Ex-priest shouldn’t have been released from prison: lawyer

A notorious figure in the Boston Roman Catholic priest sex abuse scandal was released from prison Friday morning after completing a 12-year sentence for the rape of a boy in the 1980s.

Massachusetts prison officials say Paul Shanley, 86, was released from the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater on Friday. They did not provide an exact time.

The state’s sex offender registry lists Shanley as a Level 3 offender, meaning he is most likely to reoffend. The registry says Shanley will be living in an apartment in Ware, a town of about 10,000 residents about 105 kilometres west of Boston. State law prohibits people from using information in the registry to harass people.

Abuse victims say they’re concerned Shanley, who isn’t required to wear an electronic monitoring device, will not have enough supervision.

“Paul Shanley should be in a hospital being treated and not in the outside world where he can easily gain access to innocent children,” Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer who represented dozens of men who said they were abused by Shanley.

Shanley’s lawyer says he’s served his time and is not dangerous.

Shanley was a “street priest” who ministered to alienated youth in the 1960s and ’70s.

Decades later, dozens of men came forward and said Shanley had molested or raped them. He was defrocked by the Vatican and was convicted of raping a boy at a Newton parish.