Priest, 98, said unfit for kid porn trial

A 98-year-old retired Catholic priest accused of possessing child pornography will never be fit to stand trial so charges against him should be dismissed, his lawyer argued in a motion filed Wednesday at Bronx Supreme Court.

Msgr. Harry Byrne lives at St. Lawrence Friary Infirmary in Beacon, Dutchess County, and requires care for all his basic needs, according to the filing. If accepted, the motion would dismiss the 74count indictment that the priest faces.

“He is irreversibly infirm,” his lawyer, Marvin Ray Raskin, told the Daily News. “There’s a lot of hope for rehabilitation, but there’s no practical expectation.”

Byrne (inset) was an activist priest who worked to create affordable housing in the Bronx and Manhattan, and he remained outspoken on church issues after his retirement in 1996.

He faces 37 counts of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child and 37 more of possessing a sexual performance by a child. He turned himself into police on Oct. 31, 2017, and pleaded not guilty.

Byrne “had dozens of photographs on his computer of girls 8 to 14 years old performing sex acts with men or posing naked,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said in announcing his indictment in 2017.

Prosecutors charged that Byrne used web search engines to find the pornography online. The illegal images were found in a sweep of the priest’s computer by the NYPD computer crimes squad, officials said.

In a July 2010 blog post, Byrne railed about the Catholic Church’s mishandling of the pedophile priest crisis.

“Bishops … quietly reassigned miscreants and thereby exponentially multiplied the number of victims,” he wrote. “In the U.S., not one cover-up bishop has been arraigned before church authorities for his part in the scandal.”

After an exam by a neurologist, Judge Robert Neary declared on March 27 that Byrne is “an incapacitated person.”