World News
James Porter, former priest and convicted sex abuser, dead at age 70
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BOSTON (CNS) -- James Porter, a former priest who served 20 years in prison for sexually molesting children in the Fall River Diocese churches where he served in the 1960s, died of cancer Feb. 11. Porter, 70, was being treated in Boston at the New England Medical Center, where he had been transferred from a Department of Corrections medical clinic. Last year he completed an 18- to 20-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty in 1993 to 41 counts of sexual assault involving 28 children. Since his release, Porter had been held by the state pending a civil hearing to decide whether he should be committed as a sexually dangerous person. In a 1992 television interview, Porter admitted to molesting more than 100 children in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, New Mexico and Nevada. By 1993, 99 men and women from the Fall River Diocese in southeastern Massachusetts had accused Porter of abusing them. Sixty-eight of them were part of a reported $5 million settlement with the Fall River Diocese in the early 1990s.
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