Eleven Years On, Doubts Cast on Fair Trial
Following a conversation about why I believed the conviction was wrongful, I prepared a memo for an influential publisher on the Jerry Sandusky case.
Here is my memo:
Million-Dollar Stories: Repressed Memories or Coached Testimonies?
Thank you for reviewing and offering to present the following summary to your investigative team.
Like many others, I thought justice was served in 2012, only to become convinced, 11 years after Jerry Sandusky was imprisoned, that he did not get a fair trial.
There were corrupt actors, from “victims,” to prosecutors, to at least one judge.
Much of the case was based on the junk science of repressed, recalled memories.
Every so-called victim who was an actual, identified human being later walked away with more than a million dollars.
And it seemed the more extravagant the fiction about Sandusky’s crimes, the greater the reward.
Sabastian Paden, the greatest beneficiary, collected $20 million for a story that was incredible and ridiculous on its face.
Paden’s Payout: $20 Million Tale Undermines Sandusky’s Conviction
Paden claimed Sandusky had raped him and forced him to fellate him while locked in a soundproofed basement for several days, screaming for help.
But the basement was not soundproofed, and the doors didn’t lock from the outside. Paden could have gotten out at any time.
Sandusky’s basement
Instead of escaping and never returning, he went home, went to school, and told no one about his horrible ordeals. Then, at ages 13-15, he’d go back for more – for years. Why?
No human being, much less a sexually maturing adolescent, would have behaved in that robotic manner.
It is also curious that another accuser, Aaron Fisher, said he was in the same basement, being molested on the same bed during the same weekends over the same three years, yet he and Paden testified that they were unacquainted.
The prosecution presented ten “victims” at trial.
Two of them remained unidentified, and one may never have lived at all. Yet, astonishingly, Sandusky was convicted on the charge of having molested that possibly imaginary boy.
Not a single “victim” made a report contemporary to the time of abuse. Nor did any of them confide in anyone––a friend or classmate, a family member, or a counselor.
The case was a journalistic travesty.
The prosecution and media were a conjoined force. The media functioned as credulous stenographers, reporting whatever the prosecution cared to tell them.
And, significantly, the campaign to portray Sandusky as a monster began seven months before his indictment and continued through his trial, rendering the guilty verdict all but inevitable.
There were other factors.
Paterno’s Fall: Collateral Damage in the Rush to Judgement
Joe Paterno, then dying of cancer, was just two football games away from ending the most distinguished career of any American coach.
He had worked a lifetime to deserve a reputation as a man of goodwill, who put honesty over immediate gain and integrity over the quick win.
But the media that convicted Sandusky in advance also convicted Paterno as a supposed accomplice to atrocities.
It was the “shower boy” story that destroyed Paterno’s reputation and led to the conviction of three top officials at Penn State – for not reporting an alleged rape of a ten-year-old boy by Sandusky in the locker room showers of a Penn State athletic facility some ten years earlier.
Contrary to what the media reported, Paterno or Penn State officials did not cover up a reported crime.
We now know for certain that the rape in the showers never occurred. The “victim” himself, Allan Myers, swore under oath that nothing more than innocent horseplay had been involved.
Yet the country was shocked by the media’s frenzied reports of Sandusky’s rape of a 10-year-old boy that never happened.
Even without Myers’s exoneration of Sandusky, the story made no sense.
Six foot five, 230 pounds Mike McQueary, a former Penn State quarterback whose job on the field was to avoid giant defensive linemen, goes into the Penn State locker room and allegedly sees a naked, wet, defenseless 57-year-old Sandusky with a child and doesn’t do anything?
As John Snedden, the most qualified investigator ever involved in this case, asked, “Where’s your moral compass? Or did it even happen?”
Sandusky was actually acquitted on the flimsy “shower boy” charge, yet the public continues to recall it as the most vivid proof of his villainy.
As for the trial as a whole, it featured corruption, railroading, and a rush to judgment.
The presiding judge met with the prosecutors and the defense attorney secretly in a motel, where they agreed (without Sandusky present) to waive Sandusky’s preliminary hearing. There, he would have learned who his accusers were and heard their fantastic stories (instead of learning about them at trial).
The defense could have challenged the scientific validity of repressed recalled memory––a key aspect of the prosecution, which rested on that pseudoscientific concept to explain why none of the “victims” had initially remembered their “molestation.”
Repressed memory should have been challenged as inadmissible evidence under the “Frye” standard, whereby Pennsylvania courts require that testimony invoking disputed science be excluded from consideration. There would have been no case against Sandusky without such tainted testimony.
Every alleged victim dramatically changed his story.
Most began with the statement to police that Sandusky had never abused them.
The prosecutors cheated at every turn, beginning with their felonious leaking to the media of their own false “information” in grand jury minutes.
The media mania started with the illegal leaking of grand jury minutes of a witness saying he witnessed the “shower boy” incident.
But at no point, though his testimony shifted more than once, did Mike McQueary ever declare he had witnessed a rape. The prosecutors unilaterally altered his testimony and then leaked the doctored version.
And when McQueary complained, Senior Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach sent him an email warning him to keep his objections to himself. In other words, she was suborning perjury.
That came out after the trial, during one of Sandusky’s several summarily dismissed hearings for a retrial.
The judge, James Cleland, perhaps with Penn State’s jeopardized 2012 football season on his mind, seemed determined to get Sandusky’s conviction over with.
