A Wisconsin judge ruled Friday that a sexual assault case against Theodore McCarrick will remain suspended for the remainder of McCarrick’s life, but that the charges against the former cardinal can not legally be dropped or the case dismissed.
Walworth County Judge David Reddy told McCarrick’s lawyers Dec. 27 that while he is not competent to grant their request to dismiss the case, it will remain in permanent suspension until McCarrick’s eventual death.
Earlier this year, Reddy suspended the criminal trial against McCarrick, 94, after a court-appointed psychologist found the former cardinal incompetent to participate in his own defense. The new ruling extended that suspension, meaning that McCarrick will not face a criminal judge during his lifetime.
At a hearing last week, which McCarrick did not attend, Reddy said that state laws on trial competency prohibit a judge from formally dismissing charges against a defendant found incompetent to stand trial.
“However, the court will not set any further reviews on this matter and it will remain in suspended status until the defendant passes away,” Reddy said, according to court records first reported by WLUK.
With the case against McCarrick ended, the former cardinal is no longer facing the prospect of criminal sanction in any U.S. jurisdiction. In August 2023, a Massachusetts judge dismissed assault charges against McCarrick in that state, also because the former cardinal was found to be impeded by dementia from participating in his own defense.
McCarrick was charged in April with one count of fourth-degree sexual assault in Wisconsin, stemming from an alleged incident in April 1977. He is accused of fondling an 18-year-old boy’s genitals when they were both guests at a house in Geneva Lake.
Wisconsin’s Department of Justice announced that the charges came out of an attorney general probe into Catholic dioceses in state. That probe has faced criticism from both Catholic official and some victims’ advocates. The Milwaukee archdiocese has criticized the review as targeted anti-Catholicism, while one victims’ advocacy group says the state’s AG has not done enough to pursue records on alleged sexual abuse cases.
The alleged victim in the Wisconsin case, identified by Fox6 as James Grein, said McCarrick was close to his family, and alleged that he was 11 years old when McCarrick first exposed himself and soon after began to sexually assault him, frequently at parties.
Grein also said McCarrick had non-consensual intercourse with him, and had taken him on one occasion to an event where multiple adult males had intercourse with him, although those alleged events did not take place in Wisconsin and are not part of the Wisconsin criminal charges.
In 2018, Grein told the New York Times that he had been frequently abused by McCarrick, a family friend. Grein alleges that the abuse began when he was 11, in the early 1970s, before McCarrick was ordained a bishop.
Grein’s attorney has not yet responded to The Pillar’s attempt to contact him.
McCarrick, who was laicized by the Vatican in 2019, was the first U.S. Catholic bishop to face criminal charges over sexual assault allegations.
While numerous allegations of sexual abuse have surfaced against McCarrick since 2018, and he has been found guilty in a Vatican administrative penal process, most U.S. allegations against McCarrick fell beyond state statutes of limitation, effectively preventing his prosecution in state courts.
