PENNSYLVANIA
Philly.com
JULY 26, 2016
by Joseph A. Slobodzian, STAFF WRITER
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled 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 ruling came as the high 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 that 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 longstanding 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.
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