By Nate Raymond
DEDHAM, Mass. (Reuters) -A Massachusetts judge on Wednesday dismissed a criminal case charging former Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick with molesting a 16-year-old boy in 1974, saying the 93-year-old was not competent to stand trial due to dementia.
McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, D.C., is the only current or former U.S. Catholic cardinal to ever face child sex abuse charges, with prosecutors in Massachusetts and Wisconsin filing separate cases against him.
The case in Dedham, Massachusetts, before Judge Paul McCallum was the first to be filed, with prosecutors in July 2022 charging McCarrick with three counts of indecent assault and battery.
The Wisconsin case is ongoing, with a hearing scheduled for Sept. 18. McCarrick has not entered a plea in that case and a trial date has not been set.
Those cases are the only two he has faced despite lawsuits by other men accusing him of sexual abuse decades ago. A legal quirk froze the statute of limitations in the Massachusetts case after McCarrick, a non-resident, left the state.
McCarrick, who lives in Missouri, pleaded not guilty in September 2021.
His lawyers in February moved to dismiss the case, saying a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found McCarrick has dementia, likely due to Alzheimer’s disease.
Prosecutors retained their own expert, state psychologist Kerry Nelligan, who testified on Wednesday that she agreed that McCarrick is currently not competent to stand trial due to his “severe cognitive declines.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andy Sullivan)
