Boston Sexual Abuse Lawyer Blog

A Sudbury nursing home resident who said she was sexually assaulted by an employee of the home more than a year ago will be allowed to testify at his trial, a judge has ruled, as reported by the Metrowest Daily News.

Ruby McDonough will be allowed to testify against Kofi Agana in his Framingham District Court trial on Jan. 12, 2011 Judge Robert Greco said. McDonough has been diagnosed with expressive aphasia, a condition that makes it difficult for her to communicate verbally or through writing.

McDonough had previously been ruled incompetent to testify by a Framingham District Court judge, but the state Supreme Judicial Court made a ruling that the judge erred by not allowing her to have an aide assist in her testimony.

McDonough, through her lawyer Wendy Murphy, was seeking to have that incompetence ruling overturned. Greco did not specifically overturn the ruling because he said the ruling did not make a judgement about her mental capacity. He said it was a ruling on her ability to testify.

After the ruling, a visibly happy McDonough gave a thumbs up to Murphy.

"The fact that she's being allowed to testify is the same as saying she is competent,'' said Murphy to the Daily News. "She's so happy."

Greco said McDonough will be able to testify with some accommodations, such as yes or no questions and being allowed to take a longer time than usual to answer questions. However, he did not rule how much an expert will be allowed to assist in the testimony.

Agana's lawyer, Robert Canty, said he expects that to be addressed in the final pretrial motions decided on the day of the trial.

Agana, 49, was arrested in February, 2009, and charged with indecent assault and battery on a person older than 14. He is in federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody because an immigration judge ordered that he be deported to Ghana.

The trial of a former Catholic priest on child sexual abuse charges has been postponed again -- the third time the trial has been adjourned since July, according to the Glens Falls Post Star, an upstate NY newspaper.

Gary Mercure was to stand trial Nov. 1, but the case has been postponed because of "unavailability of the prosecutor," according to the Berkshire Superior Court Clerk's Office.

Mercure has been indicted on charges he sexually abused two boys in the Pittsfield, Mass., area in the 1980s. He faces two felony charges of rape of a child by force and one count of indecent assault and battery on a child younger than 14, both felonies. The alleged victims were boys from the Glens Falls area who Mercure took to Massachusetts. He has pleaded not guilty and is free pending trial.

Mercure was a priest assigned to Our Lady of the Annunciation in Queensbury and St. Mary's in Glens Falls for more than a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. He has been accused of sexual abuse of the boys and others in Warren County, NY but could not be prosecuted locally because of a statute of limitations that generally requires felonies be prosecuted within 5 years of commission, authorities said. His last known address was in Troy, NY.

The criminal statute of limitations in Mass. was tolled while Mercure was in New York.

No new trial date on the current charges has been set, but it is scheduled for the next criminal court term, which starts in January, clerk Deborah Capeless told the Post Star.

The delay marked the third time this year the trial was postponed. It was originally scheduled for July, then September and finally Nov. 1. Mercure was first charged in October 2008. The case prosecutor, Berkshire County Assistant District Attorney Paul Caccaviello, was not available for comment.

A 79-year-old Sandwich man convicted of child rape in 2004 is facing the prospect of civil commitment to a treatment center for sexually dangerous offenders. William Mulcahy was temporarily committed Friday to the Massachusetts Treatment Center at the Bridgewater Correctional Complex at least until a Dec. 10 probable cause hearing. The hearing will determine whether he has a mental or personality disorder that makes him likely to re-offend.

A longtime Eucharistic minister and former State Department official, Mulcahy was sentenced to five to eight years in prison after being convicted of six counts of rape and abuse of a child. A woman had said she walked in on him having sex with her 8-year-old daughter.

Friday's temporary commitment will prevent Mulcahy from being immediately released when his prison sentence is up Monday, said Brian Glenny, a Cape and Islands assistant district attorney, as quoted by the Cape Cod Times.

Mulcahy's advanced age makes him an unusual candidate for a civil commitment, which can be for a day or a lifetime, his attorney, William Korman of Boston, told the newspaper. "There's been nobody this old they've filed against before," Korman said. "This is unusual, to say the least."

The district attorney's office took the step of filing a petition to commit Mulcahy after an initial expert hired by the court concluded he is sexually dangerous, meaning he may have a disorder that would make it difficult for him to control the impulse to re-offend, Glenny said.

If at least one of two doctors determine Mulcahy is sexually dangerous, the civil commitment issue will go to trial after the probable cause hearing, officials said.

A state statute allows sexually dangerous criminals to be civilly committed after their sentences have been served. They can challenge their commitment on an annual basis.

Korman questioned the need to confine an elderly man indefinitely, saying few sexual offenders are active into their 80s.

In Mulcahy's case, Korman said, "He'll be on probation until he's 95."

