PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2015
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net
A panel of state Superior Court judges today vacated Msgr. William J. Lynn’s prior conviction on a single charge of endangering the welfare of a child. The Superior Court then ordered a new trial for Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s former secretary for clergy who has been in and out of prison since his original conviction three years ago.
In a 43-page decision, the Superior Court judges ruled that the trial court — Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina — “abused its discretion” by allowing 21 supplemental cases of sex abuse to be admitted as evidence against Lynn.
The 21 cases dated back to 1948, three years before Lynn was born, and took up at least 25 days of the 32-day trial. In his appeal brief, Lynn’s lawyer, Thomas A. Bergstrom, argued that the prosecution “introduced these files to put on trial the entire Archdiocese of Philadelphia, hoping to convict [Lynn] by proxy for the sins of the entire church.”
The Superior Court judges agreed, ruling that the “probative value” of the supplemental cases “did not outweigh its potential for unfair prejudice, and that this potential prejudice was not overcome by the trial court’s cautionary instructions.”
In their decision, the Superior Court judges included some stinging criticism of Judge Sarmina.
“None of the evidence concerned the actual victim in this case, and none of it directly concerned [Lynn’s] prior dealings with either [former priest Edward V.] Avery or [Father James J.] Brennan,” the two co-defendants on trial with Lynn, the Superior Court judges wrote. “In this regard, the trial court has apparently mistaken quantity for quality in construing the probative value of this evidence en masse.” The Superior Court judges found that the “probative value of significant quantities of this evidence was trivial or minimal.”
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