Lynn conviction goes to Pa. Supreme Court

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 this year after his conviction was overturned last December. A three-judge Superior Court panel agreed with Lynn's legal team that prosecutors 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 - and that Lynn at the time was a "supervisor of a supervisor."

Legislators expanded the law in 2007 - ostensibly to allow for the prosecutions of church officials for crimes committed by priests they supervised. Bergstrom argued it could not be retroactively applied to Lynn, since he left his secretary position with the archdiocese in 2004.

The District Attorney's Office maintains that the Superior Court wrongly interpreted the original statute to mean "direct supervision."

Lynn was released from prison Jan. 2 after the Philadelphia archdiocese posted his bail. He has since lived in the rectory of St. William, a parish in Lawncrest, on electronically monitored house arrest. - Amy Worden