After his secret motel meeting, he rushed the trial. He demanded it go forward a mere seven months after the indictment. He also permitted the prosecution to dump 12,000 pages of discovery less than ten days before the trial. He ignored the defense’s plea for time to look at the discovery, which contained exculpatory evidence that could have proven Sandusky was innocent. And he denied the request of Sandusky’s lead attorney to resign from the case, arguing that he was incapable of offering a fair defense of his client.
Sandusky’s Smiling Lawyer: Legal Defense or Media Performance?
Still, that attorney, Joe Amendola, was not motivated to win. His opening statement all but conceded Sandusky’s guilt. And his conduct throughout the trial suggested he was less interested in defending Sandusky than in dissociating himself from an unpopular cause.
The Sandusky Jury: Compromised by Preconceived Guilt?
The jury was as compromised as Amendola.
Several potential jurors admitted they knew Sandusky was guilty based on what they had read in the media.
One juror was friendly with a witness who was to testify against Sandusky.
Another man who worked at Penn State said his wife was “totally convinced of Mr. Sandusky’s guilt,” and that if he found him not guilty, “I would have to do a lot of explaining.”
One juror said he and his friends had already decided Sandusky was guilty. When asked whether he could face his friends if he voted not guilty, the young man said, “I wouldn’t tell them if that’s how I felt, because that’s not how I feel.”
The judge accepted every one of them as jurors.
Dottie Sandusky’s Steadfast Fight for Her Husband
Curiously, Sandusky’s wife of 60 years, Dottie, still lives in State College, Pennsylvania. She could have moved and made her life easier if she thought her husband was guilty. But she’s in the same house, still visits him every time she can, and is committed to proving his innocence.
And Jerry Sandusky himself has shown incredible resilience. He’s a strong man. Very few people could hold up against the universal hatred he has experienced. His innocence, combined with his strong Methodist faith, has carried him this far. Incidentally, it appears evident that no one who has gotten to know him––neither his guards nor his fellow prisoners––believes him to be a criminal.
An actual child molester has numerous victims who cannot forget their abuse. They eventually come forward, and they testify. But every single one of Sandusky’s accusers was recruited, either by a greedy parent or by prosecutors or by “child abuse” attorneys who looked forward to sharing enormous settlements.
These attorneys referred their new clients to memory therapists, who helped them “remember” what they had forgotten to tell police when they first interviewed them – that Sandusky had never abused them.
The therapists brought them their memories of abuse recovered in graphic and vivid detail, yet with dreamlike features and absurd inconsistencies that typify therapeutically induced “recollections.”
Sandusky’s Physical Condition Revealed: The Overlooked Evidence
But one detail, an all-important one, was never mentioned even once. And all by itself, it proves that the stories of rape, and indeed of any sex acts whatever, were fictitious.
The smoking gun is Sandusky had only vestigial testicles. He was born that way, as part of a condition that also featured an inability to generate enough testosterone to father a child.
Yet not one of the eight trial accusers, looking forward to their millions from Penn State, ever mentioned this conspicuous fact.
Aaron Fisher claimed 100 episodes of fellatio, but he never said, “By the way, Jerry has no testicles worth mentioning.”
Brett Swisher Houtz, who claimed Sandusky turned him upside down and stuck his penis and testicles in his face, never noticed it.
Nor did anyone else. These were not seven, eight-year-old boys. The men who made the allegations at trial claim Sandusky abused them when they were 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
Boys this age are aware of their genitals and what’s happening to them. Not one of them ever noticed Sandusky had shrunken testicles. That fact alone ought to have sufficed for acquittal on all charges. (Yet for reasons unknown Sandusky’s attorney chose not to present this extraordinarily important medical information either from Sandusky or physicians- who provided medical records to the defense before the trial.)
Jerry Sandusky was never a plausible candidate for the role of homosexual pedophile. Insofar as he was sexual at all, there was never a hint of gayness about him. By all accounts, he was conventional and prudish in his attitude toward sexual matters.
In addition, abusers, by the very nature of their crime, are generally furtive and sly; Jerry was boisterous and fun-loving, with his playfulness and kindness toward neglected children out in the open for all to see. He was, and still is, an extremely devout Christian. Again, abusers wallow in pornography, but there was no pornography found on Sandusky’s computers or phones.
On the other hand, the lead prosecutor, Frank Fina, was fired from his job for using his state computer to share porn with judges. Later he was suspended from the practice of law for lying to a judge about his plan to intimidate a witness in the case.
Finally, consider the level of guile and intimidation that would have allowed Sandusky to abuse hundreds of boys (as the prosecution alleged) over decades, in a small town, rural community, without anyone ever noticing his conduct, and without a single incident being mentioned, even in private. No one familiar with Sandusky, including his family members and oldest friends, regards him as capable of such deceit. He is an innocent man in both senses of the term: innocent of malicious charges and innocent of temperament. It is because he actively cared about helping the underprivileged that people with less innocent minds regarded him as peculiar or worse.
Financial Windfall: The Big Winners in Sandusky’s Legal Tragedy
As for the ‘victims,” they all cashed in as follows:
1.Aaron Fisher, $7.5 million
Allan Myers, $6.9 million. (He didn’t testify.)
3. Jason Simcisko $7.25 million
4. Brett Swisher-Houtz, $5.5 million
5. Michal Kajak, $8.1 million
6. Zachary Konstas, $1.5 million
7. Dustin Struble, $3.25 million
8. Unknown, unnamed, never-identified “victim,” no payment because he never materialized
9. Sabastian Paden, $20 million
10. Ryan Rittmeyer, $5.5 million
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