Lawyers representing 30 people who have filed lawsuits against the Denver Roman Catholic Archdiocese said Wednesday that they and their clients are ready to enter mediation, but not the kind proposed by church officials.
“It is not mediation,” lawyer Jeff Anderson said of the decision by the archdiocese to hire a panel to seek settlement of the lawsuits. “It says to our survivors, ‘Trust us again, trust us again.’ Our clients don’t trust them (the church). They have been betrayed by them.”
The lawyers spoke following a hearing before Denver District Judge Joseph Meyer, who ordered all pretrial arguments, motions and discovery in the 30 lawsuits to be heard by three Denver district judges: himself, John McMullen and Robert Hyatt.
Anderson, who represents plaintiffs in 11 cases, and lawyer Jeff Herman, who represents 19 other people, said they aren’t completely rejecting offers of mediated settlements by the church. Instead they’d prefer the mediation be conducted by a neutral panel agreed to by all parties. The lawyers claimed the mediation panel proposed by the church separates them from their clients – that the lawyers become mere “observers” – and their clients lose valuable legal assistance.
On May 24, Archbishop Charles Chaput announced that the archdiocese had hired former Boulder District Judge Richard Dana of the Judicial Arbiter Group to head a three-person panel that also includes Heather Coogan, chief of police at the Auraria Higher Education Campus, and John “Jack” Dahlberg, a certified rehabilitation specialist who has testified in sexual abuse cases.
The attorneys for the plaintiffs, who claim the plaintiffs were sexually abused by two priests and revictimized by church officials, said they are willing to work with the church toward fair mediation. They asked Meyer to order court-ordered mediation, with a neutral panel, but the judge refused. Meyer notified the lawyers he plans to retire early next year and is actively considering joining the Judicial Arbiter Group on a part-time basis. None of the lawyers objected to his sitting on the cases until then.
Charles Goldberg, the lawyer representing the church and several parishes, said he was heartened to hear the plaintiffs are willing to seek mediation.
“The approach offered last week is not court-ordered,” he said. “We are not trying to keep the plaintiffs from their lawyers. It is strictly voluntary and strictly up to the plaintiffs and their counsel whether to participate.”
Anderson said during the hearing that he plans to file four more lawsuits in the next two weeks – three involving alleged misconduct of the late Rev. Leonard Abercrombie and one involving former priest Harold Robert White. Herman said he plans to amend some of his lawsuits to include as defendants parishes not previously listed.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
