By Frank Parlato

Judge Skerda and the Sandusky PCRA

Pennsylvania Rule 907 requires a judge to issue a Notice of Intent to Dismiss and give a petitioner 20 days to respond before dismissing a post-conviction petition without a hearing.

The rule exists to let the petitioner address the court’s concerns before the decision is made.

Judge Maureen Skerda dismissed a petition of Jerry Sandusky, the much reviled convicted child molester, from the Pennsylvania state prison on February 27, 2026.

Then, the Rule 907 notice was issued on March 13, two weeks later.

Maybe she does not know the law. Or she knew and ignored it.

Sandusky’s attorneys filed the original Post Conviction Relief Act petition on September 26, 2025. They sought an evidentiary hearing based on newly discovered evidence pointing to his innocence.

The Commonwealth opposed. Defense counsel replied. The Commonwealth answered again.

On February 27, 2026, Judge Skerda issued an opinion dismissing the petition without a hearing.

On March 13 — after the dismissal — she issued the Rule 907 notice. The notice that should have come first came last.

Due Process as an Afterthought

Rule 907 works like this: the judge is supposed to tell the petitioner she is considering dismissing the case, give him 20 days to argue against it, and only then dismiss it if she still wants to.

Skerda did it backward. She dismissed first. Then she sent a notice saying she was considering dismissal.

The Commonwealth pointed out her mistake in a letter — likely not out of concern for Sandusky’s rights, but because a Rule 907 violation is an appellate issue, guaranteeing reversal and remand at the Superior Court.

Then Judge Skerda issued the 907 notice, canceled the dismissal order, and immediately reissued the identical dismissal.

She did the steps in the right order the second time — notice, then dismissal — so the procedure was now technically correct.

Sandusky’s defense counsel responded, attaching additional newly discovered evidence. The Commonwealth filed its reply on March 20, 2026.

As of press time, Judge Skerda has not issued a ruling.

The judge’s backward procedure reveals, however, how this case has been handled — conclusions first, reasoning later. Judge Cleland forced a trial over defense counsel’s objection, allowing ten days to review 12,000 pages of withheld and last-minute discovery.

Judge Foradora denied relief in 2017 while acknowledging the Commonwealth had suppressed evidence. The Superior Court declined to address the diary of a former FBI agent that revealed prosecutors’ disclosure of grand jury information and collusion with Judge Cleland to help ensure a fast conviction, and juror Laura Pauley’s concealment of her bias when questioned.

At every stage, a procedural device spared the court from confronting the evidence. A time bar. A promptness rule. An impeachment-only rule.

Each, in isolation, bears the air of process. Viewed together, they point to simpler explanation.

No one wants to consider that Jerry Sandusky may have been railroaded.

The Verdict That Cannot Be Questioned

No judge in Pennsylvania wants to order a new trial for a man considered one of the most reviled criminals of his generation. No judge wants to write the opinion stating that the prosecutors in one of the most prominent cases in the state’s history were financially entangled with their principal witness, that a therapist gave testimony his own book contradicts, that an accuser’s wife watched the accusation take shape in 25 minutes after learning about the financial incentives from Penn State.

The stability of the Sandusky verdict is institutional. If the conviction is unsound, the failure implicates prosecutors, investigators, therapists, civil attorneys, Penn State, the Attorney General’s office, the millionaire accusers, the trial judge, Cleland, and every court that has upheld it for 13 years.

What is at stake is not a man. A miscarriage of this magnitude would indict a system.

Judge Skerda’s opinion of February 27 runs ten pages. No hearing. A dismissal on timeliness grounds. The merits of the new evidence are unaddressed except by the assertion that none of it merits any consideration since the trial evidence was “overwhelming.”

She does not ask whether the new evidence risks demolishing every presumption that made the case overwhelming — a recanting accuser, the method that solicited his and others’ testimony for literally millions in payments, a witness who watched the accusation be assembled and altered repeatedly, prosecutors who controlled their witness’s eight-figure trust fund, a therapist contradicted by his book.

There is enough hair on this that what is being ignored is an 800-pound gorilla. An evidentiary hearing would blow this case wide open. But why now?

A Better Burial

Jerry Sandusky is 82. Let it wait. Let him die in prison.

He has been in prison since 2012. The judge dismissed his petition before the law permitted it. She was just over-eager to get rid of this looming catastrophic embarrassment to the Pennsylvania judiciary.

She had to backtrack and correct the technical record, but declined to examine the evidence, of course.

The Queen of Hearts declared: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”

In the Sandusky post-conviction proceedings, her logic has been adopted without irony. Judge Maureen Skerda dismissed the petition before issuing the notice. The sentence came first. The process followed. The conviction, as always, was never in doubt.

Our next examines what Skerda refused to look at.