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SAGINAW, MI – When police executed search warrants at three Catholic Diocese of Saginaw properties last year during an investigation into claims of sexual abuse of minors, documents show they seized nearly 60 items of evidence. Among them, located in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet at diocese headquarters, was a file labeled “victim list.” That information is contained in search warrant paperwork detailing what police seized during the March 2018 raid. The paperwork was recently unsealed and copies were obtained by MLive and The Saginaw News. The list of confiscated property shows investigators took 57 items during the...

Evidence of abusive treatment of disabled people has been captured by secret filming for BBC Panorama, in an echo of the Winterbourne View scandal eight years ago. An undercover reporter employed as a care worker filmed colleagues taunting, provoking, intimidating and repeatedly restraining patients with learning disabilities or autism at the private Whorlton Hall hospital near Barnard Castle, County Durham. The footage, to be broadcast on Wednesday night, has striking parallels with Panorama’s reporting in 2011 of ill-treatment of patients at the Winterbourne View unit near Bristol. Ministers pledged to run down such hospitals, known as assessment and treatment units...

Hardly any of the more than 100 Buffalo area priests implicated as child molesters spent so much as one day in jail. For years, most of their victims were too scared or embarrassed to make complaints. But Buffalo Police had marching orders not to arrest Catholic priests, according to former vice squad Detective Martin Harrington and other retired officers. Instead they alerted the bishop's office to any illegal activities. "The department's unwritten policy was that Catholic priests did not get arrested," said Harrington, who investigated vice crimes for 17 years and retired in 1995. "I never had any experience with...

FULL TITLE: Horrifying footage shows 55-year-old man being beaten with a belt 30 TIMES by staff at care home who also let other residents attack him A horrifying video has captured the moment a 55-year-old mentally disabled man was beaten at his care home in Georgia. The disturbing footage shows staff members punching Joey Cason in the face and repeatedly hitting him. One staff member at the Total Care facility is seen beating Cason with a belt 30 times while he cowers in the corner in fear before falling to the ground in tears. Surveillance video also captured staff punching...

We are very sad that any law enforcement officer would face threats for doing his or her job and we are distressed that the Michigan attorney general has suffered in this way. https://twitter.com/kenkolker/status/1126550761910018050/video/1 We hope Michigan's bishops quickly and harshly condemn this hatred. Violence is never the answer. For decades, police and prosecutors who pursued clerics who commit and conceal child sex crimes have been stonewalled, and Church officials have contributed to the unhealthy atmosphere that leads to threats of violence. While the Church hierarchy often postures as being the victims of governmental overreach, the reality is that they were often treated with too much deference in the...

Attorneys on Monday, May 6, 2019 released a report containing names of more than 300 New Jersey priests and others accused of misconduct. Philip DeVencentis, Staff Writer, @LocalNewsPhil A law firm specializing in representing abuse victims put the names in a report, linked to a suit by a man who says he was abused in Ridgefield Park. Edward Hanratty doesn't think it's a coincidence that four abusive priests wound up at his parish in Ridgefield Park.  In his Irish Catholic community, nobody ever questioned the church, which was at the epicenter of the community, recalled Hanratty, a victim of clergy...

Complete title: When he was a priest, this N.J. teacher impregnated a 16-year-old. No, you can't fire him, school district is told. A veteran Burlington County teacher who had a baby with a 16-year-old girl while he was a Catholic priest nearly 30 years ago should not lose his job because of his past, a state arbitrator told the school district. Cinnaminson school officials brought up tenure charges against middle school teacher Joseph DeShan earlier this year after parents learned about his history as a priest in the diocese in Bridgeport, Connecticut. DeShan left the priesthood in 1994, four years...

BERKELEY COUNTY, W.Va. - The Berkeley County Board of Education has filed a lawsuit against Amber Pack, the mother of Adri Pack. Back in October, Amber Pack placed a recording device in Adri's hair after she noticed bruises when she came home from Berkeley Heights Elementary School. According to Ben Salango, Pack's attorney, the Board of Education is claiming the recording is illegal and should be excluded from evidence in the case.

NEW YORK (AP) -- At least 120 priests accused of sexually abusing a child or having child pornography have worked in the Archdiocese of New York, the archdiocese said Friday in releasing a list of names that includes bishops, high school teachers, a scouting chaplain and a notorious cardinal. The release, from the nation's second-largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, follows more than 120 such disclosures from other dioceses around the country as the church reckons with demands for transparency about sex abuse by clergy. In a letter to church members, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said he realizes "the shame that has come...

