Paul Shanley

BOSTON — One of the most notorious figures in the Boston clergy sex abuse scandal has completed his prison sentence on child rape charges and will be released this week after two experts hired by prosecutors found he does not meet the legal criteria to be held as a sexually dangerous person.

Paul Shanley was known in the 1960s and ’70s for being a hip street priest who reached out to troubled youths. But in 2005 he was convicted of repeatedly raping and fondling a boy at a suburban parish in the 1980s, and he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison.

Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said Tuesday that her office hired two psychiatric experts to evaluate Shanley, now 86 years old, to see if he should continue to be held after completing his sentence. Both experts told prosecutors that he does not meet the legal criteria for civil confinement as a sexually dangerous person.

Once Shanley is released Friday, he will begin 10 years of supervised probation.

Shanley was defrocked after dozens of men came forward and said he had molested them when they were children.

Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represented some of those men in lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Boston, said his clients are upset that Shanley is getting out of prison.

“Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place which will prevent Paul Shanley from sexually abusing once again,” Garabedian said. “When it comes to a sexual abuser abusing an innocent child, the abuser can be 35 or 95 — there’s no age limit.”

Ryan said Shanley is prohibited from interacting with children.

“The defendant will be monitored by the probation department for the next 10 years and has been ordered to have no contact with children under 16 years of age,” she said.

Under a Massachusetts law, prosecutors may petition a court to have a defendant indefinitely confined as a sexually dangerous person after completion of a prison sentence if the state can prove he suffers from a mental illness or abnormality that makes him incapable of controlling sexually dangerous impulses.

After Shanley was convicted, prosecutors asked a judge to send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Ryan said both doctors who evaluated Shanley concluded that he does not satisfy the legal criteria for prosecutors to file a petition seeking to confine him after his prison sentence.

Shanley’s appellate lawyer, Robert Shaw Jr., said Shanley has “served his time.”