Showing posts with label Spotlight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spotlight. Show all posts

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Sherman speaks on lawyering, Spotlight investigation

Ambassador Robert Sherman
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Attorney Robert A. Sherman, U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 2014 to 2017, spoke to students, staff, and faculty at the University of Massachusetts Law School today about his experience as a lawyer and diplomat.

Sherman's work experience spans criminal and civil practice, as well as politics and diplomacy. In a tort vein, from 2002 to 2004, Sherman was lead counsel for plaintiffs in sex abuse claims against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Those were among the cases investigated by the Boston Globe "Spotlight" team, whose work was dramatized in the 2015 feature film, Spotlight.

Early in the wave of sex-abuse litigation against the church, Sherman said, plaintiff attorneys faced daunting hurdles, such as statutes of limitations and charitable immunity for the church in state law. Another problem was simply identifying victims. Many victims self-blamed, and a powerful stigma attached to the first persons who came forward. 

As is problematically common in American tort litigation, secrecy in negotiated dispute resolution and non-disclosure agreements in settlements prevented the public from knowing who the perpetrators were and from understanding the scope of the wrongs. The same conditions impeded the Spotlight investigation.

Sherman said that he's spoken publicly only recently about his connection to Globe editor Walter V. Robinson and the Spotlight team. Because of his work on the cases, Sherman said, he knew more than the public, and more than the Spotlight team, about the magnitude of the problem. And he knew who the perpetrators were. Yet bound by attorney-client confidentiality, Sherman said, he could not speak freely. He wrestled with his ethical responsibilities, he said.

Occasionally, Sherman met Robinson on a park bench—like in a spy thriller. Robinson wanted names. Sherman couldn't give them. But Robinson might say, for example, "Our sources tell us to look into Father Shanley." Sherman would respond, "I've heard of Father Shanley." That was all Robinson needed to hear to know that his lead was good.

Sherman and his law firm resolved 385 of 525 victim claims against the church in arbitration, he said.

Law school and working as an attorney well prepared Sherman to be an ambassador, he said, because the job of ambassador boils down to resolving conflicts, if between nations rather than between people.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Charitable immunity does not protect diocese from claims of sexual assault in 1960s, high court rules

St. Michael's Cathedral, Springfield, Mass.
(John Phelan via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0)
Charitable immunity does not protect Catholic Church leaders in Springfield, Mass., from civil allegations of sexual assault, but it does shield them against liability for negligent supervision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday.

Pseudonymous plaintiff John Doe alleged sexual abuse, including a "'brutal[] rape'" while being held down by fellow altar boys and priests in the 1960s. Doe alleged that he first recovered memory of the abuse in 2013; he first complained to the church in 2014.

After investigations, the church offered the plaintiff an apology in 2019, and in 2021, he sued over both the abuse in the 1960s and the handling of the complaint since 2014. The Superior Court denied the defendants common law charitable immunity and ecclesiastical abstention under the First Amendment, prompting interlocutory appeal. The Supreme Judicial Court declined any First Amendment question as premature in advance of final judgment.

By statute, Massachusetts curbed charitable immunity to a $20,000 quantitative limit ($100,000 in medmal) in 1971. But the statute is not retroactive to Doe's 1960s claims.

The purpose of common law charitable immunity, the court reasoned, is to protect charitable actors "from the burden of litigation and trial." But in the context of sexual assault allegations, the defendants cannot be said to have been performing a charitable function. In contrast, "negligent supervision ... is exactly the sort of allegation against which common-law charitable immunity was meant to protect," for it implicates managerial functions in the selection of subordinates.

The case arises in the home state of the Boston Globe Spotlight team, whose 2002-04 investigation surfacing church abuse became the subject of a 2015 feature film. The bishop named in the instant suit as a perpetrator, who died in 1982, was implicated in the Spotlight investigation.

The case is Doe v. Roman Catholic Bishop of Springfield, No. SJC-13219 (posted temporarily). Justice David A. Lowy wrote the unanimous opinion.