Former Southern Baptist pastor, a convicted felon, avoids jail time in feds' abuse inquiry
The Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Court House in Manhattan, where Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sentenced former Southern Baptist pastora and seminary professor Matt Queen following a federal abuse-related investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention. Michael M. Santiago, Getty Images
Liam Adams
A former Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor won’t serve jail time after lying to federal investigators in the first and potentially only felony conviction to emerge from an abuse-related investigation into the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The Department of Justice began investigating the Southern Baptist Convention in late 2022 following a third-party report on clergy sexual abuse, leading to scrutiny into a January 2023 incident at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas where administrators reportedly mishandled an abuse report. Matthew Queen, a former professor and administrator at the school, faced charges in May for his involvement and pleaded guilty in October.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sentenced Queen to six months of house arrest, one year of probation, and a $2,000 fine, concluding the case out of federal court in the Southern District of New York. The terms of the sentence were available in court records.
In the weeks prior to Wednesday’s sentencing hearing, Queen’s attorney, Sam Schmidt, asked Kaplan for a year of probation and a $2,000 fine versus prosecutors’ request for probation and house arrest. The charges carried a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison.
“The defendant insists that his conduct had no ill effect but that too is untrue,” prosecutors said in a Feb. 26 letter to Kaplan. “The defendant’s repeated lies dragged out the Government’s investigation and distracted resources better spent elsewhere.”
That question about where the DOJ has focused its investigation into the Nashville-based SBC and its affiliated agencies hasn’t yielded a satisfactory answer so far for abuse survivors and allies who hoped for denomination-wide accountability. There are no public indications federal authorities are pursuing additional charges against Southern Baptist leaders, including another former Southwestern administrator named Heath Woolman for his involvement in the same incident that led to Queen’s conviction.
Woolman reportedly instructed Southwestern seminary dean Terri Stovall in a January 2023 meeting to destroy a document detailing a report Stovall received months prior that contained abuse allegations against a student. Queen, a witness to Woolman’s directive to Stovall in what federal prosecutors later described as a conspiracy to cover-up abuse, initially lied to FBI agents about what he heard Woolman say and fabricated contemporaneous notes to support the false narrative.
Queen’s original indictment redacted many key details about these events, including the identities of Woolman and Stovall, but subsequent reporting by The Tennessean led to additional Southwestern seminary public disclosures. Also, The Tennessean reported on how top seminary leadership was slow to discipline Queen, Woolman, and former seminary police chief Kevin Collins after learning those three reportedly mishandled this abuse case and tried to cover-up that alleged wrongdoing.
Find the rest of the article here
Showing 1 comment