Lawyers Wrap Up Arguments in Priest Abuse Case

After three weeks of testimony, jurors must decide whether retired priest Michael Edwin Wempe continued to molest even after the church sent him for treatment or if he is the victim of a family plot to avenge monstrous crimes committed long ago.

“It is time for the defendant to pay for his sins,” Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Todd Hicks told jurors in his closing arguments. “It’s time. He is guilty.”

The defense concedes that Wempe was “an animal predator,” but says he is innocent of abusing a boy in the 1990s at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Wempe was a chaplain.

Defense attorney Leonard Levine contends that Wempe’s accuser, Jayson B., conspired with his family to make up the allegations after learning that the priest could not be prosecuted for the decades-old abuse of his two older brothers.

“What Michael Wempe did in the ‘70s and ‘80s were horrible acts, and we all have a right to hate him for that,” Levine said, as Wempe sat at the defendant’s table. But Levine added that it is simply unbelievable that the priest molested the younger brother of Lee and Mark B. after he returned from treatment.

“Just consider the facts and the law, and if you do that, I’m sure you’ll come to the right verdict, and that verdict can only be not guilty.”

Wempe’s trial has far-reaching implications, not just for the disgraced former cleric who faces up to 16 years in prison if convicted, but also for the Los Angeles Archdiocese. The jury, including three Catholics, begins deliberating today in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom of Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe.

Wempe is among at least three Roman Catholic priests accused of continuing to molest children after Cardinal Roger M. Mahony sent them for treatment for pedophilia and then returned them to active ministry.

The Wempe case could make it more difficult for the archdiocese to defend itself against more than 560 civil claims alleging it failed to protect children from predator priests.

In Wempe’s criminal trial, however, there has been no question that he has abused children. After years of denial, Wempe admitted through his lawyer last year to molesting 13 boys in the 1970s and ‘80s. He cannot be prosecuted for those acts because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that they happened too long ago.

Weeks after that ruling, the younger brother of two of Wempe’s victims came forward to say that he, too, had been molested -- and recently enough for prosecution to go forward.

The prosecution argued that in molesting the boy known as Jayson B. five times from 1991 to 1995, Wempe was basically following a “recipe” of abuse that he had followed throughout his years as a parish priest.

“The defendant used the same playbook with Jayson,” Hicks said during his closing argument.

But Wempe did not take Jayson camping, fishing, shooting, golfing and skiing or invite him to sleep in the rectory as he did with his earlier victims. “He can’t have a conga line of kids going into ... the rectory,” Hicks said.

In fact, Wempe’s transfer from a church parish to a hospital forced the priest to change his methods, the prosecutor argued. “There are no altar boys at the hospital,” Hicks said, calling it reckless for the priest, after getting help for his problems, to seek out families with boys that he had befriended in earlier assignments.

He compared such actions to a recovering alcoholic returning to his neighborhood bar to get drunk.

Still, Hicks argued, Jayson knew things about Wempe, his office, his cars and his style of touching that he only could have known “because he lived it.”

The prosecutor said that if Jayson did conspire with his family to wrongfully accuse Wempe, as the defense contends, they didn’t do a very good job of it. The abuse alleged by the men, for example, differs. Jayson testified that Wempe orally copulated him twice in the priest’s car. Both of his brothers say they were only fondled.

“The defendant’s crimes are terrible,” Hicks said, as Wempe sat, expressionless. “His sins are terrible. He has wrecked people’s lives.”

Wempe’s lawyer conceded that the jury had every right to hate his client. But that does not mean he is guilty, he said.

It made no sense for Wempe, knowing he was under suspicion because of past allegations, to take Jayson to his office, Levine argued. And, he added, it made no sense to drive Jayson an hour and a half from Thousand Oaks to Beverly Hills “to molest him for five minutes.”

Several other aspects of Jayson’s story were similarly unbelievable, Levine argued. One of them is that just one person, Jayson, had accused Wempe of molestation after Mahony sent him to residential therapy.

“My God, not even a false claim was made after 1987,” Levine said, noting the financial incentive to file negligence claims against the Catholic Church.

And all of Wempe’s contacts with Jayson B. were initiated by his mother, not the priest, who if still a dangerous predator might be more aggressive, Levine said.

The defense lawyer pointed out other potential problems with Jayson’s testimony.

Levine said that Jayson recalled being molested in a blue-purple Ford Thunderbird that Wempe did not own until after the alleged abuse had ended. He suggested that it was next to impossible for Wempe to have molested him in the adjacent parking structure of Cedars-Sinai, as Jayson claimed, because there were so many people around.

He also sought to show that Jayson’s testimony changed between the preliminary hearing and the trial, a sign, Levine said, that he was making things up. He recalled greater details of his alleged abuse, including that the priest fondled him with his left hand while they worked on a computer in Wempe’s hospital office.