A retired priest with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange County was sentenced today, Friday, Aug. 25, for molesting a young boy almost two decades ago in the rectory and sacristy at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Costa Mesa.
Denis Lyons, 78, of Seal Beach Leisure World, was sentenced to one year in jail, five years of formal probation, 400 hours of community service, and lifetime sex offender registration.
Lyons pleaded guilty March 23, to four felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14.
On at least four occassions between Jan. 1, 1992, and Dec. 31, 1995, Lyons molested a young male student, John Doe, while the victim was a second- and third-grade student at St. John the Baptist Catholic School. The school was part of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Costa Mesa, where Lyons served as a priest.
In September 2008, a now adult John Doe reported the abuse to the Costa Mesa Police Department. Lyons was arrested July 20, 2009, while playing cards at a local community center near his home in Leisure World in Seal Beach. He was arrested by detectives from CMPD with the assistance of the Orange County District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation.
Lyons’ lifetime sex offender registration bars him from entering county recreational areas and city parks that have passed the Sex Offender Ordinance. Thirteen have enacted the Child Safety Zone Ordinance including Seal Beach, Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Laguna Hills, Lake Forest, La Habra, Los Alamitos, Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, Santa Ana, Westminster, and Yorba Linda. If a convicted sex offender is found in a designated Child Safety Zone, that individual may face a fine.
The Costa Mesa case was not Lyons’ first run-in with the law.
Prior case
In April 2003, Lyons was charged by the OCDA with molesting another boy under the age of 14 between 1978 and 1981. Two other male victims were alleged on the complaint as independent corroborative evidence, but were never charged due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. All three of the young boys attended St. John the Baptist Catholic Church while Lyons was a priest there.
The April 2003 case was dismissed for the following reason: prior to 1994, California law allowed for charges to be filed for sexual crimes within six years from the date of violation. In 1994, a California law (then PC 801, now PC 803) was passed stating that criminal charges can be filed for sexual crimes that occurred outside of the 6-year restriction without limitation as long as certain criteria are met including; 1) The case must be filed within one year of being reported by the victim to law enforcement; 2) The crimes must be against a child under the age of 18 and include substantial sexual conduct such as masturbation, oral copulation, penetration by foreign object, sexual intercourse, or sodomy; and 3) The case must be corroborated by clear, independent, admissible evidence.
In July 2003, three months after Lyons was charged in Orange County for the molestation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Stogner versus California that it was unconstitutional for the timeline for filing sexual charges to go back infinitely. The court determined that PC 801 could not be used retroactively and only applied to crimes that occurred from the time the law went into effect.
In other words, if there is a statute of limitations, you cannot ignore that statute of limitations.
Any crime that occurred prior to the passage of PC 801 was subject to the six-year limitation. As a result, sex crimes that occurred before 1988, or six years prior to the passage of PC 801 could no longer be prosecuted. The 2003 case against Lyons had to be dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired on the 1978 to 1981 molestations.
An all-faith abomination
As previously reported in the Sun, in June 2007, the Associated Press found that (based on liability insurance claims) Protestant churches throughout the United States received an average of 260 child abuse reports a year.
According to Insurance Journal.com, the Roman Catholic Church has found 13,000 credible claims of child abuse against priests since 1950.
That works out to roughly 228 cases a year—32 fewer cases a year among Catholic priests than among Protestant clerics.
The Catholic League took a look at the same issue in February 2004 in a report called “Sexual Abuse in Social Context.”
“In a 1984 survey, 38.6 percent of ministers reported sexual contact with a church member, and 76 percent knew of another minister who had had sexual intercourse with a parishioner,” the Catholic League report said.
Sex offenders in Seal Beach
According to a Seal Beach city staff report written earlier this year, seven registered sex offenders live in Seal Beach reside in Leisure World. Three other sex offenders live or lived in Seal Beach, but outside of the retirement community.
