Coakley made deal in 1995 priest case - Did not prosecute in boys' complaint

"I agonized over every one of those cases," said Martha Coakley of her work as head of the Child Abuse Prosecution Unit

By Michael Rezendes Globe Staff / November 23, 2009

When Martha Coakley was the Middlesex district attorney, her office prosecuted the Rev. John J. Geoghan based on an allegation that he squeezed the buttocks of a 10-year-old boy a single time at a public swimming pool. The highly publicized 2002 conviction won Coakley widespread praise for bringing the first successful criminal case against the widely accused pedophile, a priest many had called "Father Jack.''
But seven years earlier, Coakley, then the head of the Middlesex child abuse unit, had Geoghan in her sights and took a dramatically different approach. Back then, three grade-school brothers told investigators that Geoghan had inappropriately touched them during numerous visits to their Waltham home, and had made lewd telephone calls to them. Rather than prosecute, Coakley agreed to grant Geoghan a year of probation in a closed-door proceeding that received no media attention at all.

Because of the deal, Geoghan faced no formal charges and no criminal record.
In sanctioning the 1995 probation agreement, Coakley, now the front-runner in a special election for the United States Senate, never pressed the Boston Archdiocese for any prior complaints against Geoghan. It's not clear that the archdiocese would have readily obliged, but it was holding in its files thousands of pages of documents detailing abuse complaints against Geoghan made by dozens of victims dating back to the 1960s.

Coakley, in a lengthy interview last week, said she handled the case appropriately, pressing the best case possible given the specific contact described by the three young brothers. She also said she successfully negotiated specific terms of Geoghan's pretrial probation - a routine way of expediting minor criminal cases - requiring Geoghan to undergo psychiatric testing and be barred from unsupervised contact with children for a year.

"None of the boys disclosed any touching that was basically an indecent assault and battery,'' Coakley said. Coakley also said she did not believe she could have won a conviction in the case on anything more serious than the charge of making harassing telephone calls, a misdemeanor....

Mitchell Garabedian, the attorney who represented the mother of the Waltham boys, said news of the lawsuit was a catalyst. Within two years, he said, he found himself representing more than 50 of Geoghan's victims, and would ultimately represent 145 of them.
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/waltham/articles/2009/11/23/coakley_details_her_role_in_1995_probation_deal_for_geoghan/