CALIFORNIA
Contra Costa Times
By Tracey Kaplan
tkaplan@mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Posted: 07/20/2012
A juror who led the effort to acquit Will Lynch for punching a priest he claims molested him as a child confessed Friday that he would have handled the attack on the cleric differently.
“I would have used a club,” said Rich Parker, a semiretired bail bondsman.
In an interview with this newspaper, Parker offered the first peek at the jury’s deliberations in a case that shined the national spotlight on clerical sex abuse and its impact on victims.
Lynch, now 44, pummeled the Rev. Jerold Lindner at a Jesuit retirement home in Los Gatos in spring 2010, about 35 years after the priest allegedly sodomized him and forced him to have oral sex with his 4-year-old brother during a religious camping trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The beating left the 65-year-old cleric bloodied, bruised and with two small cuts requiring stitches.
Parker’s account came on the same day Santa Clara County prosecutor Vicki Gemetti officially entered into the court record a decision that District Attorney Jeff Rosen had already announced: The office will not retry Lynch for misdemeanor assault.
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