Newton Priest Paul Shanley To Be Released From Prison

NEWTON, MA — A priest at the forefront of the Boston Clergy sex abuse scandal and convicted in 2005 of raping at least one 6-year-old boy at St. Jean's Church in Newton is scheduled to be released later this week, according to the Middlesex District Attorney's office.

Back in 2005 the DA's office had requested Paul Shanley, who served as a pastor at Newton's St. Jean l'Evangeliste and was convicted of two counts of rape of a child and two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child, be imprisoned for life. Shanley was sentenced to a 12 to 15 year prison sentence.

"He is now scheduled to be released from that sentence and begin ten years of supervised probation," according to a statement by the DA. "The defendant will be monitored by the probation department for the next 10 years and has been ordered to have no contact with children under 16 years of age."

In the 1980s Paul Shanley served as pastor of St. Jean l’Evangeliste Church in Newton. He was arrested in 2002 a little more than a decade after he was transferred to California from Boston as a “priest in good standing” according to Vanity Fair, and then convicted three years later. He was accused of assaulting four boys, including Greg Ford and Paul Busa, who both alleged that, for years beginning in 1983, when they were 6 years old, Shanley would pull them out of catechism classes and rape them, Vanity Fair reported.

While he was in prison he appealed his case in 2007, it was at first denied. Then in 2009 it was sent to the Supreme Judicial Court which affirmed the original conviction the following year. He was convicted based on the memories of one man's memories of what took place between 1983 and 1989 after three other men were dropped from the case.

The news that the now 86-year-old Shanley is slated to go home 12 years after his conviction has been met with anger from priest abuse victims and their advocates who worry he his still a danger to the public, according to multiple reports. Some of Shanley's other alleged victims and their attorneys are planning a press conference later this week.

He is currently being held at the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater.

Without expert testimony that states Shanley meets the legal criteria for civil confinement as a sexually dangerous person, the District Attorney's office can't petition the courts for such. But, the District Attorney said it had hired two qualified examiners. Although doctors have preliminarily told the District Attorney's office that Shanley does not satisfy the legal criteria.

Read the full WCVB story here.

Read the Vanity Fair story about Shanley here.

Read a 2010 story about St. Jeans from Wicked Local here.

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Image: Former Catholic priest Paul Shanley listens to Middlesex Superior Court Judge Stephen Neel as he speaks about the jury selection process for Shanley's child rape trial Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Tom Landers, Pool)