Trial underway for ex-priest accused of raping boy
82-year-old is first to face prosecution after inquiry by state AG over allegations of sex abuse by clergy
Acriminal trial isn’t necessarily a search for the truth, a defense attorney for a former priest charged with sex crimes in Santa Fe County told jurors Thursday in opening arguments. It’s more a question of whether the state can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the crimes occurred.
Attorney Ryan Villa represents Marvin Archuleta, who is accused of tying up and raping a first grader at Holy Cross Catholic School in Santa Cruz during the 1986-87 school year.
Archuleta, 82, is the first priest to be put on trial as a result of an investigation state Attorney General Hector Balderas began in 2016 into allegations of sexual assaults by New Mexico clergy members going back decades.
The accusations against Archuleta — that he took a 6-yearold boy to the sacristy, restrained him with a belt and raped him while saying, “This is God’s love” — are sure to elicit a strong response from jurors.
But as Villa’s comments indicate, proving three decades later Archuleta committed the crimes could prove challenging for prosecutors whose first task will be disproving Archuleta’s claim that he wasn’t even in New Mexico when the alleged crimes occurred.
Whatever physical evidence may be long gone and memories are sure to be called into question.
According to a criminal complaint, Archuleta was ordained in 1970 and served as a priest in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe from 197078 and from 1987-94 in Santa Cruz and Chimayó.
But he also spent more than a decade in Silver Spring, Md., which is where his attorneys say he was when his accuser claims to have been raped.
Archuleta has denied committing the crimes and says he hadn’t even heard of his alleged victim until the accusations surfaced.
“There is nothing truthful in the allegation,” Archuleta said in a recorded interview with special agents that was played for jurors Thursday.
Asked if he felt his accuser was lying, Archuleta said: “I don’t want to say he is lying, but what he is describing is not even a possibility.”
Archuleta agreed to take a polygraph test, according to the recording, but the lead investigator in the case said Thursday that Archuleta was never given one because “they can be easily manipulated.”
Archuleta’s accuser — now in his 30s — didn’t disclose the alleged abuse to authorities until 2016.
And when he did, he didn’t accuse Archuleta by name because he didn’t know his name, prosecutors said Thursday. Instead he picked him out of a lineup of photographs of priests shown to him by a civil attorney.
Archuleta was a defendant in several lawsuits accusing him of abuse — three of which the archdiocese has settled out of court — and his name appears on a list published by
the archdiocese of clergy credibly accused of sexual assault.
But jurors will never know that because those facts will not be allowed to be introduced at trial.
Assistant Attorney General Brittany DuChaussee told jurors Thursday she expects to prove Archuleta’s guilt through the testimony of his accuser — who is expected to take the stand Friday — the accuser’s family and newspaper clippings placing Archuleta in the area at the time.
“We can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Marvin Archuleta was here,” DuChaussee said, “and that [his accuser] was abused by Marvin Archuleta under the guise of it being God’s love.”
Villa criticized the attorney general’s investigation during his opening arguments Thursday, saying the office never bothered to look for records in Maryland or to interview the accuser’s first grade teacher, who, according to Villa, has said she doesn’t remember Archuleta or any of the circumstances his accuser says preceded his sexual assault at the hands of the priest.
Villa said he intends to introduce his own evidence — in the form of newspaper clippings and baptism records — to prove Archuleta was living in Maryland at the time he of the alleged rape.
Archuleta’s trial is expected to continue through Feb. 7. If convicted of the charges — criminal sexual penetration of a minor and kidnapping — he faces up to 36 years in prison.