BOSTON, Sept. 4 — A lawyer for 86 people suing Boston's Roman Catholic Archdiocese in the case of a pedophile priest said today that archdiocesan lawyers had spoken too soon when they said on Tuesday that the plaintiffs had agreed to a tentative settlement totaling $10 million.
The lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, said that many of the plaintiffs had signed the agreement but that "many have not signed."
Mr. Garabedian added: "There is an offer of $10 million. There has been no acceptance. To call it tentative would be inaccurate."
Still, Mr. Garabedian, whose clients accuse the now-defrocked priest, John J. Geoghan, of sexual abuse, implied that his clients might be ready to accept the offer, even though it is much less than an agreement reached in March for $14.9 million to $29.8 million. The church later scuttled that agreement.
"No one has said no," Mr. Garabedian said about the $10 million offer. "People want closure. They feel as though they have been dragged into this darkness and they can't get out of it. They feel as though they want closure to try to get their lives back together."
The settlement of the cases involving Mr. Geoghan, one of the most notorious figures in the scandal of sexual abuse by clergymen, could be a significant step for the archdiocese as it faces several hundred other sexual abuse lawsuits involving other priests.
The archdiocese backed out of the earlier Geoghan agreement because its finance council, an advisory board of mostly lay businessmen, said the church could not afford to pay up to $30 million to the Geoghan plaintiffs and similarly compensate the scores of other plaintiffs who had filed suits since the scandal broke in January. In recent weeks, the archdiocese has said it has even begun studying the possibility of filing for bankruptcy, a strategy that could allow it to delay paying any plaintiffs for years.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs and some experts on the church have maintained that the archdiocese could afford such a price if it sold or mortgaged church property.
A $10 million Geoghan settlement, apparently covered mostly by insurance policies, would lift the pressure on the church to sell property or file for bankruptcy, at least for now. It could also set a precedent for the other pending lawsuits.
In late July, negotiations broke down between the church and lawyers for about 250 plaintiffs in cases involving about 25 priests. People with knowledge of those negotiations said they failed in part because the archdiocese was waiting to see what would happen in the Geoghan cases, hoping those cases would set a less expensive precedent for the church.
Today, some of the lawyers involved in those cases said they expected that the archdiocese would look to the Geoghan cases as a guideline. But one lawyer for the 250 plaintiffs said he did not expect a Geoghan settlement to affect his cases. "We're on a completely different track," said Roderick Macleish Jr., saying he and his colleagues are preparing to litigate their cases. "We're gong to be asking for trial dates, and that's what we want."
Legal experts said today that it generally made sense for Mr. Garabedian's clients to accept the lower settlement amount. The alternative, they said, would probably be years of waiting for an uncertain outcome.
In addition, if Mr. Garabedian were to end up litigating each of his cases, he would face the possibility that the archdiocese would invoke the state's charitable immunity law, which can limit jury awards to plaintiffs suing the church to $20,000. If the archdiocese were, in the meantime, to settle the scores of other cases for less money per plaintiff, that could put pressure on the Geoghan plaintiffs to accept even less.
The possibility that the archdiocese would declare bankruptcy would be another factor, said Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor who is a visiting scholar at Harvard University Law School.
"The fact that the church might well declare bankruptcy, it would take 20 years," Ms. Murphy said. She said such a delay would result in the plaintiffs "not being able to put that behind them, particularly because of how long it's already been for most of them."
"I think it's like a pounding headache for most of them," Ms. Murphy said.
She added: "$10 million is a lot of money. Reasonable people will say it was good for the victims to get this over with."
Mr. Garabedian said today that the $10 million proposal differed in a few ways from the original March agreement. In March, the archdiocese agreed to pay 16 plaintiffs who are relatives of people who were abused $10,000 and to pay $75,000 each to 20 other plaintiffs who do not claim they were touched by Mr. Geoghan, but say they were traumatized by being forced to see the priest naked or by other similar circumstances.
The remaining plaintiffs were supposed to have had their awards determined by mediators, and could have received as much as $938,000.
Under the new proposal, the relatives would still receive $10,000, Mr. Garabedian said. The remaining plaintiffs would receive about a third of the highest amount they would have received under the March agreement, from $25,000 to $320,000, he said.
Several of the plaintiffs did not return telephone calls today. One plaintiff, Ralph DelVecchio, declined to talk about the agreement.
J. Owen Todd, a lawyer representing Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who said on Tuesday that the plaintiffs had agreed to accept the church's new offer, said today that he was surprised at Mr. Garabedian's statements that the deal had not been concluded.
"In view of Mr. Garabedian's statements, I think we'll wait until he feels that he's got his ducks in a row," Mr. Todd said. "The archdiocese is prepared to settle it when Garabedian is finished his work."