PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
POSTED: Saturday, April 27, 2013, 2:19 PM
If the court filings are any indication, Msgr. William J. Lynn’s appeal of conviction on a child endangerment count will be as hard-fought as last year’s 11-week-long trial where a Philadelphia jury found him guilty for his supervisory role in the child sex-abuse scandal involving the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
On Friday, just days after Philadelphia media reported on Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina’s 235-page opinion affirming Lynn’s conviction and her handling of the landmark trial, lawyers for Lynn filed their response in Pennsylvania’s Superior Court, faulting the judge for virtually every key ruling she made.
The 21-page response by Thomas A. Bergstrom and Allison Khaskelis, Lynn’s appellate lawyers, asks the Superior Court to overturn the conviction of the 62-year-old cleric and argues that Sarmina wrongly allowed city prosecutors to charge Lynn under the broader 2007 amended child endangerment statute.
Lynn was the Archdiocesan Secretary for Clergy from 1992 to 2004, the job in which he investigated allegations against priests and recommended action to the archbishop. Lynn’s attorneys argued that he should not have been charged under the 2007 law and could not have been charged under the pre-2007 statute because it required direct contact of children, not merely supervisory power over priests accused of molesting them.
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