NEW ORLEANS — A jailed priest now in the hospital and awaiting trial for child rape and kidnapping charges, admitted under oath he still looks at child pornography, a prosecutor said on Friday.
Lawrence Hecker, the 92-year-old retired priest who admitted in an exclusive interview with WWL Louisiana and the Guardian in August that he had sex with underage boys in the 1960s and 70s, was apparently in a UMC hospital on Friday as his pretrial hearing for child rape and kidnapping charges was held.
Prosecutor Ned McGowan raised Hecker's statements about viewing child pornography while arguing that he shouldn't be released from jail. He may have been referring to a deposition Hecker gave in December 2020 in a different child sexual abuse case against him. The Guardian reported that Hecker said in that deposition that he would look at child porn if it "appeared on his computer" while he was searching for other porn.
He's been in jail since his arrest Sept. 8, charged with choking out a high school student in 1975 and sodomizing him while he was unconscious. Hecker was lucid and stood the whole time during his 18-minute interview with WWL in August, but his defense team said he's suffered mental decline, disorientation and some physical ailments while being held in the Orleans Justice Center jail.
Judge Ben Willard set Hecker's bond at $800,000, which he can't afford to pay. Hecker's defense attorney Bobby Hjortsberg said jail officials told him they could not provide proper medical care for Hecker once he's released from UMC. Prosecutor Ned McGowan suggested a secure hospital that can provide mental health treatment in East Feliciana Parish. Hjortsberg said that's a possibility, but then asked Willard for home confinement.
"That's not gonna happen," Judge Willard said.
Hecker claimed that society was more permissive of such behavior at the time, even though Louisiana’s age of consent to have sex in the 1960s and ‘70s was the same then as it is now.