byDenise Lavoie Associated Press
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BOSTON (AP) -- One of the most notorious figures in the Boston clergy sex abuse scandal has completed his prison sentence on child rape charges and will be released this week after two experts hired by prosecutors found he does not meet the legal criteria to be held as a sexually dangerous person.
Paul Shanley was known in the 1960s and '70s for being a hip street priest who reached out to troubled youths. But in 2005 he was convicted of repeatedly raping and fondling a boy at a suburban parish in the 1980s, and he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison.
Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said July 25 that her office hired two psychiatric experts to evaluate Shanley, now 86 years old, to see if he should continue to be held after completing his sentence. Both experts told prosecutors that he does not meet the legal criteria for civil confinement as a sexually dangerous person.
Once Shanley is released July 28, he will begin 10 years of supervised probation.
Shanley was defrocked after dozens of men came forward and said he had molested them when they were children.
Ryan said Shanley is prohibited from interacting with children.
"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," she said.
Under a Massachusetts law, prosecutors may petition a court to have a defendant indefinitely confined as a sexually dangerous person after completion of a prison sentence if the state can prove he suffers from a mental illness or abnormality that makes him incapable of controlling sexually dangerous impulses.
After Shanley was convicted, prosecutors asked a judge to send him to prison for the rest of his life.
Ryan said both doctors who evaluated Shanley concluded that he does not satisfy the legal criteria for prosecutors to file a petition seeking to confine him after his prison sentence.
During the trial, Shanley's accuser, then a 27-year-old firefighter, said Shanley would pull him from Sunday catechism classes and rape and fondle him at St. Jean's parish in Newton, beginning when he was 6 years old. The man said he recovered memories of the abuse as the clergy sex abuse scandal unfolded in the Archdiocese of Boston during the early 2000s.
Shanley's trial attorney, Frank Mondano, declined to comment on Shanley's upcoming release from prison. During the trial, Mondano challenged the reliability of the accuser's repressed memories.
Shanley's appellate lawyer, Robert Shaw Jr., said Shanley has "served his time."
The Archdiocese of Boston said Shanley's crimes against children were "reprehensible."
"No young person should ever have to experience such violations of their safety and dignity," it said in a statement released July 25.