Update: Case of Rabbi Baruch Lanner

Rabbi Baruch Lanner - Past NCSY Leader
According to the New Jersey Department of Corrections Rabbi Baruch Lanner either did not apply for or was turned down for early parole which would have seen him released December 9, 2006.

Lanner's next Projected Parole Eligibility Date is April 24, 2008.

There was also an appeal by Lanner that was not reported in the press which was partially successful.

State v. Baruch Lanner, unpublished opinion, App. Div. Docket No. A-3385-04T3 (January 11, 2006) -- Conviction for petty disorderly persons offense of offensive touching vacated.
Full text of decision:
http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/opinions/a3385-04.pdf
http://lawlibrary.rutgers.edu/courts/wordperfect/appellate/A3385-04.DOC

One-year statute of limitations bars conviction for petty disorderly persons offense committed in 1996, which was a lesser included offense of charge of criminal sexual contact for which defendant was indicted in 2001. Statute establishing five-year statute of limitations for greater offense and allowing “downgrading” of that offense to a non-indictable does not change the result. “We reject the State’s assertion that this statute would permit the prosecution of a lesser-included offense at any time, so long as the greater offense is filed within the requisite limitations period. Rather, we agree with defendant that the statute, by its use of the term “downgrade,” is referring to a prosecutorial function, not submission to a jury for its consideration of a time-barred offense.”

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Rabbi Baruch Lanner, the former youth leader and yeshiva high school principal convicted of sexual abuse in 2002. He was taken into custody and returned to state prison on February 23, 2005 to resume serving a seven-year sentence.

Rabbi Lanner served less than a week of that sentence before being freed in October 2002 pending the ruling on his appeal.

In a 3-0 decision in February, 2005, a New Jersey appeals court upheld one charge of criminal sexual contact with a young woman, then a teenage student at Hillel, the Ocean Township high school where Rabbi Lanner was principal from 1982 to 1997. The judges dismissed another charge of child endangerment involving a second female student at the school.