student at Marin Catholic High School where Ingels taught in the early 1970s, had cooperated with police in recording some recent phone conversations. In them, prosecutors said, Ingels had made incriminating statements corroborating the former student's account of being abused at age 15 during a family outing at Muir Beach in 1972. Even as Marin County District Attorney Paula Kamena pressed criminal charges, she was gathering information from another of Ingels' alleged victims, a woman who said the priest had also molested her repeatedly while she was a student at the school. (See sidebar, "Fast Times at Marin Catholic High.") San Francisco DA Kamala Harris: Her office has elected to keep sex abuse documents related to the church under wraps. But Ingels was lucky. At his arraignment, hislawyers announced that he would postpone entering a plea. A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court—by a 5-to-4 vote—struck down as unconstitutional a California law that had extended the statute of limitations for prosecuting suspected sex abusers. The law—enacted during a national furor over sex abuse in the church—had allowed prosecutors to bring abuse cases against many clerics years after the alleged crimes had occurred. The Supreme Court decision—Stogner vs. California—said the retroactive lengthening of statutes of limitation from a few years to, in some cases, decades violated the Constitution's ex post facto clause, which prohibits the enactment of laws that criminalize behavior after the fact.



Along with many others, Ingels walked. The Stogner decision stopped criminal investigations across California in their tracks. By ending any possibility of public