By: Frank Parlato
Search the disciplinary records. Search the law reviews. Search the case law databases of every state and federal circuit in the country.
You will not find a single case in which the prosecutors who obtained a criminal conviction subsequently positioned themselves — or their domestic partners — on a financial committee controlling millions of dollars in civil settlement proceeds generated by that very conviction.
Until the Sandusky case.
Prosecutors Joseph McGettigan and Frank Fina tried Jerry Sandusky’s case. They selected the accusers, shaped the testimony, and argued to the jury. They won.
Then they did something that no prosecutor in this country has ever been caught doing.
After the conviction, Penn State University paid more than $60 million to the eight men who testified at the trial that Sandusky had abused them when they were teenagers.
Men who had forgotten but, thanks to therapists retained by their civil lawyers, recovered the memory of abuse during their teen years and collected millions from Penn State.
The settlement process, according to Penn State Trustee Anthony Lubrano, involved “little to no vetting of claimants.”
The university’s approach was to “pay and don’t push back.”
No depositions were taken. No forensic psychiatric examinations were conducted. No evidence was submitted to substantiate claims.
The biggest payday went to Sabastian Paden — alleged Victim 9.
When police first came to the trailer where Paden lived with his mother, he told them Sandusky had never done anything sexual to him. His story changed shortly afterward.
Paden received $20 million, or one-third of the $60 million distributed to the eight trial accusers. His settlement (less attorney’s fees) was placed in a trust.
The trust agreement, dated April 2015, was drafted by a lawyer named Dennis McAndrews. The agreement established a Trust Protective Committee — the body with veto power over all distributions from the trust. Nothing came out of that trust without the committee’s approval. The controlling members of that committee were Frank Fina and Gay Warren, the live-in domestic partner of Joseph McGettigan.
The committee members were not volunteers. Each received compensation paid directly from the trust they controlled. Paden himself received $1,000 per week — later increased to $1,500 — from a trust that began with approximately $12 million in assets ($20 million less attorney’s fees. McGettigan got a share of the $8 million in attorney’s fees as well.)
If Paden sought to terminate the trust and assume control of his own money, termination required a recommendation from two committee members. Fina and Warren could indefinitely block his financial independence. The prosecutors didn’t just control the money flowing out. They could prevent him from ever getting free of them.
With a trust in the eight figures they gave Paden, a rather gullible young man, an allowance, while they controlled the rest.
McAndrews — the lawyer who drafted the document placing the criminal prosecutors on the financial committee controlling their witness’s money — subsequently went into law practice with McGettigan. McGettigan joined the McAndrews Law Office on April 11, 2013. The lawyer who wrote the trust became the lead prosecutor’s business partner.
Prosecutors profit from their convictions all the time. A high-profile conviction can lead to career advancement, promotions, private-sector opportunities, political campaigns, and judicial appointments. Conviction statistics open doors.
McGettigan and Fina did not merely benefit from the Sandusky conviction in the ways prosecutors typically benefit — through reputation, career advancement, or future opportunities earned by a successful track record. They jumped directly into the financial stream generated by the conviction. They placed themselves or their domestic partner on the committee that controlled the settlement funds stemming from the conviction they obtained.
The pipeline ran straight from the jury’s verdict to their financial position.
It is the full annihilation of a principle already half gone in American criminal law: that the prosecutor is a minister of justice, not an interested party.
Paden Got the Biggest Payday
Paden got the biggest payday because his story was the most extreme.
At trial, he testified that Sandusky abused him every weekend for three years — approximately 2005 through 2008 — at the Sandusky home in State College. He testified he was kept as a prisoner in the basement, without food, while he screamed for help. He said Sandusky’s wife was usually in the house during these visits and did nothing.
Consider what the jury was asked to believe. A teenager was locked in a basement, starved, and violently raped every weekend for three years. He screamed for help, and no one came. Then, every Monday morning, he went to school and said nothing — not to a teacher, friend, counselor, or his mother. And every Friday, he went back for more. For three years. Exposed to approximately 150 weekends of starvation, imprisonment, and forced sex, he never told a soul and never failed to return.
