Judge clears way for retrial of ex-Philadelphia monsignor
PHILADELPHIA >> A Catholic church official’s 14-year legal odyssey over his handling of sex-abuse complaints won’t end anytime soon after a Philadelphia judge said Friday he would be retried on child endangerment charges.
Monsignor William Lynn had served nearly three years of a three- to six-year sentence when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed his conviction because of trial errors in late 2015. That was the second time Lynn’s conviction had been thrown out after a sweeping 2012 trial that unearthed decades of hidden complaints from locked vaults at the archdiocese.
Lynn, 66, appeared weary but unfazed after the ruling Friday. He will be back in court next week for the judge to decide how many church-abuse victims can testify at the second trial. Lynn’s lawyers must also decide whether to appeal the ruling and try again to have the case dismissed.
Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams — who revived the case after his predecessor reluctantly concluded no church leaders could be charged in 2005 — is in his last year of office and under federal indictment. Eight people are running to succeed him.
“They can’t dismiss the case. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars were spent investigating the archdiocese and prosecuting Lynn, so what’s the next prosecutor going to do?” asked defense lawyer Jeffrey Lindy, who represented Lynn for a decade, but is no longer involved in the case. “They’re not going to say, ‘OK, we proved our point, let’s go away.’”
Lynn could also try to negotiate a plea with a time-served sentence, although he has not been interested in plea talks in the past.
Lynn is accused of endangering a single altar boy, a city policeman’s son who testified that he was abused in about 1998 by a priest transferred to his parish. Lynn was the longtime secretary for clergy, who reviewed 50 years’ worth of complaints kept in locked files to prepare a list of problem priests, including the one in question, William Avery, whom Lynn labeled a suspected predator. Lynn told jurors he made the list to try to address the problem, only to have Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua have it destroyed.