Prosecutors to review new church abuse records; ex-D.A. skeptical By Harriet Ryan, Victoria Kim and Ashley Powers January 22, 2013, 12:14 p.m. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office said Tuesday it plans to review newly released records from the late 1980s that show then-Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top aide worked to conceal pedophile priests from law enforcement. The office "will review and evaluate all documents as they become available to us," a spokeswoman for Dist. Jackie Lacey said. Lacey's predecessor, however, cast doubt on the possibility of charges for Mahony and other top church officials. In an interview Tuesday, former Dist. Steve Cooley, who oversaw a five-year investigation of clergy sex abuse in the Los Angeles archdiocese, said a three-year statute of limitations for most felonies made it unlikely prosecutors would bring criminal cases based on memos written by the church leaders in 1986 and 1987. "It would be great to prosecute them," said Cooley, who stepped down last year. But you cannot ethically prosecute someone ... when the statute has run. Cooley put his investigation on hold in 2007, saying he was awaiting the release of more personnel files by the church. He said he did not believe that the prosecutors who handled that investigation ever saw the documents released Monday. In those records, Mahony and his chief aide for sex abuse cases, Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, discuss ways to keep police from discovering that three priests had molested young boys. "Whatever they did back then was horrendous, unethical and immoral to the point of biblical proportions," Cooley said, but because of the statute of limitations "it may not be criminal."