Charlotte Injury Lawyers Blog
Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What can you sue for in a personal injury case?”
Time cures all ills, as the saying goes. For at least one North Carolina sex abuse victim, time is the enemy of justice.
On July 1, a Stanly County Superior Court Judge dismissed a sex abuse charge against the Rev. Joseph Kelleher. The judge ruled that Kelleher, who is 86 and lives in a retirement home in High Point, is not mentally competent to stand trial.
The sexual abuse allegation was levelled against Kelleher in 2010 by a man who said he was abused by Kelleher in 1977, when the man was 14-years-old. At that time, Kelleher worked at Our Lady of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Albemarle.
Lawyers for the victim called the case “one of the oldest, if not oldest” criminal case pending in Stanly County, and questioned why it was delayed for some four years before being dismissed.
Delays of a different kind resulted in dismissal of two civil lawsuits brought in Mecklenburg County against the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte. Those lawsuits were premised on decades-old sex abuse of children by Kelleher and another priest. Lawyers for the diocese argued successfully that plaintiffs in those cases missed the deadline to file their lawsuits.