
“That must happen all the time.”
“It does. So Mrs. Caceres was fine with it. In fact, she thought it was the best of all possible worlds. Father Leopold offered to tutor the boy in his apartment the evenings that Mrs. Caceres was working late. She was saying more novenas for Leopold’s well-being than anyone on the planet. What better? In a neighborhood where gangs roughed up or recruited all the kids, this boy had a guardian angel keeping him off the streets.”
“Till the kid complained?” Barry asked.
“He couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother, which is common with most adolescents. He just became very withdrawn and wanted to stop going to see Father Leopold. His mother insisted otherwise, telling him he’d better cooperate and do everything the priest wanted him to do. Everything. Listen to him, she kept insisting, and obey him. No disrespect.”
“And he did, right?”
“Yes, he did. For several weeks, until he had a breakdown in school, after Leopold had moved from touching the boy to sodomizing him. It was a doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian who notified child welfare and the police. That’s how I got the case.”
“Did you have Leopold arrested?”
The court officer unlocked the door and let us into the empty courtroom. We walked down the aisle and I pushed the gate that admitted us to the well, taking our assigned table closest to the jury box.
“It was my rude awakening to how the church operated. At the first whiff of a complaint, the priests were moved to another archdiocese. Another state, thousands of miles away. Beyond the subpoena power of the state of New York. Leopold had come from some town in Wisconsin, where he’d run the youth group. Before the ink on the Caceres complaint was dry, he was relocated to a really poor parish south of Austin, Texas. The church leaders just shuffled their problems around, hoping no one would notice.”
“But you’re usually a pit bull about this stuff, Alex. Didn’t you go after Leopold? Didn’t you bring the boy in?”
“Once. I had one shot at an interview with a painfully shy adolescent who would rather have had a root canal than talk to me about Leopold’s sexual advances. I had a whole plan for gaining his trust over time and building the case. But the church lawyers moved faster than I did. They offered Mrs. Caceres a settlement she couldn’t refuse.”
“Money? She took money to kill the case?”
“You bet she did. She didn’t want to start a scandal, publicly accusing a priest of molesting her son. Wouldn’t be good for the boy, and it certainly wouldn’t be good for her beloved church.”
“And Leopold, what became of him?”
“Typical of the pattern, Barry. A couple of years in a small parish in a remote part of Texas hill country, then on to Oregon, then up to Bridgeport. And always gravitating toward his target population. Supervising the altar boys, organizing retreats for the youth choir. You’ve seen stories about civil cases against priests, but you’ll search pretty hard to find any criminal cases that have been successfully prosecuted. Not one in this county when I got to this job.”
“Is that why you’ve been so adamant about no plea for Koslawski?”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “He’s had lots of chances, over and over again. He’s hurt so many young lives and walked away from them each time, protected by the Mother Church.”
“And if Sheila Enright hadn’t been so hell-bent on putting Koslawski’s character in evidence through Bishop Deegan, the religious background wouldn’t have tiptoed its way into this case.”
We were spreading our files on the table when Enright and her client walked into the courtroom. She was an associate in a white-shoe law firm in which her senior partners billed their clients at $850 an hour. That representation was the first sign that Koslawski had someone with a deeper pocket trying to protect him. When I checked the list of archdiocesan settlements, the McGuinn, Hannon, and Cork name came up repeatedly.
“Good morning, Sheila,” I said.
She mumbled a greeting to me and to Barry, but her client was stone-faced. “Any sign of Keets yet?”
“His secretary called to tell us to come up. She said he’s ready to go.”
Enright put her briefcase beside her chair and began whispering to her client. It was a smart move for a sex offender to have a woman at his side for trial. It often made a defendant seem more benign and unlikely to be threatening to anyone. It might have backfired in this circumstance because of Enright’s manner. Her attack on the victim had been strident and nasty in tone and substance. There was nothing to corroborate his version of the events — there rarely was, since sex crimes were not likely to be committed in front of witnesses — but the youth’s calm demeanor and forthright responses to her questions reflected the confidence of his candor.
One of the court officers banged twice on the side door that led to the judge’s robing room. “All rise. The Honorable Lyle Keets entering the courtroom.”
The black robe draped over his shoulders and the leather-bound notebook he carried suited the judge’s patrician bearing. Keets mounted the three steps to the bench, followed by his law assistant, and ordered us to be seated as he pulled in his chair. The stenographer took her place in the well, between the witness stand and the judge’s chair above her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, lifting a fountain pen while checking the previous day’s notes. “We suspended after the direct examination by Ms. Enright of her witness, Bishop Edward Deegan. Are we ready to resume testimony?”
“Yes, sir,” Barry Donner answered.
“Your witness. You may go ahead.”
“Actually, Your Honor, Ms. Cooper is going to handle this cross.”
I could hear Sheila’s chair scrape across the floor as she half rose to her feet before thinking twice — she had no grounds for an objection — and reseating herself.
This was a circumstance of Sheila Enright’s own creation. Koslawski had his constitutional right to a trial by jury, but Shelia had chosen to waive that right with advice from two of her senior partners after they scoped the pool of prospective jurors. The tactic was occasionally used by savvy lawyers who suspected that their clients might not get a fair shake if a dozen of their peers found charges like these distasteful, and chose to rely instead on a judicial temperament that might be cooler rather than emotional, arguing the case to the bench.
