Here is an account that provides better context for the jury verdict in Philadelphia last week which found Msgr. William Lynn, who served as secretary for clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2004, guilty on one count of child endangerment for allowing a priest to take a new assignment involving contact with children even after learning of allegations that he had engaged in inappropriate contact with at least one minor. It was the lightest of the charges brought against Lynn - he was acquitted on a conspiracy charge and a second child endangerment charge (involving another priest who was overseen by Msgr. Lynn in the 1990s and also on trial, James Brennan, accused of actual sex abuse of a minor, but the jury deadlocked on this, and for now, Brennan is free untilthe propsecutors decide to call for a new trial against him.
The usual rabble of Catholic-haters hailed the outcome on Lynn because it was the first time a ranking clergyman had ever been found guilty of anything in connection with the sex abuses committed by priests under their supervision. Never mind that Lynn's offense appears relatively minor (though he faces jail time of 3-1/2 to 7 years for the conviction), especially in view of the prevailing culture in the 1990s when the episode occurred, nor that he was convicted on the basis of a 2007 law applied retroactively to his case. But perhaps the most interesting aspect that has emerged from all this is what the jury that convicted Lynn thought about the broad tarbrush the prosecution used against the Church in presenting its case against Lynn. This is an account by a reporter commissioned by a Philadelphia law firm to blog the Lynn trial.
Philadelphia jury didn't buy theory
that convicted Mons. Lynn 'conspired'
to keep abusive priests in active ministry
by Ralph Cipriano
June 25, 2012
Lost in all the hoopla over the "historic" conviction of Msgr. William J. Lynn was the jury's repudiation of the prosecution's central allegation in the priest abuse case: that Lynn had somehow conspired with predator priests to keep them in ministry, so they could abuse new victims.
The prosecution's conspiracy theory was basically that the monsignor got up every morning and said,
hey, what can I do today to keep our bad boys in collars, so they can continue to rape, pillage and molest more innocent children.
[This, however, has been the constant and patently unfounded general accusation made by all the critics of the Church, especially the organized supposedly 'victim-advocate' groups, in whose eyes every Catholic priest is the very personification of Satan, and no Catholic could possibly ever be driven by anything other than evil motivations, that in fact, the Vatican itself has ordered bishops to turn a blind eye - and even cover up - for sex-offender priests. They have asserted this every way they can, on every occasion they could possibly use - from press releases routinely deriding any positive action taken by the Church against offending priests and bishops, to documentaries like the 2005 BBC Panorama that slandered Cardinal Ratzinger for orchestrating 'cover-ups', even blaming him for a 1962 CDF document which the anti-Catholic forces have deliberately mistranslated and misconstrued to represent a directive asking bishops to keep all their investigations into sex-offender priests 'secret', to each and every court suit that has ever been filed to prosecute these sex offender priests. All of which the media reports indiscriminately, without challenging allegations presented as fact.]
On Monday, the jury foreman in the case went on Fox 29 and said that nobody on the jury bought the prosecutors' conspiracy theory that sounded far-fetched when the trial began back in March, and seems even more absurd now that the three-month trial is over, and no evidence was ever presented to back it up.
It would be comical, except that
the Commonwealth just spent a ton of money and eight weeks of trial time trying to convince the jury that Bill Lynn the quintessential company man was the alleged mastermind down at the archdiocese of a secret plot to sexually abuse children.
The jury found Lynn not guilty of conspiring with Father Edward V. Avery, or anyone else, to endanger the welfare of children.
On Monday morning, jury foreman Isa Logan went on Fox 29's Good Day and told anchors Mike Jerrick and Karen Hepp that he didn't believe the prosecution's conspiracy theory, and neither did anyone else on the jury.
"It wasn't about him [Lynn] passing them [abuser priests] on from parish to parish," Logan explained to the two TV anchors. Instead, the jury concentrated on Lynn's supervisory role, Logan said.
