Prosecutors: Sandusky appeal ‘variations on a theme’
State prosecutors have sized up Jerry Sandusky’s latest appeal of his conviction on a battery child sex abuse charges, and they say it amounts to little more than a variation on a theme “that has already been thoroughly explored, litigated, reviewed and rejected.”
For that reason, the prosecutors said, Judge Maureen Skerda should reject Sandusky’s bid for a new trial. Sandusky’s defense argued in a filing earlier this winter that newly discovered evidence of State College attorney Andrew Shubin’s work with two separate civil clients gives new weight to defense claims that lawyers, counselors and police were actively coaching people into making allegations against the once-revered Penn State football assistant.
Sandusky, 79, was convicted after a June 2012 jury trial of the serial sexual abuse of 10 different victims – eight who testified and two others whose cases were testified to by witnesses but whom police could never definitively identify.
He is currently serving a 30-year minimum prison term.
Sandusky’s lawyers said the new cases involving clients who met with Shubin years later during a civil mediation process run by Penn State show efforts to coach potential clients into stories that would maximize potential financial settlements from the university.
And that, they argue, enhances their argument that jurors should have heard expert testimony about the validity, or not, of so-called repressed memory therapy.
Prosecutors, in their response, argued that this is not new ground.
Sandusky’s trial attorney, Joseph Amendola, cross-examined all the victims about inconsistencies in their statements to the police.
In one case, they noted, Amendola played accidentally recorded tapes to the jury of police investigators talking about strategies to get possible victims to open up, and then trying to use those tactics with the witness dubbed Victim 4.
Victim’s 4 personal attorney, who was also caught on the extra tape, noted to police that until that time his client had told him that more had happened than touching and massages, but “he wasn’t comfortable talking about it.”
Troopers did fumble questions about the recording during the trial, testifying earlier that they never discussed the specifics of one witness’s story with the others.
But prosecutors contended that rather than a conspiracy to lie, the tapes showed nothing more than a general encouragement intended to help Victim 4 get past his reluctance to discuss specifics about what had happened to him. Amendola, in 2017 appellate testimony about his work for Sandusky, called the tape a “gift from heaven.”
“Sandusky is simply searching for yet another way to challenge the credibility of his victims, an issue that has been exhaustively litigated,” prosecutors wrote.
The prosecutors’ filing also asserts that psychologists and counselors who worked with the Sandusky trial victims have said, in prior hearings, the work they did with those clients did not constitute repressed memory therapy as that is clinically defined.
They ask Skerda to deny the new appeal on the written pleadings, and reject what they called the defense team’s latest effort to wedge open the courtroom door for relitigation of this and other issues — like a theory that the original trial was fast-tracked — that appellate courts have already considered.
Defense attorney Alexander Lindsay advanced a theory in his latest filing, which prosecutors do not directly in their reply, that the Sandusky trial was rushed in a Penn State/NCAA/government deal to have a verdict in hand so the university could issue its internal report on the scandal and the NCAA could levy punishments, all in time for the 2012 season to proceed.
PennLive reached out to Penn State for a response to that claim when Sandusky’s appeal was filed last month, but did not get an answer. No word from Skerda, a Warren County Common Pleas judge appointed to consider Sandusky’s appeals, how she will proceed with the latest filings.