Prosecutors say Anthony Odiong exploited his parishioners\u2019 emotional dependency to engage in sexual conduct with them<\/p>\n
A Roman Catholic priest with ties to Texas<\/a> and south-east Louisiana<\/a> and criminally charged<\/a> with abusing his position as a clergyman to pursue sex with three spiritually vulnerable female congregants faces being taken to trial on all of those cases at once.<\/p>\n The Texas district attorney\u2019s office prosecuting Anthony Odiong filed a motion seeking to consolidate the three cases in late March, ahead of a trial date that the Guardian understands has tentatively been set for 4 May. Prepared by McLennan county first assistant district attorney Ryan Calvert, the motion notes that Texas state law allows \u201ca defendant [to] be prosecuted in a single criminal action\u201d if the crimes alleged \u201care connected or \u2026 are the repeated commission of the same or similar offenses\u201d.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prosecutors say Anthony Odiong exploited his parishioners\u2019 emotional dependency to engage in sexual conduct with them A Roman Catholic priest with ties to Texas and south-east Louisiana and criminally charged with abusing his position as a clergyman to pursue sex with three spiritually vulnerable female congregants faces being taken to trial on all of those … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}