Ronald Paquin, the former Haverhill priest whose case was among the first the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team documented in 2002, died Friday at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. He was 83. The Maine Department of Corrections said he died with medical personnel present and that the Attorney General and the medical examiner were notified, which is standard for a death in custody. No cause has been given.
He died a prisoner of a second state, for a second set of crimes, after Massachusetts had let him go. His case is a short history of what the law could and could not do about clergy abuse, and of the one mechanism that finally held him.
Massachusetts: the plea, the sentence, the release
Paquin was a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston assigned to St. John the Baptist in Haverhill. In December 2002 he pleaded guilty in Essex Superior Court to three counts of child rape for repeatedly raping an altar boy between 1989 and 1992, beginning when the boy was 12. He was sentenced to 12 to 15 years. The Globe’s reporting that year, drawing on archdiocesan files released in litigation, showed the church had moved him between parishes after complaints, and psychologists who evaluated him reported he admitted molesting at least 14 boys. He was laicized.
He served the sentence. As it ended in 2015, the Essex District Attorney petitioned to have him civilly committed as a sexually dangerous person under chapter 123A, the statute that allows the Commonwealth to hold a sex offender past his sentence, potentially for life, on proof that he remains dangerous. The petition requires the opinions of two qualified examiners. Both examined Paquin and concluded he was no longer sexually dangerous. District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett withdrew the petition, saying the law gave him no choice, and on October 2, 2015 Paquin walked out of custody. He was 73.
Maine: the crimes with no expiration
What Massachusetts could not do, Maine did. In 2017 prosecutors in York County charged Paquin with dozens of counts arising from trips he had taken with altar boys to Kennebunkport in the 1980s. The abuse alleged was three decades old. It could be charged because Maine’s limitations rules for sexual crimes against children allowed it, and because one of the boys, now a man in his forties, came forward after Paquin’s release.
He was tried in November 2018 and convicted on 11 of 24 counts. In 2019 he was sentenced to 20 years with all but 16 suspended, followed by three years of probation. Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction. He was 76 when he entered Maine’s prison system and would have been 90 at the end of the unsuspended term.
What the two outcomes show
The first is about civil commitment. Chapter 123A is often described as a way to keep the worst offenders locked up indefinitely, and it can be. But it is not a sentence; it is a finding about present dangerousness, and it stands or falls on expert opinion. When both examiners say a 73-year-old is no longer dangerous, the district attorney cannot proceed, and the courts have enforced that limit. Paquin’s release in 2015 was the statute working as written, whatever one thinks of the result.
The second is about time. Massachusetts has lengthened its criminal limitations period for child sexual abuse more than once, and prosecutions may now be brought decades after the victim turns 16. But an extension does not revive an offense that was already time-barred when it passed, and for abuse from the 1980s the extensions mostly came too late. Maine’s rules reached back further. A victim from a Massachusetts parish whose abuse occurred in Massachusetts in 1985 had, by 2017, no criminal remedy here. A victim of the same priest whose abuse occurred across the state line had one, and used it.
Civil claims are different. A 2014 Massachusetts law allows a survivor of child sexual abuse to sue within 35 years of the abuse or seven years of discovering the injury, whichever is later, which is why the archdiocese’s settlements have continued long after the criminal cases ended.
The Spotlight record
Paquin’s file was one of the documents the Globe obtained in January 2002 through the litigation that opened the archdiocese’s personnel records, and his name appears in the series that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 and later became the film. The Globe’s January 2002 profile described complaints dating to the 1980s and a church that kept reassigning him. He was among the first priests criminally charged in the wave that followed, and among the last still in prison.
Who was Ronald Paquin?
A former priest of the Archdiocese of Boston who pleaded guilty in 2002 to raping a Haverhill altar boy, served 12 years, was released in 2015, and was then convicted in Maine in 2018 of abusing another altar boy during trips to Kennebunkport in the 1980s. He died in a Maine prison on September 12, 2026 at 83.
Why was he released in Massachusetts in 2015?
His sentence ended. The district attorney sought civil commitment as a sexually dangerous person, but both qualified examiners found he was no longer dangerous, and under G.L. c. 123A the petition could not proceed.
Why could Maine prosecute crimes from the 1980s?
Maine’s limitations rules for sexual crimes against children permitted the charges. Massachusetts’s 2014 extension of its own limitations period did not revive offenses that were already time-barred.
How did he die?
The Maine Department of Corrections has not stated a cause. He died with medical personnel present; the medical examiner was notified as required for any death in custody.
Can survivors still sue?
In Massachusetts, a 2014 law allows civil claims for child sexual abuse to be brought within 35 years of the abuse or seven years of discovering the injury, whichever is later.
Death reported by the Bangor Daily News, the Portland Press Herald and WABI, September 13, 2026. Massachusetts case history from The Boston Globe (2002 and October 2, 2015) and CBS Boston; Maine case history from NBC Boston and Boston.com (2018 and 2019). Statutes referenced: G.L. c. 123A and G.L. c. 260, § 4C. General information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice.