Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA · 1992

New Mexico: Catholic priest convicted decades later of sexually abusing altar servers across three Albuquerque parishes

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Disposition and response

Material that narrows or disputes the record

Appellate history

Tenth Circuit affirmed the conviction and sentence on April 21, 2021.

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

Catholic priest; pastor, St. Bernadette's Church, Albuquerque

Organization

St. Bernadette's Church, Albuquerque, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Albuquerque, Our Lady of the Assumption Church, Albuquerque

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

Perrault was the assigned Catholic priest and pastor at the parishes where his victims served as altar boys; Doe 1 became an altar server under Perrault's direct authority at age nine, and other victims encountered him through his priestly role at two other Albuquerque parishes. No victim was a relative of Perrault.

Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

Date in cited record · jury verdict and sentence

United States District Court, District of New Mexico. A jury convicted Arthur Perrault, a Catholic priest at several Albuquerque parishes from the mid-1960s to 1992, of all seven counts of sexual abuse of altar-server boys, including Doe 1, who became an altar server at St. Bernadette's at age nine when Perrault was the priest there. He was sentenced to 365 months' imprisonment.
2021-04-21 · direct appeal, No. 19-2184

United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Affirmed. The court rejected challenges to jury impartiality, venue and cumulative error.

Documented coercion mechanisms

position as parish priest with access to altar servers
decades-long tenure across multiple parishes (St. Bernadette's, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Assumption)
fled the country for 25 years to Morocco (no US extradition treaty) after a reporter began investigating

Cited record

Sources

official court judgment federal appellate judgment United States v. Perrault, 995 F.3d 748 (10th Cir. Apr. 21, 2021).: Tenth Circuit opinion affirming Arthur Perrault's conviction on seven counts of sexual abuse of altar-server boys across multiple Albuquerque Catholic parishes, and his 365-month sentence.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

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Source and tier basis: https://storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2021/04/21/united_states_v._perrault.pdf Corpus classification: official-court-judgment; evidentiary role: federal-appellate-judgment. SHA-256 e93fd80174a4ac3c51d34aee7e56b1a91153fbc583984cd4f04579341c2c5b45
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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