If jurors had been seated in their usual role as triers of the case facts, then the judge would be responsible only for applying the law to those facts. The prosecution would need a unanimous verdict of twelve in order to convict. The defense team could claim a partial victory by hanging the group with only one not-guilty vote. Here, Lyle Keets would not only be responsible for all questions of law, but he would also be the sole trier of fact, the final arbiter in the defrocked priest’s case.
So the McGuinn trio of high-priced legal talent had decided to take their chances by opting to not allow Denys Koslawski to be judged by a jury of his peers. The voir dire of a large panel of citizens would have been certain to elicit his background in the clergy, and word would have spread through the courthouse like wildfire, attracting the tabloid press to cover this now anonymous case. You could never guess what personal views a devout practitioner — or a lapsed Catholic — would bring to the jury box.
“Would you please ask the bishop to retake the stand?” Lyle Keets nodded at the officer to bring in the witness while Sheila Enright smirked her discontent at me.
Once the case was assigned to Judge Keets, the defense team made an educated guess that the elderly jurist, who’d been on the bench since the days when the testimony of a sexual assault victim required corroboration — independent evidence of the elements of the crime, which didn’t exist in the present case — might buy into their denials. We had all done enough research to know that Keets was High Episcopal, but none of us could figure which way that would cut when it came to his jurisprudence.
Bishop Deegan, close to eighty years of age — about ten years older than the judge — swept into the courtroom, his head erect and his gold pectoral cross highlighted against his black suit and white clerical collar. He took the stand and sipped from the cup of water offered to him before making himself comfortable.
“May I remind you, Your Grace, that you are still under oath?” Keets said.
The defense had also made a lame effort to close the courtroom, but the law was well established that with rare exceptions the public was entitled to be present at criminal trials. Deegan peered over my shoulder as if to reassure himself that no spectators had entered present. Then he looked expectantly at Barry Donner and seemed surprised when I rose to my feet to begin the questioning.
“We haven’t met, sir. I’m Alexandra Cooper and I’m working with Mr. Donner on this case.”
“Very well then. Good day, Ms. Cooper.”
Deegan’s credentials had been established by Sheila Enright the previous afternoon. He was presently Bishop of the Diocese of Chicago, with degrees that included a doctorate in canon law — a codification of the law of the Catholic Church.
“You spoke yesterday about the time, fifteen years ago, when you served as an auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of New York, is that right?”
“That is correct.”
“And you met Mr. Koslawski during that period, when he was a priest in a local parish?”
Deegan nodded in the defendant’s direction. “Yes, I was the vicar in charge of education, and Denys was one of our most able teachers back then.”
That was a point he had made over and over again the previous day. Enright had taken the bishop through all of the good deeds of the young priest to hammer home his sterling character.
I asked a series of questions regarding the interactions between the two men and accepted the praise that Deegan heaped on the defendant. I wanted it clear that I had respect for his exalted position, for his religious leadership and community influence, and for the pride he so richly took in his many years of church leadership.
“During your time in this archdiocese, did you ever hear any allegations against Father Koslawski regarding sexual abuse?”
The bishop’s answer was out of his mouth before I could finish the question. “I had no duties that involved me in issues of sexual abuse.”
“Most respectfully, sir, my question was whether or not you heard any allegations, whether in or apart from your duties?” I changed the course of my inquiries, though Deegan was determined not to give me an inch. The law allowed me to ask a character witness not only about specific acts within his direct knowledge, but also the defendant’s reputation for morality within the community.
“No, I did not.”
“Did you ever hear any allegations that Father Koslawski put his hands on the knees and thighs of a young man in a movie theater?”
“Objection.” Sheila Enright didn’t rise from her seat. “Asked and answered.”
“You may respond,” the judge said.
“I don’t recall.”
“Let me back up a step, Bishop Deegan. Would you consider such conduct — the unconsented groping of a minor’s thigh and knees, by an adult — to be sexual abuse?”
“Objection, Your Honor.”
“I’ll allow it.”
I had studied Deegan’s answer to this question in a deposition he had given in a civil case involving another priest.
“No, I would not.”
“Is there some other way you would describe that conduct, sir?”
Deegan cleared his throat with a cough. “I would say that it’s improvident, Ms. Cooper. Improvident touching.”
Exactly the language he had used in the civil matter two years earlier, which had led to a furious interchange with the plaintiff’s lawyer.
“So, ‘not sensible or wise’ would be your conclusion about such touching. Improvident, but not a sexual violation.”
“Correct, Ms. Cooper. I don’t consider those — those, well — areas to be sexual parts.”
He ought to talk to women who ride the subway in New York, subject to the uninvited stroking of strangers on crowded trains.
Enright was on her feet. “Your Honor, I think Alex — Ms. Cooper — is already venturing beyond the scope of my direct.”
“I’m just trying to get the semantics right, Judge. I don’t want to use a conclusory term like ‘sexual abuse’ if the bishop doesn’t agree with the legal definition.”
“Ask your next question, Ms. Cooper.” Keets stared at me over the rim of his reading glasses.
“You were responsible for hearing complaints against priests, were you not?”
“Most certainly.”
“And what were the nature of those complaints?”
The bishop smiled at me now, almost beatifically. “Some were liturgical, Ms. Cooper. Some were theological.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I received complaints that a priest’s sermons were too long,” Deegan said, “or that he sang poorly. On the more serious side, there might have been a charge that a priest was promoting a practice in violation of church teachings, that kind of thing.”
“And abuse of alcohol?”
“Yes, certainly. Those came to me.”
“So sexual abuse was the only parish problem that was not under your jurisdiction.”
