PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia Inquirer
AMY WORDEN, INQUIRER HARRISBURG BUREAU
POSTED: Monday, November 17, 2014
HARRISBURG – The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Tuesday over whether to reinstate the child endangerment conviction against Msgr. William J. Lynn.
A Philadelphia jury convicted Lynn in 2012, finding that the former Archdiocese of Philadelphia secretary for clergy ignored credible warning signs in the 1990s about a priest who years later sexually assaulted a 10-year-old altar boy.
Lynn, who for a dozen years supervised clergy assignments and investigations into misconduct by Philadelphia area priests, became the first Catholic Church supervisor found criminally liable for child-sex crimes by a priest. He was sentenced to three to six years in prison.
But he was freed earlier this year after his conviction was overturned last December. A three-judge Superior Court panel agreed with Lynn’s legal team that prosecutors had misapplied the endangerment law.
Lynn’s attorney, Thomas Bergstrom, argued that the law in place when the sexual assault took place in the late 1990s applied only to those who directly supervised children – but that Lynn at the time was a “supervisor of a supervisor.”
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