A Secrecy Fetish, District Attorney Kamala Harris is going too far in protecting Catholic pedophiles.

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Was Kamala Harris merely sloppy when she failed to disclose a
crime lab scandal and the criminal backgrounds of police who
were trial witnesses? Or does she have a policy of “When in
doubt, keep secrets”?

SF Weekly's attempts to obtain her office's files on Catholic
clergy abuse under the state Public Records Act suggest Harris
favors concealment over transparency.

The records at issue may contain answers to a question of great
public concern that has consumed international headlines during
recent weeks: What did senior Catholic officials know, and what
did they do behind the scenes, while priests accused of
molesting children were shielded from punishment?

Cardinal William Levada was archbishop of San Francisco until
2005. He is now a top Vatican official and the Holy See's most
prominent defender of Pope Benedict XVI against allegations that
the pontiff has failed to adequately deal with pedophile
priests. In San Francisco, Levada was known as a key architect
of the church's practice of keeping abuse allegations secret,
protecting abusive priests, and punishing church whistleblowers.

Portions of this record came to light in stories by then–SF
Weekly staff writer Ron Russell in 2005 and in a May 5 story in
The New York Times that recounted elements of Russell's
reporting. By sifting through documents made public as a result
of lawsuits, Russell learned that during the 1990s and 2000s,
Levada helped keep allegations against pedophile priests
shrouded in secrecy. Alleged abusers included Salesian Brother
Salvatore Billante, who police alleged had sexual relations with
at least 24 children, but charges were dropped after the
California Supreme Court overturned a state law extending the
statute of limitations for pedophiles. And so the full contents
of archdiocese clergy abuse files obtained by prosecutors were
never revealed at trial.

Relatively unscathed by his San Francisco legacy, now-Cardinal
Levada is the chief Vatican official charged with responding to
global allegations of clergy abuse.

“Given Levada's current role overseeing pedophile priests and
cover-up cases across the globe,” said David Clohessy, national
director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
(SNAP), “it is more important than ever that parents and
citizens and Catholics learn exactly what he did in San
Francisco.”

District Attorney Kamala Harris possesses San Francisco
Archdiocese files containing details of how the church dealt
with pedophile priests that go back as far as 80 years.

But Harris, the frontrunner in the June primary elections to
become the Democratic candidate for California attorney general,
has for five years rebuffed reporters' efforts to view those
files, despite statements by former DA Terence Hallinan saying
they should be released.

For the past six weeks, SF Weekly has asked Harris' office to
comply with the request under the California Public Records Act.
It has released nothing.

A prosecutor must be careful not to release records that might
undermine an investigation, unfairly malign the innocent, or
expose victims to publicity they don't want. But in this case
Harris' office seems to be going beyond these important
principles to a blanket policy of secrecy.

It's worth recalling that Harris was recently lambasted by a
judge for hiding the extent of an evidence-handling scandal at
the San Francisco Police Department crime lab, and for ignoring
her constitutional obligation to turn over to defense attorneys
the criminal histories of police testifying at trial.

Did Harris merely misinterpret the law? Or does she have a
penchant for secrecy?

On April 21, just as controversy was heating up over the
Vatican's role in the global sex abuse scandal, Harris' deputy,
Paul Henderson, responded to my request by stating that Harris'
investigative files were not subject to California's government
transparency laws; her office essentially enjoys a blanket
secrecy privilege.

I sent Henderson's arguments to California Newspaper Publishers
Association legal counsel Jim Ewert. “That's flatly untrue,” he
said. The District Attorney's office “can release them if they
want to. But they have decided not to.”

I wrote to Harris' office citing Ewert's analysis. Harris'
spokeswoman, Erica Derryck, changed course, saying they would
retrieve and review the files to determine whether there were
any I could view. Following half a dozen phone conversations and
as many e-mail exchanges, Derryck said she would contact me on
May 24, but I didn't hear from her. When I e-mailed and called
her again, almost seven weeks after my initial request, she said
she was still working on it. I have heard nothing more.

