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Pa. Supreme Court rejects Philly D.A.'s appeal in church sex-abuse case

By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Philly.com
July 27, 2016

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160727_Pa__Supreme_Court_rejects_Philly_D_A__s_appeal_in_church_sex-abuse_case.html

Msgr. William J. Lynn was found guilty of child endangerment.
Photo by ALEJANDRO A. ALVAREZ

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Msgr. William J. Lynn, the first Catholic Church official convicted for a supervisory role over priests accused of sexually abusing children in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, must have a new trial.

The court rejected an appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, which challenged a lower court's order of a new trial.

The unsigned one-sentence order confronts District Attorney Seth Williams with the thorny question of how to retry the landmark case after an appellate ruling removed one of the pillars of the prosecution.

Lynn, now 65 and serving a three- to six-year prison term, was not accused of molesting children. He was accused of child endangerment because prosecutors say that as archdiocesan secretary for clergy from 1992 to 2004, he reassigned pedophile priests to new parishes, where they preyed on more children.

To establish that Lynn was part of a long-standing cover-up of pedophilia in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, prosecutors introduced historical information on clergy sex abuse - about two dozen examples, some dating to the 1940s.

But in ordering a new trial in December 2015, Superior Court ruled that the historical cases tainted the jury's ability to reach a fair verdict. The District Attorney's Office asked the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling.

Williams spokesman Cameron Kline said prosecutors are reviewing the decision and won't comment "until after that process has been completed."

Thomas A. Bergstrom, the Center City lawyer hired by the archdiocese to defend Lynn, said he is preparing a motion to have Lynn released on the $250,000 bail he posted before he was sentenced in July 2012 by Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina.

"Currently, he is an unconvicted and unsentenced individual and he should be released on bail pending a new trial, a fair trial this time," Bergstrom said.

The historical evidence in question, sometimes called "other bad acts evidence," has been at the heart of the case against Lynn since 2011, when he was charged with three priests and a parochial school teacher after a county grand jury probe.

Sarmina let prosecutors introduce documents from the archdiocesan "secret archives" about problem priests, ruling that the background was needed to help the jury understand the context and culture in which Lynn made decisions about how to handle accused clergy.

Lynn's lawyers, however, called the evidence prejudicial, and said it inflamed the jury and impelled a guilty verdict.

When Lynn's lawyers first appealed his conviction, Superior Court reversed on different grounds. The court ruled that Lynn was wrongly charged under a version of the child-endangerment law that did not apply until 2007, after he no longer supervised priests.

The Supreme Court reversed that decision last year and ordered the midlevel appeals court to reexamine the conviction. In December, the Superior Court panel ordered a new trial for Lynn on the defense challenge to the historical evidence.

Tuesday's Supreme Court decision was concurred in by five of the seven justices. Justice Christine Donahue, a former Superior Court judge who dissented from the 2015 panel that ordered a new trial, and Justice Sallie Updyke Mundy did not participate in the Supreme Court ruling.

Contact: jslobodzian@phillynews.com




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