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  Missouri Supreme Court Will Not Rehear Beine Case

By Betsy Taylor
Associated Press, carried in The Kansas City Star [St. Louis MO]
May 31, 2005

ST. LOUIS - A defrocked Roman Catholic priest is expected to be released from prison within days, after the Missouri Supreme Court said Tuesday it would not rehear his case.

The court last month threw out the conviction of James Beine, 63, on charges of exposing himself to boys in a restroom at a St. Louis grade school where he worked as a counselor.

Scott Holste, spokesman for Attorney General Jay Nixon, said the Supreme Court's order Tuesday directs a trial judge to enter acquittals for Beine. When that is done, "Mr. Beine will be a free man," Holste said.

Attorney Larry Fleming said he did not know where his client planned to go after his release but that Beine will not have to register as a sex offender because his convictions were overturned.

The court had ordered Beine to be freed on appeal bond on May 6, but he voluntarily remained in jail while legal proceedings continued because he feared for his safety if he was placed in home confinement.

Fleming said because the court action now is finished, Beine will be released without home confinement being necessary, eliminating that concern.

Beine was suspended from the priesthood in 1977 over allegations of sexual abuse, and in the mid-1990s the St. Louis archdiocese paid $110,000 to settle two lawsuits that claimed Beine sexually abused boys more than three decades earlier. He was formally removed from the priesthood earlier this month.

On April 26, the state Supreme Court threw out Beine's 2003 St. Louis convictions and the resulting 12-year sentence.

In its 4-3 ruling, the court ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove that Beine, while a counselor at St. Louis' Patrick Henry Elementary School during the 2000-2001 school year, committed wrongdoing when he allegedly exposed himself while urinating in a school bathroom.

The court said the section of the state's sexual misconduct law dealing with exposure was unconstitutionally broad and left "adults in a state of uncertainty about how they may take care of their biological needs without danger of prosecution when a child is present in the same public restroom."

Legislators moved quickly to repair the flawed language, passing a bill in the final hours of the 2005 session to clarify that the crime requires perpetrators to know that exposing themselves is likely to offend or alarm.

"While we were disappointed with the ruling in this case, it was heartening that we were able to work with the General Assembly to get a fix into the law in a relatively quick manner," Holste said Tuesday.

A U.S. appeals court already had thrown out Beine's federal conviction of possessing child pornography and the resulting prison sentence of nearly five years, ruling that investigators illegally seized key evidence.

St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke recently warned parishes where Beine once served of the former priest's possible prison release, citing "grave concerns about possible acts of child sexual abuse which he may have committed."

St. Louis prosecutors - barred from retrying the thrown-out charges - had said they were deciding whether they could file additional charges from complaints of sexual abuse their office fielded from Beine's years as a priest. The St. Louis circuit attorney's office said Tuesday that no new charges have been filed.

Fleming said Beine worked as a counselor for years in the schools, and he has received "glowing recommendations" written about Beine. "There's been an awful lot of rumors and accusations, but I haven't seen anything substantive," Fleming said.