The basement, as it happens, was a walkout with multiple unobstructed exits and windows that opened onto an open field and neighboring homes.
Photos of the basement
The “every weekend” narrative was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. McGettigan drew it out through direct examination designed to establish Sandusky as a relentless predator who commandeered this boy’s life on a weekly schedule. It was how McGettigan sold the jury on the prosecution’s most extreme theory.
Paden’s mother, Marie, has signed a sworn declaration. She says her son visited perhaps 15 times in total, and usually, other boys were there.
She says prosecutors and civil attorneys coached her son’s testimony.
She says key details were fabricated — including the underwear. At trial, Paden testified about wearing “tighty-whities” — white briefs — a detail that was supposed to corroborate the abuse narrative. Marie states that her son had never worn that type of underwear. He had always worn boxers.
Marie said that the “missing underwear” issue predated any contact with Sandusky, but that prosecutor McGettigan directed her to present it in a way that would mislead the jury and imply it coincided with contact with Sandusky.
McGettigan exploited the witness sequestration rules to make this work. Marie was sequestered during the trial. She did not know that her son had testified about disposing of his underwear after being abused by Sandusky. So when McGettigan directed her to mention the missing underwear on the stand, her testimony appeared to independently confirm her son’s — when in fact both statements were orchestrated by the same prosecutor.
Marie also revealed in her affidavit something the jury never heard. Beginning at approximately age three, a decade before any contact with Sandusky, Paden exhibited concerning sexualized behaviors, including inserting objects into his rectum.
Children and Youth Services investigated possible abuse at the father’s relatives’ home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Marie states she found tampons with fecal matter and stuffed animals with holes cut in them throughout her son’s childhood. All of it predated Paden meeting Sandusky.
At trial, the prosecution attributed Paden’s behavioral issues to Sandusky. The jury was never told that the behaviors began years before the teenager met the defendant.
Marie says the prosecutors told her son, “You will never have to work a day in your life.”
The Testimony That Cannot Coexist
Paden was not the only accuser who claimed every weekend for three years. Aaron Fisher — Victim 1 — made the same claim, covering the same period, 2005 through 2008.
Fisher testified that he stayed at Sandusky’s house “probably close to a hundred, over,” describing visits as “every weekend” over approximately three years. His account, like Paden’s, described abuse that occurred alone with Sandusky during these visits.
Both accusers testified that Sandusky abused them alone, on the same bed, during the same weekends, over the same three-year period, during an estimated 100 to 150 visits each.
Fisher’s mother, Dawn Hennessey, has confirmed that the “every weekend” narrative was false. In preserved messages, she stated that her son “did not go there every weekend,” that the visits were sporadic — often one night, back before dinner the next day — and that other boys were frequently present. She estimated the total number of overnights at roughly 10-20.
Her account matches Marie’s. Both mothers — who had no contact with each other during these communications — independently describe sporadic visits, far fewer than claimed, often with other teens present.
How the Prosecutors Built a Dependent Witness
Before the prosecution took an interest in Paden as a witness, he and his mother were living in a trailer. He was moved into a suburban rental home. The money for the move did not come from Paden’s resources. It came from US Claims, a litigation lending company that advances funds to plaintiffs against future settlement proceeds.
A US Claims Purchase Agreement dated July 27, 2012 — less than five weeks after the June 22, 2012 conviction — shows Paden received a net cash advance of $50,000. In exchange, he sold a $57,427 interest in his future settlement, due within six months. If unpaid within 42 months, the obligation escalates to $127,937 — an effective APR of approximately 27% with monthly compounding.
The connection to US Claims ran through McGettigan’s network.
Paden was borrowing against a settlement that did not yet exist, at 27% annual interest, facilitated by the prosecutor who built the case that would generate that settlement.