"It was more on what are your actions knowing about a father [priest], what do you do after the fact when you find out that this person could be a potential problem or is a problem."
"None of us understood or believed that he [Lynn] had the understanding that here's a predator priest, I'll help him get to another parish so he can continue to enjoy what he likes to do," Logan stated. "None of us believed that."
[I certainly hope the jury's commonsense judgment is the general reaction of unbiased readers who get their news only from the MSM and would therefore tend to have only the latter's negative view of the Church. Of course, future cases against individual prelates may prove that some of them did, in fact, conspire actively to cover up priestly sex crimes as a way to 'protect the image of the Church', but these will have to be proven case by case, as with Mons. Lynn, and not taken as a general indictment of all priests and their superiors.]
"It's a ludicrous notion," agreed Jeff Lindy, one of Msgr. Lynn's defense lawyers. Lindy said
the conviction is based on an old Pennsylvania child endangerment law that didn't really apply to Lynn. The defense lawyer hopes the conviction is thrown out on appeal.
"It's clearly a complete repudiation of any claim that Msgr. Lynn conspired with anyone," agreed Alan J. Tauber, another defense lawyer who's also pinning his hopes on an appeal. "It's one of the clearest cases for reversal that I've ever seen based on the application of the law," Tauber said.
Lawyers in the case have been free to talk since Judge M. Teresa Sarmina lifted her gag order last Friday, when the verdict was announced. But getting lawyers to talk on the other side of the case has been difficult. Tasha Jamerson, a spokesman for District Attorney Seth Williams, could not be reached for the past two days.
The conspiracy case against Lynn was so weak that even pro-prosecution Judge Sarmina tossed two conspiracy counts to endanger the welfare of children that allegedly linked Lynn to the other defendant in the case, Father James J. Brennan. Brennan's case ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked on two counts against him, attempted rape, and endangering the welfare of children.
To anyone who sat through the entire trial,
the real conspiracy was the elephant in the courtroom: the archdiocese's successful top-down campaign to keep pervert priests out of jail, and the sins of Mother Church out of the media, and the civil courts. It was so obvious only a table full of prosecutors could miss it.*
While defense lawyers talked about an appeal, Lynn remained an inmate of the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, known as CFCF, at 7901 State Road in Northeast Philadelphia. A hearing on whether to spring Lynn from jail and keep him under house arrest until his Aug. 13 sentencing was scheduled for 11 a.m. Tuesday in Courtroom 304.
Whether Pennsylvania's old child endangerment law applies to Lynn may be the key issue if the case is appealed. The interesting thing about the defense theory that the old child endangerment law didn't apply to Lynn is that at one time, the people who agreed with that theory included former District Attorney Lynne Abraham, and a 2005 grand jury that investigated sex abuse in the archdiocese.
A January 12, 2012 defense motion for relief to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania that fell on deaf ears outlines the appeal case. The applicable state law known as EWOC [endangering the welfare of a child] said: "A parent, guardian, or other person supervising the welfare of a child under 18 years of age commits an offense if he knowingly endangers the welfare of the child by violating a duty of care, protection or support."
Here's what the 2005 grand jury report said about whether that law applied to Lynn or any other member of the archdiocese hierarchy: "As defined under the law ... the offense of endangering welfare of children is too narrow to support a successful prosecution of the decision-makers who were running the Archdiocese. The statute confines its coverage to parents, guardians, or other persons 'supervising the welfare of a child.' High-level Archdiocesan officials, however, were far removed from any direct contact with children."
On Oct. 1, 2006, Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, one of the authors of the 2005 grand jury report, wrote an article in the Allentown Morning Call, calling for the closing of legal loopholes in the EWOC law.
"It was also one year ago that the same grand jury revealed gaping loopholes in Pennsylvania laws intended to protect our children," wrote Sorensen, who helped write the 2011 grand jury report, and also worked on the current archdiocese case.
