Mahony’s Attorney Accuses Foes of Trying to Pressure His Client

An attorney for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles on Tuesday accused lawyers of trying to grab headlines when they asked a judge last month to sanction Cardinal Roger M. Mahony for failing to appear at a scheduled deposition.

Attorney Donald F. Woods Jr. said in court papers that opposing counsel had failed to establish an “urgent need” to depose Mahony in a civil negligence claim involving sex-abuse allegations against a former Stockton priest whom Mahony had supervised.

The alleged abuse ended seven years before Mahony became bishop of Stockton in 1980, Woods wrote. In addition, “Mahony has testified exhaustively on four different occasions concerning his minimal knowledge of Father Oliver O’Grady, the alleged offender.”

Woods asked Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charles W. “Tim” McCoy to deny the motion for sanctions and order payment of $3,500 for Mahony’s legal fees.

Attorneys John Manly and Venus Soltan had been scheduled to depose Mahony on April 22 in the Stockton sex-abuse case. But the sides disagreed on the ground rules, including the site of the deposition, and Woods said Mahony would not attend.

In his court filing Tuesday, Woods said he planned to raise 1st Amendment and separation of church and state issues in an attempt to limit the scope of Mahony’s testimony in the case. Those are some of the same privileges the archdiocese has tried to invoke in civil and criminal litigation arising from the local clergy sex scandal.

Meanwhile, three days before the deposition, McCoy halted all litigation in as many as 94 pending sex-abuse cases against the Catholic church in Northern California, including the Stockton case, until California’s chief justice names a trial judge in the cases.

Manly has said that he must depose Mahony because he has “direct and particular knowledge ... as to the Stockton Diocese’s direct involvement in concealing O’Grady’s past and continuing acts, and assigning, enabling and allowing O’Grady to continue to prey on children.”

Last week, Soltan insisted that the motion was “not vindictive.” “It’s not about headlines,” Manly said.

In his declaration, Woods said that opposing counsel had fashioned their motion “to grab headlines for the purpose of embarrassing the cardinal and motivating the archdiocese to settle” the civil cases against the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

“Victims’ advocates and their attorneys have said a number of times that the way to force the church to settle is to keep the pressure on the cardinal,” Woods wrote.

He defended his firm’s position that the deposition be moved to its offices or the church grounds for security reasons, and that the site be kept secret.

“The deposition needs to be taken in a calm, professional atmosphere, as opposed to a Cardinal Bernard Law or Michael Jackson situation,” Woods wrote, referring to the former archbishop of Boston, who resigned after his deposition testimony had become public.