Within weeks of the conviction, civil attorney Stephen E. Raynes — referred by McGettigan — filed a notice of claim against Penn State on behalf of Paden. Paden’s civil lawyers bought him expensive gifts, moved the family to a Bryn Mawr condo, then to multiple homes in Malvern, and provided cash on request. Marie later learned these funds were borrowed at 27 percent interest against a future settlement.
After the conviction and the settlement, Paden was arrested on marijuana charges in Pennsylvania.
Fina and McGettigan arranged for his relocation to Colorado, reasoning that marijuana was legal there.
McGettigan and McAndrews installed Chris Malanga — a life coach, not a lawyer or financial advisor — as Paden’s power of attorney. Additional therapists were appointed, some of whom lived with Paden around-the-clock. This group became known as the “Colorado team.”
The cost of maintaining this operation — security, full-time therapists, housing, a life coach with power of attorney — was paid from the trust. The prosecutors who obtained the conviction were now directing how their witness’s settlement money was spent, who had access to him, and who controlled his daily environment.
When Paden’s mother attempted to encourage her son toward self-sufficiency, the team resisted. When she objected to their management, McGettigan told her son: “Your mom is batshit crazy.”
The alienation of Marie, the one person who might encourage Paden to tell the truth about what actually happened, is consistent with the trust structure’s purpose: not to protect Paden, but to ensure his continued compliance and prevent recantation.
The Law Is Clear
The United States Supreme Court (Berger v. United States.) stated the principle in 1935: the prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.”
In Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., the Supreme Court held that when a “financially interested” party acts as prosecutor, the resulting error is “fundamental and pervasive.” The conviction was reversed.
The Court wrote that a prosecutor with a financial stake creates “an intolerable danger that the public interest will be compromised.”
In Marshall v. Jerrico, the Court held that the Due Process Clause entitles every defendant to a “disinterested” prosecutor. Government officers who would “personally benefit” from enforcement activity raise constitutional concerns that go to the core of the proceeding.
A prosecutor who profits from a conviction has an interest in ensuring that the conviction is never disturbed.
Every subsequent act by that prosecutor — every objection to post-conviction relief, every argument against a new trial, every resistance to the disclosure of exculpatory evidence — must be evaluated not as the disinterested conduct of a minister of justice, but as the self-interested conduct of a party protecting his own financial position.
Additional evidence confirms that the financial entanglement was not a one-time arrangement but an ongoing enterprise. The US Claims Purchase Agreement securitized Paden’s settlement proceeds — converting future payments into present-day financial instruments. An October 2020 email from Fina demonstrates his continuing involvement in the financial management of witness settlement funds — eight years after the trial.
Fina’s law license was suspended for a year and a day by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2020, by a 5-1 vote, for misleading a supervising grand jury judge during the related prosecution of Penn State administrators. Justice David Wecht, concurring, wrote that Fina “chose to mislead the supervising judge” and “promptly reneged” on assurances he had given to that judge — conduct that “fell far below the ethical standard we rightly demand of a prosecutor.” The Office of Disciplinary Counsel described Fina as “someone who cannot or will not separate right from wrong.”
Fina was represented in the disciplinary proceeding by McGettigan and McAndrews — the same men who would share control of their witness’s millions.
The grand jury judge he worked with during the Sandusky investigation — Barry Feudale — was removed from the bench because his judicial objectivity appeared “clouded by his relationship with prosecutor Fina.”
This is the prosecutor who placed himself on the committee controlling his witness’s millions.
This is not a gap in the case law because the principle is uncertain. It is a gap because no prosecutor in the recorded history of America has been brazen enough to do it.
The question is: when the prosecutors who obtained a conviction are revealed to have built a financial dependency with their key witness before trial, positioned themselves to control that witness’s settlement money after trial, installed a team to manage his daily life, alienated his mother, coached multiple witnesses through prolonged suggestive sessions with promises of financial reward, presented physically impossible and mutually exclusive testimony to the jury, and converted a criminal conviction into a continuing financial enterprise — can any ruling that relied on the presumption of prosecutorial good faith continue to stand?
The answer is no.
