The value of grand juries
A redacted report undermines its essential mission
The statute of limitations and other factors hindered efforts to hold accused offenders to account after a statewide investigating grand jury issued a report two years ago on sexual abuse of children by clergy in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese. But the report offered a look at how the abuse quietly persisted for decades and who inside and outside of the church could have done something about it.
Similar insight came out of an Allegheny County grand jury report two years ago about the sexual abuse of female students at Plum Senior High School.
The grand jury found an insular culture in which staff members cared more about protecting each other than the students in their care and administrators didn’t do enough to pursue rumors of wrongdoing. The report was a veritable roadmap for reform.
A forthcoming statewide grand jury report on sexual abuse in the Pittsburgh, Greensburg, Allentown, Erie, Harrisburg and Scranton dioceses has the potential to offer important lessons, too. But that will depend in part on how much of it the public gets to see. A watereddown version — redacted at the request of some of the people named in the report — would dilute the potential to inform, change and heal.
As the report was due to come out in June, a couple of dozen anonymous people filed secret petitions with the state Supreme Court, contending they were unfairly criticized without due process. They demanded the right to present their own evidence to the grand jury or a judge in the hope of shaping the narrative to their satisfaction, if not having their names stricken. Their names are still secret, but most of them are priests.
The state grand jury law has a mechanism for addressing complaints of those who are named in a report but not charged. They are shown the parts of the report pertaining to them and given the opportunity to write a written rebuttal before the document is publicly released. There is yet another safeguard against unfair criticism. Before approving a report for public release, the judge supervising the grand jury must agree that the report is accurate.
But that wasn’t enough for the two dozen petitioners who sought the state Supreme Court’s intervention.
The court has granted the petitioners a partial victory; it has ordered the release of a redacted report by Aug. 14 while it continues to sort out the group’s claims of unfair and unconstitutional treatment.
The petitioners’ names may be made public one day, or they may never be known. Perhaps some will succeed in having their names removed while others won’t. Perhaps a revised report that offers additional perspective will be issued months down the road.
To be sure, the two dozen petitioners make up a small number of those expected to be censured in the report.
But the bottom line is that the redaction of even a handful of names undermines the grand jury’s charge to tell the full story of child sexual abuse in the six dioceses. To gain insight into what went wrong and how to learn from the past, the public will have to read between the blacked-out lines. There’s no comfort in that.