Crimes
In 2000, an investigative series published in The Jewish Week alleged that Lanner had physically and sexually abused young people for decades. Lanner resigned the day after it was published. The story, "Stolen Innocence," later won an award for "meritorious journalism."
An investigation was conducted by the Orthodox Union (OU). The investigating committee, headed by then-Hillel President Richard Joel, spent over $1 million interviewing more than 140 people and issued a 330-page report detailing the abuse. The report alleged that Lanner had physically and emotionally abused dozens of teenagers, including fondling girls and kneeing boys in the groin, and that the abuse had begun in 1970. As a result of the report, the executive vice president of the OU, Rabbi Raphael Butler, resigned. He had been criticized for failing to act on earlier complaints.
Lanner was convicted in 2002 of sexually abusing two teenage girls who attended the religious school where he had been principal, and sentenced to seven years in prison. An appeals court dismissed one of the child endangerment charges in 2005. He was released on parole on January 10, 2008, and will remain on parole for four years.
Read more about this topic: Baruch Lanner
Famous quotes containing the word crimes:
“It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature—were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.”
—John Brown (1800–1859)