"The grand jury recommended simple amendments to statutes that would close the loopholes," Sorensen wrote. "Lawmakers have yet to pass any of these amendments ... They should promptly enact the Philadelphia grand jury recommendations to: ... make the law against endangering the welfare of children explicitly apply to supervisors who place children in the care of those known to be dangerous to children ... "
"What criminal law reforms cannot do is identify or hold accountable past abusers and enablers who have successfully concealed their offenses until after the statute of limitations has run," Sorensen wrote.
Hmm, that sure sounds like under the old law, prosecutors were saying they didn't have a case against Bill Lynn.
On Nov. 15, 2007, the co-sponsor of the bill to reform the EWOC law, state Rep. Dennis O'Brien, said on the floor of the state house, "The current law punishes only those people with the duty of care to a child who violate that duty by abusing or endangering the child. This bill acknowledges that employers and supervisors of those abusers should also share the responsibility for the welfare of these children. Thus, this bill imposes criminal liability on the employers or supervisors of abusers who knew of the abuse but failed to act, or worse, concealed the abuse."
Defense lawyer Tauber has researched 280 cases in Pennsylvania involving the EWOC statute. "Never once has the statute been applied to a supervisor of employees before the statute was amended in 2007," Tauber said.
Here's what the law was changed to in 2007: "A parent, guardian or other person supervising the welfare of a child under 18 years of age, or a person that employs or supervises such a person, commits an offense if he knowingly endangers the welfare of the child by violating a duty of care, protection or support."
Lynn was secretary for clergy from 1992 to 2004. He got a pass from former District Attorney Lynne Abraham and the 2005 grand jury that investigated sex abuse in the archdiocese. But in 2011, a new grand jury, and a new district attorney, Seth Williams, looked at the same old EWOC law, and arrived at the opposite conclusion, that the law did apply to Lynn.
*The opinion among objective commentators (the few who do not have it in for the Catholic Church no matter what) seems to be that Lynn was used by Philadelphia prosecutors as a 'show piece' since he was secretary of the clergy for the Archdiocese at a time when, as Philadelphia grand jury in 2005 concluded, the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua (1923-2012, Archbishop of Philadelphia from 1988-2003, who died last January at age 88, before he could be charged with anything) and his predecessor, Cardinal John Krol, had "orchestrated a systemic cover-up of sexual abuse of children over four decades that shielded 63 pervert priests from prosecution, after they had raped, sodomized and molested hundreds of innocent children" and that when Mons. Lynn went through 323 secret archive files in 1994 to compile a list of 35 abuser priests in active ministry, Cardinal Bevilacqua ordered that list shredded.
Evidence that the cardinal ordered this and that it was carried out by Lynn's direct superior at the time was presented at the trial to support the prosecution's conspiracy charge against Lynn. Cardinal Bevilacqua testified ten times before grand juries in Philadelphia in 2003 and 2004, as did his senior aides when he was Archbishop, which led a 2005 grand jury to conclude that the cardinal had "a strict policy, according to his aides, that forbid informing parishioners...The cardinal, in fact, encouraged that parishioners be misinformed.” The cardinal's last testimony, taken in connection with Mons. Lynn's trial, was videotaped in November 2011. Lynn's defense contested it on the ground that Bevilacqua by then was suffering from senile dementia. In any case, the jury did not find Lynn guilty of conspiracy in this regard.
Cardinals Krol and Bevilacqua are no longer around and are no longer subject to earthly justice, but if they erred as it appeared they did, only God knows whether they repented and sought his pardon while they lived. Along with Cardinal Law of Boston, and Archbishop John Magee of Ireland (private secretary to three Popes) - both of whom at least admit wrongdoing - these ranking men of the Church represent a sad era in modern Catholic history that, we all pray, is now a thing of the past. The sadder thing is that Bevilacqua and Magee both ordered or carried out a cover-up after the Boston-Cardinal Law scandal had already made the Church the sempiternal scapegoatof negative public opinion for all abuses ever made against children anywhere.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/06/2012 19:58]