Msgr. Lynn - still waiting
A Philadelphia judge's decision on whether Msgr. William J. Lynn should be retried is postponed until March 24.
Wednesday was supposed to have been decision day for Msgr. William J. Lynn: a Philadelphia judge's announcement of whether the 66-year-old clergyman would be retried for child endangerment in the Catholic church child sex-abuse scandal.
Instead, with explanation, Common Pleas Court Judge Gwendolyn N. Bright postponed her decision until March 24.
Bright promised a decision back in January after a hearing in which Lynn's lawyers argued that prosecutors should be barred from retrying Lynn because they allegedly ignored their own investigator's warning that a key witness was not credible.
Prosecutors argued that the objections of the investigator were overruled and the witness, who claimed he was molested by two priests and a parochial schoolteacher in a Northeast parish in 1998 and 1999, testified in two trials.
Despite aggressive defense questioning in two trials and the witnesses' factual inconsistencies, his testimony was believed by juries in two trials and helped convict Lynn, two other priests and a parochial teacher.
Lynn was the first church official convicted in the clergy sex abuse scandal for his supervisory role investigating sex abuse complaints against priests and recommending action to a series of Archbishops of Philadelphia. The child endangerment conviction was based on the prosecution claim that Lynn allowed a priest with a history of abusing children to live in the rectory of a parish associated with a Catholic school.
Lynn served 33 months of a three- to six-year prison term before he was released last August after a state appeals court granted a new trial.