New York was considering Shanley's promotion to director. However, Cardinal Law dissuaded him from doing it, citing potential embarrassment to the church from Shanley's past. Conviction and appeal In May 2002, Shanley was arrested in San Diego, California, on three counts of child rape from Massachusetts. The allegations dated to when he was a pastor at St. Jean's. The victim had filed charges against Shanley only a few days earlier, saying the attacks occurred for several years between ages six and 15. In February 2005, Shanley was convicted in Massachusetts of indecent assaults and statutory rape; he received a sentence of 12 to 15 years in state prison. Shanley was laicized in 2004. The Shanley case was based on recovered memories of abuse that happed 20 years earlier when the plaintiff was a young child. The validity of recovered media and the alleged prejudice against Shanley due to heavy media coverage formed the basis for his legal appeal. In 2007, Shanley's new attorney, Robert F. Shaw, Jr., filed a motion for a new trial, challenging his convictions as unjust. During a May 2008 hearing, Shaw argued that repressed memories of childhood rape and sexual assault by family and clergy were without general acceptance in the scientific community and were so-called "junk science". Shaw claimed that the court had not received accurate information about the scientific status of repressed memories before Shanley's trial. On November 26, 2008, Superior Court Judge Stephen Neel denied Shaw's motion for a new trial. Shaw then filed a petition for review in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, arguing that Neel had erred, and that "repressed memory" is an unproven, hypothesized phenomenon that has not been accepted in the scientific community and should not be admitted as evidence in Massachusetts courts. In January 2009, the Supreme Judicial Court granted the petition and ordered the case transferred from the intermediate appellate court for review by the state's highest court. On September 10, 2009, the Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in the Shanley case. Shaw argued that Shanley was prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned based upon inadmissible evidence. The case was closely watched throughout the United States and abroad. On January 10, 2010, the Supreme Judicial Court unanimously affirmed Shanley's conviction. It concluded: "In sum, the judge's finding that the lack of scientific testing did not make unreliable the theory that an individual may experience dissociative amnesia was supported