A Massachusetts judge has dismissed a criminal case charging the former Roman Catholic cardinal Theodore McCarrick with molesting a 16-year-old boy in 1974, saying the 93-year-old was not competent to stand trial due to dementia.
McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington DC, is the only current or former US Catholic cardinal to ever face child sexual abuse charges, with prosecutors in Massachusetts and Wisconsin filing separate cases against him.
He was defrocked after a Vatican investigation confirmed he had sexually molested adults and children.
The case in Dedham, Massachusetts, before the judge Paul McCallum, was the first to be filed, with prosecutors in July 2022 charging McCarrick with three counts of indecent assault and battery.
The Wisconsin case is ongoing, with a hearing scheduled for 18 September. McCarrick has not entered a plea in that case and a trial date has not been set.
Those cases are the only two he has faced despite lawsuits by other men accusing him of sexual abuse decades ago. A legal quirk froze the statute of limitations in the Massachusetts case after McCarrick, a non-resident, left the state.
McCarrick, who lives in Missouri, pleaded not guilty in September 2021.
His lawyers in February moved to dismiss the case, saying a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found McCarrick has dementia, probably due to Alzheimer’s disease.
Prosecutors retained their own expert, the state psychologist Kerry Nelligan, who testified on Wednesday that she agreed McCarrick is currently not competent to stand trial due to his “severe cognitive declines”.
The Catholic church is currently engulfed in sexual abuse scandals in New Orleans, as revealed by the Guardian, and has been exposed for harboring pedophiles and covering up for them in many US dioceses, including parts of Pennsylvania, and in Boston more than a decade ago, as well as in several other countries.
