Retired New Orleans priest gets life in prison after pleading guilty to child rape
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A serial child molester and retired Roman Catholic priest on Wednesday declined an opportunity to apologize to his victims after pleading guilty to child rape earlier in December.
Lawrence Hecker’s silence came on Wednesday in New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse as a judge handed him a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
Earlier in the proceeding, the victim who pressed the case that led to Hecker’s guilty plea described his rape in gut-wrenching detail.
“I don’t forgive him,” said the victim, who was about 16 when the cleric assaulted him in 1975 at a church next to a high school that the then teenager attended.
Alluding to how Hecker’s superiors protected him from law enforcement authorities for decades, he added: “In my opinion, the archdiocese should be sitting there with him – because they are complicit in this as well.”
Other victims who endured sexual abuse at the hands of Hecker, now 93, and were prepared to testify at the trial averted by the cleric’s guilty plea on 3 December also spoke at Wednesday’s sentencing hearing, including one who dismissed him as “an animal”.
The judge Nandi Campbell was weeping as she sentenced Hecker.
“I hope this sentence gives you some closure,” Campbell said, though she acknowledged how difficult it would be.
Hecker’s attorney, Robert Hjortsberg, told news reporters outside the courthouse that his client had expressed remorse for his actions through his guilty plea.
Wednesday’s emotional hearing at last closed the book on a grueling legal saga made necessary primarily because of a decades long cover-up engineered by Roman Catholic church officials in New Orleans, whose archdiocese counts on hundreds of thousands of believers and therefore is one of the faith’s most reliable strongholds in the US.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/18/new-orleans-catholic-priest-sentenced-lawrence-hecker.
