Charitable Immunity
Show #1003

Immune from lawsuits? If you’re a church or a charity in New Jersey you are – even if a child in your care has been molested or raped by one of your employees. It’s a law, dating back almost 50 years, that few New Jerseyans know anything about, unless they’ve tried to sue a church or a charity or a school. But a former student at Princeton’s American Boy Choir school is trying to change that law. Claiming that he was sexually abused, repeatedly, by multiple choir staffers, his effort to have his day in court is now before the State Supreme Court and the Legislature. Sandy King’s mini-doc takes us inside the court, where we hear the oral arguments on his case, and inside the halls of the State House, where we see his efforts to lobby members of the Assembly. With Raymond Brown in the studio: Assemblyman Neil Cohen, sponsor of the bill to overturn charitable immunity; William Cambria, former counsel to the Newark Archdiocese, and Rutgers Law School Associate Dean Bernard Bell.