Paul Shanley, the former priest from Boston who was convicted of child abuse and depicted in the film Spotlight, has been released from prison.
After serving twelve years of a fifteen-year sentence, Shanley was released for good behavior. He will now be on supervised probation for 10 years.
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The 86-year-old was released from the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, Massachusetts on Friday.
Shanley is barred from interacting with children. He will be required to register as a high-risk Level 3 sex offender. This means that his photo and other information about him will be shared on the state’s Sex Offender Registry Board’s website, according to USA Today.
Back in 2005, Shanley was found guilty of raping a boy for several years in the ’80s. When The Boston Globe unearthed the child abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese, Shanley was one of the first priests to go to prison.
The scandal exploded in Boston in 2002. The Boston Globe revealed that dozens of priests in the archdiocese had molested and raped children for decades while the church purposefully covered it up by shuffling abusive priests around from parish to parish.
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After the report was published, thousands of victims came forward from around the world. The newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for the investigation and the shocking sequence of events was the basis for the movie Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for the Best Picture last year.
During Shanley’s trial, his accuser, who was then a 27-year-old firefighter, says that the ex-priest would excuse him from Sunday catechism classes and rape and fondle him at a parish in Newton. The illegal interactions began when the victim was only 6-years-old.
Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who represented some of the victims in the lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Boston, says that his clients were upset about Shanely being freed from behind bars.
“Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place which will prevent Paul Shanley from sexually abusing once again,” Garabedian said. “When it comes to a sexual abuser abusing an innocent child, the abuser can be 35 or 95 – there’s no age limit.”