An explosive audio recording aired by a Kansas City television station on Thursday night reportedly includes Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill threatening his fiancée, who accused him of injuring their young son. In the recording broadcast by CBS affiliate KCTV, a voice identified as the boy’s mother, Crystal Espinal, tells Hill that her son said regarding who punched him, “Daddy did it.” She adds, “He is terrified of you.” A voice alleged to be Hill replies, “You need to be terrified of me, too, b—-.” The man identified by the TV station as Hill adds, “I didn’t do...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President. The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner. E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue. U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State...

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Thursday his office is still investigating possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the DOJ and FBI in their investigation into President Trump and associates of his 2016 campaignskipThe Trump-Russia investigation launched by the DOJ and the FBI would carry on into the special counsel investigation, which to this day is looking at Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Steele was being paid for his research by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was funded in part by the Clinton...

Recently, I noticed my friend Leila Miller repeating online that she does not insist that people remain living with an abusive spouse. My inclination was to say, “Stop! You don’t need to say it again!” Around the same time, I noticed that I was about to repeat myself on a seemingly unrelated topic. I started thinking, “What exactly is going on here?” My answer: We are dealing with weaponized self-pity, not a good-faith question. Miller is the author of Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak. She gives voice to the adult children whose lives were disrupted by their...

Clergy sex abuse of children has rocked the Catholic Church not only in terms of trust and reputation, but also financially, to the tune of more than $3 billion, according to National Public Radio. The multibillion-dollar expense has gone to settlements in response to lawsuits filed by people abused by clergy, reports NPR. Nearly 20 Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy because of the scandals. An attorney whose firm represented abuse victims said that the money the church has paid because of the crisis is part of justice for those who suffered, though it hardly compensates for...

A former New Jersey priest who had been "credibly accused" of sexually abusing minors was found dead in his Nevada home, and police are treating it as a homicide. The body of John Capparelli was found Saturday morning by police conducting a welfare check at his home in Henderson, about 15 miles south of Las Vegas. The Clark County Coroner's Office said Capparelli, 70, died from a single gunshot wound to the neck. His body was found in the kitchen, a spokesperson said. Police said they did not have a suspect at this time. Capparelli's name appeared on a list...

It is both harrowing and infinitely sad to see "Leaving Neverland" and "Surviving R. Kelly,"  two cable television documentaries about the crime of child sexual abuse, its perpetrators and victims. R. Kelly currently sits in a Chicago jail cell for failure to pay child support, while at the same time, years of allegations about his sexual abuse of underage girls, have finally caught up with him. The R&B star says he is unfairly accused and that his career has been ruined by the allegations. "Leaving Neverland" aired last week, profiling two men who say Michael Jackson sexually abused them when...

A top Catholic cardinal admitted on Saturday that Church files on priests who sexually abused children were destroyed or never even drawn up, a move which allowed paedophiles to prey on others. "Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed, or not even created," German Cardinal Reinhard Marx said in a speech to a landmark Vatican summit on tackling paedophilia in the clergy. "Instead of the perpetrators, the victims were regulated and silence imposed on them. The stipulated procedures and processes for the prosecution of offences were deliberately not complied with, but instead cancelled...

Full title: Kerala rape case: Sister Lucy, who protested against accused bishop, says sexual abuse is rampant in Church Religious women, priests and laymen who supported a nun after she filed a police complaint of rape against Jalandhar ex-bishop Franco Mulakkal, are being systematically targeted by the Catholic Church in Kerala. Nuns, who form the most vulnerable community in the Church, are facing most of this oppression. While five nuns who took to streets demanding the arrest of the bishop are being put under pressure and threatened, another nun who was an important witness in the case was harassed and tortured...

The law of civil forfeiture allows police and prosecutors to seize and keep cash, cars, homes, businesses and property of all kinds without ever criminally charging or convicting the owners. As originally conceived, it was to be a deterrent by which law enforcement would transfer the ill-gotten gains of crime to the public treasury. But, as so often happens with governmental power, it has transmuted over the years into a semi-criminal operation in and of itself. In 2014, Chris Sourovelis’ son was arrested for selling $40 worth of drugs. Three weeks later, the Philadelphia police forcibly evicted the entire Sourovelis...

Thirty-five years later, Debbie Vasquez's voice trembled as she described her trauma to a group of Southern Baptist leaders. She was 14, she said, when she was first molested by her pastor in Sanger, a tiny prairie town an hour north of Dallas. It was the first of many assaults that Vasquez said destroyed her teenage years and, at 18, left her pregnant by the Southern Baptist pastor, a married man more than a dozen years older. In June 2008, she paid her way to Indianapolis, where she and others asked leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and its 47,000...