By Ralph Ciprianofor BigTrial.net
A hearing where Judge Gwendolyn N. Bright was supposed to rule on a defense motion to dismiss the retrial of Msgr. William J. Lynn has been moved to March 24th, at 2 p.m.
Judge Bright was originally scheduled to rule on the motion to dismiss the case on March 1st, but the hearing was postponed without any public explanation.
Seven years into the Msgr. Lynn case, Judge Bright has draped a shroud of secrecy over the proceedings by imposing a gag order on the lawyers in the case. As part of that gag order, those lawyers are required to file motions and legal briefs under seal. Two recent pretrial hearings in the judge's courtroom were also marked by lengthy back room conferences.
It's hard to understand what the secrecy is all about since the Msgr. Lynn case has been out in public since 2011, when our grandstanding district attorney, R. Seth Williams, released a mistake-filled grand jury report that forever hung the defendants out to dry.The Msgr. Lynn case has been tried in front of a Common Pleas Court jury in 2012, resulting in a guilty verdict for the monsignor on a single count of endangering the welfare of a child.
The state Superior Court in 2013 overturned that conviction and ordered a new trial for Lynn, but that decision was reversed by state Supreme Court in 2015. A year later, in 2016, the state Superior Court again overturned Msgr. Lynn's conviction and ordered a new trial. The state Supreme Court then decided not to take another appeal from the D.A.'s office, setting the stage for the retrial, scheduled for May 1st.
All of those proceedings transpired in public. The alleged victim in the case, "Billy Doe," AKA Danny Gallagher, has been publicly outed on the cover of Newsweek. We also know that Gallagher collected $5 million in a civil settlement with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that was supposed to be kept confidential.
At a January hearing in Judge Bright's courtroom, Joseph Walsh, the retired lead detective in the case, has come forward to express all of the doubts he had about Danny Gallagher's fantastic stories, and the many lies he caught Gallagher in. Walsh has also testified that when he told the lead prosecutor, former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, about Gallagher's lack of credibility, she replied, "You're killing my case."
So Judge Bright, seven years into this travesty, why all the secrecy?
In a phone interview, Thomas McGill, the judge's law clerk, acknowledged that the Msgr. Lynn case has already been the subject of local, national and international publicity. The gag order, he said, "is designed to limit" any further publicity, because the judge is concerned about "tainting the potential jury pool."
"The judge has decided that until the case goes to trial there will be no additional publicity concerning the case," McGill said.
Except on bigtrial.net.
Besides the motion to dismiss, the judge has two other pending defense motions to rule on. Thomas A. Bergstrom, Lynn's lawyer, has asked the judge to preclude the guilty plea of former priest Edward V. Avery from being admitted as evidence. In court in 2013, when he was called as prosecution witness, Avery publicly recanted his guilty plea. On the witness stand, Avery testified that he never even met Danny Gallagher, but he pleaded guilty because he was facing a long prison sentence, and didn't want to die in jail.
Bergstrom also has filed a motion to preclude any supplemental sex abuse cases from being admitted as evidence in the retrial, scheduled to begin May 1st.
A panel of three Superior Court judges ruled in 2016 that the trial judge, M. Teresa Sarmina, had abused her discretion by allowing 21 supplemental cases of sex abuse to be admitted as evidence against Msgr. Lynn.
The 21 cases dated back to 1948, three years before the 66-year-old Lynn was born, and took up at least 25 days of the 32-day trial. In his appeal brief, Lynn's lawyers argued that the prosecution "introduced these files to put on trial the entire Archdiocese of Philadelphia, hoping to convict [Lynn] by proxy for the sins of the entire church."
The Superior Court judges agreed, ruling that the "probative value" of the supplemental cases "did not outweigh its potential for unfair prejudice, and that this potential prejudice was not overcome by the trial court's cautionary instructions."
In their decision, the Superior Court judges wrote that Judge Sarmina "has apparently mistaken quantity for quality in construing the probative value of this evidence en masse." The Superior Court judges further declared that the "probative value of significant quantities of this evidence was trivial or minimal."
At a pretrial hearing, an assistant district attorney said the prosecution would like to introduce at the retrial a dozen supplemental cases of sex abuse. Bergstrom, however, argued to Judge Bright that all 12 cases should not be admitted as evidence because they had nothing to do with Msgr. Lynn.