In lieu of releasing records, Harris' office ended up releasing
a statement: “District Attorney Harris focuses her efforts on
putting child molesters in prison. We're not interested in
selling out our victims to look good in the paper. When this
case was brought under Terence Hallinan, prosecutors took the
utmost care to protect the identity and dignity of the victims.
That was the right thing to do then and it's the right thing to
do now.”

This sort of statement drives abuse victims crazy. Joelle
Casteix, western regional director of SNAP, was sexually abused
as a child by a lay teacher at a Catholic school. She had to sue
to obtain records pertaining to the incidents. She rejects
Harris' rationale for keeping archdiocese abuse records secret.
It's possible, even routine, to release records about pedophile
priests while protecting the names of victims, Casteix explained.

“That's one of the most dangerous statements I've ever heard,”
she said. “The number one thing that gets predators off the
street is transparency about predators. You can do that by
releasing documents, and you can redact victims' names at the
same time.”

Joey Piscitelli, SNAP's northwest regional director, was more
adamant in denouncing Harris' logic. “They're full of shit. You
can quote me on that,” he said. “They're not protecting the
victims. They're protecting Levada.”

Hallinan, who forced the archdiocese to turn over the records in
2002, and who pursued cases against priests before his office
was barred from proceeding by expired statutes of limitations,
sees no reason to keep the files secret: “Obviously, those
things should be made public,” he said in an interview.

Rick Simons, who has represented victims in clergy abuse cases,
said Harris is notorious for refusing to respond to public
records requests. He added that her office has refused to
release records even of investigations into priests who have
already been tried, convicted, jailed, and released.

Other district attorneys, such as Alameda County's Nancy
O'Malley, have been far more forthcoming, particularly when it
comes to exposing clergy who abuse children. Simons said that
Harris' penchant for secrecy “shows a pattern and practice and
policy of ignoring the rights of children by one of the largest
institutions of the city and county of San Francisco, and in the
Bay Area.”

Kam Kuwata, campaign consultant to Los Angeles District Attorney
Rocky Delgadillo, who faces Harris in the Democratic primary,
said his boss also regards the matter differently. “We see no
reason why transparency and protecting the victim cannot work
hand in hand,” he said.

This isn't the first time Harris has employed troubling logic to
argue for keeping the archdiocese abuse files secret. In 2005,
Russell also asked for the records. A Harris spokesman responded
at the time by saying, “If we did it for you, we would have to
do it for everybody. Where do you stop, and where do you start?”

California law is clear where you start: with the presumption
that the people's business is public.

On March 27, Levada published an unusual 2,500-word essay on the
Holy See's website, denouncing The New York Times for publishing
clergy abuse stories he claimed did not sufficiently highlight
the church's purported zeal in rooting out predatory priests.

“In 2002, I was appointed (at the time as Archbishop of San
Francisco) to a team of four bishops to seek approval of the
Holy See for the 'Essential Norms' that the American Bishops
developed to allow us to deal with abuse questions,” Levada
wrote. “We found in Cardinal Ratzinger [the future Pope Benedict
XVI], and in the experts he assigned to meet with us, a
sympathetic understanding of the problems we faced as American
bishops.”

To people who have closely followed Levada's career, it seemed
bizarre that he would mention his 2002 role in devising national
Catholic clergy-abuse policies.

For help in this task, Levada enlisted his longtime ally, San
Mateo cleric Father Gregory Ingels.

According to Russell's SF Weekly investigation, in 1996 Levada
learned Ingels had been accused of sodomizing a 15-year-old boy.
Yet Levada helped Ingels' career flourish, and supported Ingels'
role as a top church policymaker even after learning of a second
serious allegation of sexual abuse.

In Marin County, prosecutors assembled a sex abuse case against
Ingels, using information drawn from the archdiocese files. But
Ingels' case was thrown out because the statute of limitations
had expired. Ultimately, the church agreed to settle one of the
complaints by paying an alleged victim $2.7 million — and, in
the process, sealing records similar to the ones Harris controls.

Nobody paid Harris to conceal the church's child abuse history,
however. Rather, she simply seems to view secrecy as the path of
least resistance, whether or not it's consistent with the public
interest.

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/a-secrecy-fetish/