By Ralph Ciprianofor BigTrial.net
A lawyer for Msgr. William J. Lynn told a panel of state appeal court judges today that former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen knowingly put a witness on the stand that the lead detective in the case had repeatedly warned her was not truthful.
"She knew he was gonna lie," Thomas A. Bergstrom said about Sorensen and her star witness, Danny Gallagher, the lying, scheming altar boy.
Bergstrom accused the D.A.'s office of taking an "Alice in Wonderland" approach to the archdiocese sex abuse case. First, back in 2011, they indicted Msgr. Lynn, three priests, and a Catholic schoolteacher. Then, they asked Joe Walsh, their "hand-picked detective," to investigate the case, to see if Gallagher's allegations were true, Bergstrom told a panel of three state Superior Court judges. And what the detective discover? That their "one and only witness is lying," Bergstrom said, referring again to Gallagher.
That's why Sorensen, according to Walsh, told the detective, "You're killing my case," Bergstrom said. Because she knew if Walsh was right, that Danny Gallagher was a liar, "my case is over," Bergstrom told the judges.
Judge Eugene Strassburger interrupted to ask if Sorensen's alleged statement "could simply be hyperbole."
No way, Bergstrom said. "She doesn't care," Bergstrom said about Sorensen. "She knows he's lying," he said about Gallagher, but she "put him on the stand" any way. "The Commonwealth had every reason to believe he's lying."
In rebuttal, Assistant District Attorney Anthony Pomerantz replied that it didn't matter what Walsh's opinion was of Danny Gallagher; nor did it matter what Sorensen believed. The only thing that mattered for Lynn to be guilty of endangering the welfare of a child, Pomerantz said, was for him to "knowingly violate" his duty to protect children from a known abusive priest. The monsignor did that, Pomerantz said, by putting a known abusive priest back in active ministry, where he could potentially harm more kids.
If Danny Gallagher is a liar, Pomerantz asked the judges, then why did that abusive former priest, Edward Avery, plead guilty back in 2012 to conspiracy to endanger the welfare of a child and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse?
Pomerantz didn't mention Avery's explanation under oath -- that the former priest, then 69, was looking at a prison sentence of 13 1/2 to 27 years in jail, and was facing a hostile judge, M. Teresa Sarmina, when he pleaded guilty to two crimes he testified that he didn't commit.
"I didn't want to die in prison," the former priest testified, explaining why he took a sweetheart plea bargain on the eve of the Lynn trial, and got only 2 1/2 to 5 years in jail. He wound up serving the full sentence and was released from prison last year.
At his trial in 2012, Msgr. Lynn was convicted on one count of endangering the welfare of a child, and sentenced to 3 to 6 years in jail. He served 33 months of his minimum 36 month sentence before his conviction was overturned for a second time by the state Superior Court in 2016. The court had previously overturned Lynn's conviction back in 2013. This is the third time the Lynn case has gone up on appeal to the Superior Court.
Today's hearing, under chandeliers and sconces in an ornate courtroom, began with Assistant District Attorney Pomerantz arguing that the panel of judges should overrule Judge Gwendolyn Bright's decision to limit the D.A.'s office to introducing as supplemental evidence, just three additional cases of sex abuse in the archdiocese.
Since the beginning of the case, the strategy of the D.A.'s office has been to put the Catholic Church on trial. They did that at the original Lynn trial by introducing as evidence 21 supplemental cases of sex abuse dating back to the 1940s, before Lynn was born. The supplemental cases were introduced as evidence to show a pattern in the archdiocese of covering up sex abuse.
But the state Superior Court overturned Lynn's conviction in 2016, by arguing that the prejudicial effect of the 21 supplemental cases, which took up 25 days of the 32-day trial, far outweighed their value as evidence.
In response, the D.A.'s office proposed introducing only nine supplemental cases at a retrial of the monsignor, but the trial judge, Judge Bright, approved only three cases. The D.A.'s office then appealed to the state Superior Court, asking the judges to overturn Judge Bright's decision because it allegedly was an abuse of her discretion.
Superior Court Judge Anne Lazarus asked Assistant District Attorney Pomerantz how it could be an abuse of the trial judge's discretion if Judge Bright was willing to allow the prosecution to present three supplemental cases of sex abuse to show a pattern of cover ups in the archdiocese.
Pomerantz's response was that the D.A.'s office had carefully reviewed all 21 supplemental cases, and narrowed the list down to only nine cases that Lynn was involved in. The D.A.'s argument was that Lynn was attempting to protect the church from scandal and abuser priests from jail "at the expense of those children," and that's why he should be convicted again of endangering the welfare of a child.
In response to the D.A.'s appeal over the supplemental cases, Bergstrom also appealed a ruling of Judge Bright, by arguing that the retrial of Msgr. Lynn should be thrown out on the grounds of double jeopardy, because of intentional prosecutorial misconduct.
Judge Bright found there had been prosecutorial misconduct at the original Lynn trial. The misconduct, the judge said, was that the prosecution never told the defense that Detective Walsh had questioned Danny Gallagher before the Lynn trial about several key discrepancies in his allegations of abuse. And that Gallagher had responded by either saying nothing, claiming he was high on drugs, or telling a new story.
But Judge Bright stopped short of throwing the retrial out on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, by ruling that the misconduct wasn't intentional. In his appeal, Bergstrom countered that the misconduct was intentional.
Judging by the tepid response both appeal motions got from the panel of judges, however, a knowledgable observer predicted that this time around, the state Superior Court will deny both the defense motion, as well as the prosecution motion. And send the case back to Judge Bright for a retrial of Msgr. Lynn.
At today's hearing, Bergstrom did not mention the recent discovery of Assistant District Attorney Sorensen's long lost notes from her original 2010 interview with Danny Gallagher, after he had just been bailed out of jail by the D.A.'s office, so he could testify against the church.
Sorensen and other prosecutors in the case had previously told three different judges that those notes didn't exist. Then, after a gap of eight years, those notes suddenly reappeared last month.
Bergstrom couldn't bring up those notes because they weren't previously introduced on the record in Judge Bright's courtroom. But when the case goes back to Judge Bright for a retrial, he's free to make plenty of noise about those notes.