California “Accessory After The Fact” Laws
Lessee… child rape is a felony, check; knowingly aided the perp, check; knowing of the perp’s guilt, check; in order to protect the perp from arrest, trial, conviction, and/or sentencing, check.
You love me?
No, that last check is a problem.
(People v. Hardin, 207 Cal.App.2d 336 at 341)
Every piece of evidence I’m aware of shows that Mahoney’s intent was to protect the diocese from exposure and litigation, not to protect the offending priest. It was on that basis that the grand jury could not indict him.
What if it was just showering lessons, huh?
So, that the evidence shows that Mahoney warned one rapist-priest to stay in New Mexico because he had so many victims in Mahoney’s area that returning from California would certainly lead to the arrest of the rapist-priest doesn’t show the necessary intent?
The evidence that Mahoney counseled rapist-priests to avoid secular therapists doesn’t show the necessary intent? Mahoney knew that secular therapists were mandatory reporters and would be required to inform law enforcement if they believed that the rapist-priests would continue it rape?
Are you contending that if Mahoney had the intent to protect the diocese he couldn’t also have the intent to conceal crimes by keeping rapist-priests away from mandatory reporters and to help rapist-priests evade arrest by counseling them to stay in a different state than their victims?
Bricker, I realize you hedged your claim by saying that you haven’t seen evidence. I’ve never seen Tokyo, but my observations having nothing to do with whether Tokyo exists.
But JFTR, I’m asking.
And if you’ve got any thoughts about Bricker’s latest ‘state of mind’ comment, I’d like to include those in the ask. (Yeah, I’ve broken down and accepted ‘ask’ as a noun.)
I’d think that if (a) I knew someone had committed a criminal act (I can hear Bricker asking: how could I possibly know this, before trial and conviction?), and (b) I did something whose effect was plainly to make the crime more difficult for people to notice, or was plainly to make the connection between crime and criminal less apparent, my intent and state of mind and all that could pretty much be assumed to be one of trying to help a criminal avoid prosecution, absent strong evidence to the contrary.
Your thoughts?
I’d answer this, but I’m afraid we’d end up spending pages nitpicking the definition of “love”.
As to criminal prosecution of Mahoney, here is an article discussing it. The problem with the prosecution, according to the article, isn’t difficulty with specific intent, but rather when the offenses may have occurred. The tolling of the statute of limitations is a huge problem, as well as the fact there weren’t mandatory reporting of sexual offenses against children laws back in 1986/1987.
My takeaway from that is that he committed crimes. He just can’t be charged with them due to statute of limitations.
So he’s an un-charged, un-convicted criminal.
From a non-lawyers perspective it certainly sounds like he did intend to protect the offending priests. His ultimate motivation may have been to protect the reputation of the diocese but he deliberately chose, as a method of protecting the diocese, the tactic of ‘protect the priests from the secular authorities’.
If I may use an analogy: Mr X wants to kill Mr Y. Mr X decides to shoot Mr Y with a gun. If someone came along and stated ‘Mr X’s intent was to shoot Mr Y’ I wouldn’t say they were wrong just because shooting was the method Mr X chose to pursue some higher level goal.
Since a grand jury didn’t indict, I have to assume that there is a difference in my layman’s understanding of ‘intend’ and the legal meaning in the case. The fact that the Cardinal doesn’t seem to have expended much effort to protect future victims from these priests just seems to add an extra level of anger at the system.
You can’t “pretty much assume” in a criminal prosecution. The State would have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Cardinal intended to help the priests to “avoid or escape from arrest, trial, conviction or punishment.”
The problem with Bricker’s statement that the State couldn’t prove that element of the crime is that he’s creating a false dichotomy. The State wouldn’t have to prove that the Cardinal ONLY intended to help the priests avoid arrest, just that it was one of his intents. It’s not like an either/or proposition. I think the tiny amount of facts I know on the case, there is certainly evidence that the Cardinal intended that the priests not be arrested or prosecuted. I also think that the Bricker defense of “I only wanted to protect the church” wouldn’t be the least bit persuasive to a jury because he can have more than one intent. And the Cardinal’s actions, again depending on the proof, would be a clear indication he didn’t want the priests arrested or tried.
