Ex-Priest Shot by Former Altar Boy in 2002 Convicted of Abusing Him

For a decade, Dontee Stokes was desperate for people to believe him. But not until a 12-member jury Thursday convicted former Roman Catholic priest Maurice J. Blackwell on three counts of sexual abuse was the former altar boy finally able to imagine a life free of the need to prove himself.

Tormented by memories of childhood abuse by a clergyman he once had admired, Stokes told his anguished story to police detectives in 1993. After years of official inaction, he approached Blackwell on a Baltimore street corner two years ago, pulled out a silver-plated handgun and shot and wounded his nemesis.

Even after he was acquitted two years ago in the former priest’s attempted murder, Stokes pressed on, urging the same prosecutors who had tried to jail him to convict Blackwell.

On Thursday, still hobbling from his wounds, Blackwell, 58, sat impassively as the jury foreman read the guilty verdict against him. Defrocked by the Vatican last year in another molestation case, Blackwell faces up to 45 years’ imprisonment.

“This was a time for God to show himself,” a triumphant Stokes said.

It “was about me,” Stokes said of the four-day trial, in which his credibility was challenged by defense witnesses. Surrounded by overjoyed relatives after the verdict was delivered, he added: “I’m not a perfect person, but I stand here right and he stands here wrong.”

Jurors deliberated for five hours Wednesday before telling Circuit Judge Stuart R. Berger that they were deadlocked. Less than an hour after they returned Thursday morning, they reached a quick agreement.

Blackwell’s conviction Thursday came two days after defrocked Boston priest Paul Shanley was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison for raping a boy in the 1980s. Shanley’s was one of the most infamous among hundreds of alleged sexual abuse cases that forced the Archdiocese of Boston to pay $85 million last year to settle 550 lawsuits.

As Stokes, now 29, found a measure of vindication in Thursday’s verdict, another man went public with his own abuse allegations against Blackwell. Robert Martin, a Baltimore native who traveled from Louisiana to support Stokes, alleged that he also had been molested by the former priest when he was 14 -- an incident Martin said led to the Vatican’s decision in October to defrock the former priest.

Whispering that he had been “haunted for years,” Martin said that Stokes’ 10-year fight to convince authorities to prosecute Blackwell had convinced him “that if you’re a victim, you have to come forward and talk about it.” His voice quavering as he stood at Stokes’ side, Martin said he had fled Baltimore to Las Vegas, but “running away didn’t help. You can’t forget it.”

Jo Anne Stanton, the prosecutor who won Blackwell’s conviction, said she had tried to call Martin as a witness to show other acts of abuse, but the judge turned her down, saying his testimony would be improper.

A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Baltimore verified that Blackwell’s admission in 1998 of molesting another youth led “to the archdiocese decision to permanently remove him from ministry.” But archdiocese spokesman Sean T. Caine said he could not confirm or deny Martin’s account because of “confidentiality reasons.”

On Thursday, the archdiocese reacted to Blackwell’s conviction by saying that the trial was “independent of the processes and standards employed by the Catholic Church, which revoked his faculties to function as a priest several years ago.” But during Stokes’ attempted-murder trial in December 2002, Baltimore Cardinal William H. Keeler apologized to the defendant from the witness stand.

During the four days of testimony that ended Tuesday, two Baltimore detectives testified that during their initial 1993 investigation of Stokes’ charges against Blackwell, they found evidence of other victims -- molested youths who had been active at St. Edwards Church, where Blackwell had been a charismatic leader for two decades.

But Baltimore prosecutors, unable to find corroborating evidence, decided then not to charge Blackwell in any abuse cases.

After the verdict was announced Thursday, Kenneth W. Ravenell, Blackwell’s lawyer, said he would file a motion for a new trial on the grounds that the detectives’ testimony about other abuse victims may have improperly tainted jurors’ decisions.

The verdict, Ravenell said, “was decided on evidence the jury shouldn’t have heard.”

But it was Stokes’ emotional testimony that provided the core of the case against Blackwell. The diminutive barber said he was 13 when Blackwell began touching him intimately, and that the priest’s advances grew bolder over the next three years. Blackwell tried to assault him in the church rectory in 1992, Stokes said.

Blackwell did not testify in his own defense -- a silence he has maintained since Stokes’ 2002 trial, when the former priest invoked his constitutional right not to incriminate himself and refused to take the stand.

Instead, Ravenell made Stokes’ character an issue, calling to the stand former church leaders who said they had heard no abuse allegations from Stokes. And two psychiatrists described interviews in which Stokes told of out-of-body experiences, seeing demons and being abducted by aliens.

“There was absolutely no credibility to anything Dontee Stokes has told you,” Ravenell said to jurors in his closing statement.

Hugging Stokes after the verdict, Stanton, the prosecutor, praised his endurance. “It’s difficult to hear your character attacked,” she said.

Stokes allowed himself a tiny grin. “I’m just glad that I remained faithful,” he said.