Law Should Prosecute Criminals, Not Scapegoats

Pottstown Mercury
December 31, 2013

http://www.pottsmerc.com/opinion/20131231/law-should-prosecute-criminals-not-scapegoats

In a decision that came as a surprise to many and a blow to some, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania last week voided the child-endangerment oversight conviction of Msgr. William Lynn, the former secretary for clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He has spent the last 18 months in prison as the highest-ranking official in the Roman Catholic Church to be convicted of charges stemming from the child sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the church from Philadelphia to the Vatican.

The unanimous 43-page opinion is sure to be unpopular with many, especially advocates for the victims of sexual abuse by the clergy. Indeed, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams has vowed to an appeal.

But the ruling is legally sound. It’s hard to see how an appeal will be successful. That means that Lynn must be freed.

Since the early 1990s, beginning in Boston, it became clear that the Catholic Church had long tolerated abusers and pedophiles in its ranks. When a “problem” would surface, the “problem” priest would be transferred to a new parish, sometimes after receiving therapy and sometimes not. Usually neither the pastor nor the parishioners were warned about the monsters in their midst.

Lynn, now 62, served as secretary of clergy from 1992 to 2004. He was responsible for fielding complaints about abuse by priests and recommending a course of action to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who made the final decisions.

Lynn was convicted for his role in the oversight of Edward Avery, a now-defrocked priest who pleaded guilty in 2012 of sexually assaulting an altar boy referred to as “Billy Doe” in 1998. That assault was not reported to the archdiocese until 2009. Another priest and a lay teacher were also convicted earlier this year of assaulting the boy. Bevilacqua, who is now dead, was never charged.

In 2005, a Philadelphia grand jury issued a scathing report documenting decades of horrors at the hands of the clergy — overseen and covered up by the hierarchy of the archdiocese.

But the grand jury concluded that, under Pennsylvania’s 1972 child endangerment law, higher-ups in the archdiocese — including Bevilacqua or Lynn — could not be prosecuted. The grand jury concluded that “as defined under the law, the offense of endangering the welfare of children is too narrow to support a successful prosecution of the decision-makers who were running the archdiocese. The statute confines its coverage to parents, guardians, or other persons ‘supervising the welfare of a child.’ High-level archdiocesan officials, however, were far removed from any direct contact with children.”

After that report, then-District-Attorney Lynne Abraham led efforts to amend that law to include supervisors like Lynn. The statute was updated in 2007 to apply not only to “a parent, guardian or other person supervising the welfare of a child under 18 years of age” but also to “a person that employs or supervises such a person.”

Williams, Abraham’s successor, prosecuted Lynn under the 2007 amended law despite the findings of the 2005 grand jury. At Lynn’s trial, it was established that he never knew about the alleged abuse of Billy Doe — indeed, he had never even met the young man. He was not involved in “supervising” him in any way. So under the law that applied at the time of the case, the Superior Court found, the case against Lynn should have never been brought.

Let it be noted that his hands were not clean. The court wrote it appeared Lynn’s first priority was protecting the archdiocese and his second was the reputation of the offending priests. But it didn’t find he had intent to harm any children.

Some may call it hair-splitting or a technicality. But the law is the law. Some may say the way it was applied here was a gross prosecutorial overreach.

But the law must be upheld in the courts. The aim of the judicial system should be to jail criminals, not scapegoats — even scapegoats for an institution that is guilty of unspeakable sin.