Monsignor William J. Lynn was the first Catholic Church official in the country to be convicted of a crime related to the sexual abuse of youth who were directly abused by other clergy, not Lynn. Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Joseph A. Slobodzian reported on the Pennsylvania appellate arguments challenging Lynn's conviction on the grounds that the crime Lynn was convicted of--endangering the welfare of child crime--could not apply to him because the statute was written to criminalize the failures in the direct supervision of kids. Defense lawyer Tom Bergstrom also argued that Lynn's conviction can't stand under the amended version of the endangering statute because he was no longer supervising children at the time the law was changed.
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