The real problem with the prosecution was the statute of limitations and lack of mandatory reporting laws, not that the Cardinal could only have one intent.
nnn
(Emphasis mine.) Exactly - the defendant’s actions would create a presumption of intent. Maybe I wasn’t clear, but this was exactly what I was talking about when I said “pretty much assume” based on a defendant’s knowledge and actions. Absent countervailing evidence, you get to assume intent based on actions, since you can’t exactly open up a defendant’s brain and see his intent coded into his neural pathways.
Were I someone else, not mentioning any names, I’d point out the legal problems with using the words “assume” and “presumption of intent” in discussing a criminal prosecution. You don’t get to “assume” his intent, you infer it based on the evidence presented.
Fortunately, we’re not in a courtroom or collaborating on the composition of a legal filing, so I’ll use standard English terms that convey the approximate meaning of the legalisms, and will stay away from terms of art like “rebuttable presumption.” 
Yeah, when a priest asks you to present your rebuttal, you should probably pass.
Okay, I for one believe that legalistic concepts like the presumption of innocence before conviction and the strict construction of criminal statutes is important to our legal system. OJ Simpson, for example, was not guilty of murdering his wife, because those with a right to so decide did do so, i.e., a jury of his peers, notwithstanding that he was found to be at fault in a wrongful death tort lawsuit based on the same incident.
In the Lower Merion webcam brouhaha of a few years back, I read what various participants had had to say and came to the conclusion that the principal’s claim of innocence was probably honest – that he was not guilty of authorizing invasion of privacy but only of putting trust in untrustworthy staff so enamored of the potentials of their technology that they failed to take the legal limitations on its use into account. Events proved me correct in this.
I would observe that Bricker is not at fault in pointing out the defenses that can be advanced for Cardinal Mahoney. Like any other accused man, he is entitled to the best defense our legal system can provide him. My issue with Bricker in this regard is that he appears to stand foursquare for Truth, Justice, and the American Way only when those accused are Conservative and/or Republican political leaders or functionaries and/or members of the Catholic hierarchy – there’s more than a little overlap there these days. I would challenge him to adduce more than one or two instances where someone who was not a Conservative Republican or Catholic leader was accused of something heinous and he put in their defense in these forums the amount of legal argumentation he has spent on any of those who are, at any time in the past seven years or so. (Statute of limitations, y’see.)
Is that fair?
I already linked to a thread in which I advanced precisely the same sort of defense for Ted Kennedy, against someone who was insisting on calling him a murderer.
Unless you discount that because you consider Ted Kennedy a Catholic leader?
I, too, believe that legalistic concepts like the presumption of innocence before conviction and the strict construction of criminal statutes is important to our legal system.
If I were a prosecutor arguing that a defendant should be fined or imprisoned for commission of a crime, it would be essential that I state the exact criminal statute that I was accusing the defendant of violating.
But I am not such an entity. I’m out here on a message board. I, like most people, have a pretty good general idea of what the laws are in areas where the laws have a long pedigree and apply in obvious ways. Knowingly and intentionally covering up someone else’s criminal activity is against the law, and I don’t need to be able to point to chapter and verse of the California statutes, or get into nitpicking about intent, to say that that is so. Bricker is simply trying to tie a simple matter up in legal knots, and hijack yet another thread while doing so.
I remember a dozen or so years ago, there was a poster who managed to hijack practically every thread he was in into a debate over the workability of the basic principles of libertarianism. These days, Bricker is doing the same thing, only with legal nitpickery instead of libertarianism as the direction of the hijack.
Gotta admit, I’m pretty tired of it.
I believe that starts you on your way to producing** more** than one or two instances.
Well, lefty gotta be wrong. Doesn’t matter if what lefty is wrong about means shit to a tree, gotta prove 'em wrong about something.