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| Jeff Lindy: The Left-Wing D.A.'s New Right Hand Man |
for BigTrial.net
After new District Attorney Larry Krasner got through cleaning house yesterday by firing 30 assistant district attorneys, there's nobody left to prosecute Msgr. William J. Lynn.
One of the ADAs whacked by Krasner was Patrick Blessington, the lead prosecutor on the Lynn case. Blessington was also the guy who attacked retired Detective Joe Walsh as a "rogue" cop, saying he wasn't authorized to interview more than 30 witnesses in the Billy Doe case.
Blessington had nonsensically claimed that Walsh had done the interviews on his own. That, of course, prompted laughs from Judge Ellen Ceisler. In the Philadelphia archdiocese sex abuse prosecutions, Walsh was the key witness who came forward to say that he believed Billy Doe was a liar, and that Doe, whose real name is Danny Gallagher, had admitted to Walsh that he just "made up stuff." The retired detective's testimony has already forced the D.A. to let Bernard Shero, a former Catholic schoolteacher convicted of raping Gallagher, out of jail nearly a dozen years early.
Walsh was going to be the defense's star witness if the D.A. proceeded with its announced plans to retry Msgr. Lynn on one count of endangering the welfare of children. But now it looks as though that retrial may never happen, because of some other moves Krasner made.
Also gone from the D.A.'s office are a couple of senior lawyers, Ronald Eisenberg and Hugh J. Burns Jr. Eisenberg was the longtime deputy D.A. in charge of the D.A.'s law division, which kept deciding to appeal the Lynn case, after the monsignor's conviction was twice overturned by the state Superior Court. Burns was the longtime chief of the appeals unit who kept arguing that the monsignor was a danger to society and belonged in jail.
Eisenberg is said to have already departed for the state attorney general's office; Burns was one of the ADAs fired by Krasner yesterday.
But Krasner made another recent personnel move that may have something to do with whether the D.A. decides to retry Lynn. Krasner hired Jeffrey M. Lindy to be his top deputy. Lindy, a criminal defense lawyer who's a former deputy D.A. in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a former assistant U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia, was one of four lawyers who defended Msgr. Lynn in his original 2012 trial where he was convicted on one count of child endangerment.
Lindy, of course, would have an ethical conflict in having anything to do with the retrial of his former client. But maybe he can venture an opinion to his new boss that the Billy Doe case was bogus from day one, a manufactured prosecution starring a fraudulent victim. And that continuing to beat this dead horse would be a waste of time.Lynn has already served 33 months of his 36 month sentence, plus 18 months of house arrest, so it makes little sense for the D.A. to retry the case as the defendant has already done almost all of his time.
The former D.A. who announced that his office would appeal the Lynn case is now wearing a jumpsuit and sitting in a federal prison in Oklahoma, where he's doing a five-year stretch after pleading guilty to taking bribes.
With Rufus Seth Williams in jail, Pat Blessington looking for work, and Hugh Burns and Ron Eisenberg gone from the D.A.'s office, it's a perfect time for Progressive Larry Krasner to declare victory in the Lynn case and move on.