PENNSYLVANIA
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
September 23, 2013
By P.J. D’Annunzio / The Legal Intelligencer
A former Catholic Church official convicted of endangering the welfare of children abused by other priests should not have been considered a supervisor of the children’s welfare because he never had direct contact with them, his counsel argued before the state Superior Court in Philadelphia.
A three-judge panel composed of President Judge John T. Bender, Judge Christine L. Donohue and Senior Judge John L. Musmanno heard arguments in Commonwealth v. Lynn last week.
The lawyer representing Monsignor William Lynn, the former secretary for clergy in the Philadelphia archdiocese, is arguing that the law he was convicted under does not apply to the official, given the facts of the case.
Thomas A. Bergstrom, of Pittsburgh’s Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, argued that prosecutors did not make the case that, under Pennsylvania’s endangering-the-welfare-of-child statute, Lynn had any contact with children.
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