United States: James Porter pleads guilty to 41 counts against 28 children
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Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
parish priest in charge of altar boys and parochial-school children
Organization
Diocese of Fall River, St Mary's, North Attleboro
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
Parish and parochial-school children under their priest — the pre-Boston case that first forced the pattern into national view.
- Pastoral or clerical authority
Evidence structure
Proceedings
1993-12-06 · guilty plea and sentence
Massachusetts court, USA. Former priest James Porter pleaded guilty on 6 December 1993 to 41 indictments of sexually assaulting 28 children under sixteen in southeastern Massachusetts in the 1960s — admitting roughly 100 victims across states over three decades — and was sentenced to 18–20 years. He completed the sentence in 2004 and died in 2005 awaiting a civil-commitment hearing. The case prompted early US bishops'-conference policy changes.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- parish and school authority over children of the diocese
Cited record
Sources
- national newspaper court reporting conviction history report 'Ex-Priest James Porter; Convicted in Child Molestations', The Washington Post (obituary, 2005).
Confirms the plea, counts, sentence and history.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20019-2005Feb12.html Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: conviction-history-report.
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
Related cases · Christian institutions & contexts
- 2018 · Harrisburg, PA, USA PA grand jury: 301 priests, 1,000+ child victims documented ('weaponized' faith)
- 2009 · Dublin, Ireland Ryan Commission: abuse 'endemic' in Catholic-run institutions (state inquiry)
- 2021 · Paris, France CIASE/Sauvé Report: est. 216,000 abused by French clergy since 1950
- 2019 · Vatican City McCarrick: ex-cardinal found guilty by Vatican canonical process, laicized
- 2010 · Oregon City, OR, USA Beagley faith-healing death: parents convicted (criminally negligent homicide)
- 2014 · Philadelphia, PA, USA Schaible: 3rd-degree murder, second child dead of untreated pneumonia
- 2001 · London, UK Victoria Climbié: murder convictions; possession belief; Laming Inquiry followed
- 2012 · London, UK Kristy Bamu: kindoki 'deliverance' murder convictions (30/25-yr minimums)