The Sandwich police investigation of Mulcahy led to other sexual assault victims, including a young man and a woman in her 20s who said she was molested when she was 13.

The Sandwich police also said they received letters from several young women who claimed Mulcahy had molested or raped them during his overseas appointments with the State Department.

Mulcahy was a familiar face in Sandwich's Roman Catholic community, according to the Cape Cod Times. For years, he volunteered at Corpus Christi Church, where he was a Eucharistic minister and participated in a program called "Liturgy of the Word for Children."

A man who was convicted of raping two women in Somerville four decades ago now faces a potential lifetime commitment under the state's Sexually Dangerous Person laws, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney's office and the Somerville Journal.

On Friday, a Suffolk Superior Court Judge sent John J. Kelleher, 59, to the Massachusetts Treatment Center in Bridgewater for a period of one day to life after an assistant district attorney proved he was "likely to engage in further sexual offenses if not confined to a secure facility," according to the DA's office.

The decision came after Assistant District Attorney Barbara Young introduced his history of sexual offenses at a five-day jury-waived trial last month. That history includes the 1971 knifepoint rape of two young women in Somerville and the attempted rape of a young woman on Thomson Island in 1987, in which he stabbed the victim in the face with a fork.

Kelleher attacked each of the women, who were strangers to him, in their homes while they were sleeping, according to the District Attorney's office.

Young also introduced testimony from an expert witness who opined that Kelleher was likely to commit additional sexual offenses based on his "history of substance abuse, his extensive and diverse history of violent crime, his selection of strangers as victims, and apparent inability to control his sexual impulses," according to the District Attorney's office.

Kelleher had most recently been convicted of a third count of drunken driving in 2009, and upon his release from jail was held on temporary order of commitment pending these proceedings.

Women who experience physical or sexual abuse as children or adolescents are at significantly increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a large, longitudinal cohort study suggests. Furthermore, investigators found there is a relationship such that the more severe the abuse, the greater the risk.

The latest findings from the Nurses Health Study II show moderate or severe physical abuse was associated with a 26% to 54% higher risk for diabetes in adulthood. Unwanted sexual touching was associated with a 16% higher risk for the disease. Forced sexual activity before adulthood carried a 34% increased risk if it occurred once and but carried a 69% greater risk if it occurred more frequently.

"Although there was no evidence of a multiplicative, synergistic impact of experiencing both physical and sexual abuse, women who experienced both types of abuse had higher absolute risks of diabetes than expected from physical or sexual abuse alone.

"Girls who experience both types of abuse may suffer more severe abuse, more emotionally damaging abuse, or more chronic abuse than girls who experienced abuse of one type," the researchers, led by Janet Rich-Edwards, ScD, director of developmental epidemiology at the Conners Center for Women's Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, write.

The study was published online November 9 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The researchers note that there has been a consistently reported link between child abuse and adult obesity and evidence indicating that child abuse leads to overweight.

The study authors add that because obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, it may be that early abuse may lead to the disease via this pathway. They also note that experimental and observational research suggests that "early trauma may cause lasting dysregulated stress responsivity, which may link child abuse with diabetes through physiologic pathways independent of adiposity."

Hampshire Superior Court Judge Bertha Josephson has issued an arrest warrant for founder of the famed Riverside (NY) Church basketball program, who failed to appear last week for his arraignment in a Massachusetts court on sex abuse charges. The man's lawyer, Frederick Cohn, said the two-count indictment handed down earlier in October is flawed and that he will fight extradition for Ernest Lorch because the two-page indictment is too vague - it says the assault took place between March 1977 and April 1978.

Lorch was scheduled to enter a plea on charges of indecent assault and battery and attempted rape in Hampshire Superior Court in Northampton on Tuesday. When he failed to appear in court, the arrest warrant issued, according to the NY Daily News.

Cohn told the News that the Northwestern District Attorney's office is "linking itself" to a shakedown of his client, who is in his late 70s and in failing health. "I've got a guy who is old and sick and in a wheelchair, and they want to drag him up to Massachusetts to face a guy who has been trying to extort him for years," Cohn said. "It's all about money," he added.

Lorch filed a lawsuit in state court in White Plains last year that accuses the alleged victim and other men of threatening to go public with sex abuse claims unless the basketball powerbroker paid them off.

Cohn said Lorch used a paddle to discipline the teenager during the Massachusetts trip, which resulted in the assault and battery allegation more than 30 years later.

"I don't see it as sexual assault," Cohn said. "I see it as bad judgment."

Jane Mulqueen, the chief of the child abuse division of the Northwestern DA's office, did not return Daily News calls for comment.

The maximum penalty for each count is five years.

Although the indictment marks the first time Lorch has faced criminal charges, several alleged victims have accused the attorney, who was a deacon at Riverside Church for many years, of sexual abuse.