Pat Fitzgerald suspended 2 weeks in Northwestern hazing inquiry
- Thread starter sss
- Start date
you should read your own documents before you post them. Here is a direct cut and paste stating that the investigation was political and tainted:
The documents released by the feds (TSM investigation docs) are heavily redacted, but there are many references to Second Mile board members circling the wagons. References were made in the documents to false allegations being made by a "disgruntled mother" and a "disgruntled kid."
The documents are more noticeable for what they don't say. Such as in the issue of jurisdiction involving the Sandusky investigation. If, for example, in their investigation of The Second Mile, if the feds any found any evidence of a federal crime, such as Sandusky crossing state lines with sex abuse victims, "They would have taken it [the investigation] away from the state for prosecution," Snedden said.
"But they [the feds] didn't do any of that," Snedden said after reviewing the documents. "There's no indication they did that."
Instead, the attorney general pursued the Sandusky investigation, and the feds pursued The Second File.
"Sadly, neither focused on political vindictiveness and corruption, which is exactly what happened here," Snedden said.
This ridiculous douche just makes shit up - he wouldn't know a fact if it smacked him in his silly douche face. He claims JVP was on the TSM Board - which is farcical bullshit as anyone who knows anything about the situation knows (JVP regularly told Sandusky that he had to choose between his job as a PSU Football Coach or being involved with managing TSM - that it wasn't possible to do both... and JVP forcing this decision on JS is what brought about his retirement in 1999.).
He claims the document you reference exonerates TSM and the PSU BOT when it does the diametric opposite. This moron is nothing but a lying, scumbag troll.
Maybe you should read a bit closer. Here is an direct cut and paste that sums it up.
"Bagwell said he hopes the newly released documents will have a calming effect on Penn State Nation.
"Penn Staters are still screaming for an investigation for years of The Second Mile," Bagwell said. "Well, it turns out there was an investigation."
"My overall view is that everything here [in the documents] seems to support the idea that The Second Mile didn't knowingly do anything wrong," Bagwell said. "The Penn Staters who are clamoring for heads at The Second Mile to roll, I don't think that's an outcome that's appropriate at this point in time."
And THIS from one of most ardent JoeBots!
I base my opinion on common sense:
- Joe said MM didn't tell him about sexual assault.
- MM said he used soft language when speaking with Joe.
- Posnaski spent time in the Paterno home while this was going down. He says Scott explained the allegations and Joe didn't seem to understand that such things happened in society.
- Dad, Dranov, Curley, and Shultz all said that MM didn't tell them about sexual assault.
- No coaches or players said that they were aware of JS assaulting kids. Neither did anybody at TSM.
That doesn't mean that I give anybody a complete pass but it does make it unlikely that there was some sort of conspiracy to cover things up in order to protect football.
PSU should have kept their employees aware of such things and trained on how to handle them. Accordingly I think Joe should have dealt with this more forcefully.
PSU administrators should have documented MM's report and what they did to address it. My guess is that they handled it "off the books" because of who JS was.
TSM should have NEVER allowed any of their employees or representatives to have one on one contact with troubled youth. That's incredibly irresponsible!
Facts are stubborn things and you don't like ones who injure your cult.
He was an honorary board member and raised funds for them and gave them money often. Even AFTER 1998 when Sandusky was indicated by a licensed psychologist as a pedo. Joe was heavily involved with TSM though not as much as Sandusky
Irrelevant to Joe's TSM ties.
Tim Curley exonerated Jack Raykovitz at Spanier's trial and one of your OWN JoeBots says there is no evidence of wrongdoing by TSM. Full Stop! You are delusional.
And you are a lying delusional cult member who I will refute as long as you support the pedo and his enablers.
MM told Joe that he saw something "sexually inappropriate" between Sandusky and a child. Prima Facie child abuse. Adult +Child + ANYTHING sexual=Call the police!
Yet Joe knew what he meant and said so in testimony. Twice.
Joe's parish was one of the first in the Catholic Church sex scandal well before this indictment came out. That is BS.
Schultz did say so in GJ testimony and CSS's actions show they were aware that it was child abuse.
The emails show otherwise.
Pretty clear there was.
Except they were covering it up. Joe participated in the decision not to report Sandusky.
Which is a coverup.
Maybe now but that was not a common policy twenty five years ago. TSM paid the price and are no longer around but lots of organizations allowed one on one contact many years ago.
You take everything that was ever said and twist it into conclusions that fit your bias.
You are projecting. I am simply reciting the facts of the case which were proven in a court of law. You are trying to create a counter narrative that protects your cult's reputation. That reputation is diminished by your delusions.
Key is Fina.
Jerry Sandusky's lawyers are back in court again seeking an evidentiary hearing so they can question former chief deputy attorney general Frank Fina about multiple grand jury leaks and highly credible evidence of collusion.
The allegations of prosecutorial misconduct against noted bad actor Fina and the A.G.'s office are highly credible because they are documented in an extremely unusual source -- a 79-page diary written contemporaneously in 2011 and 2012 by decorated former FBI Agent Kathleen McChesney, who's famous for her work in capturing serial killer Ted Bundy.
But in the Sandusky case, his lawyers want to question McChesney about her role as co-leader of the civil investigation at Penn State led by former FBI director Louis Freeh. Sandusky's lawyers also want McChesney to testify in court so that she can authenticate her diary.
The requests from Sandusky's lawyers are outlined in a 28-page motion for a new trial filed Monday in state Superior Court that's based on new evidence discovered post-trial after Sandusky's 2012 conviction. The appeals court is already familiar with the McChesney diary, as it was the basis for a previous motion for a new trial filed on May 9, 2020 by Sandusky's lawyers, along with a request for an evidentiary hearing.
But a year later, on May 13, 2021, the state Superior Court denied that motion, ruling that Sandusky's lawyers did not file their appeal in a timely fashion. Instead, the state Superior Court ripped Sandusky's lawyers, saying that they "dithered for one-half a year" before bringing the newly discovered evidence to the court's attention.
Undaunted, Sandusky's lawyers, Philip Lauer of Easton and Alexander Lindsay of Butler, have filed a new application to reargue their appeal in state Superior Court. In their motion for a new trial filed Monday, Sandusky's lawyers are also asking the state Superior Court to once again remand their request for an evidentiary hearing to the Centre County Common Pleas Court.
Centre County Common Pleas Court is the place where Sandusky was re-sentenced in 2019 to 30 to 60 years in jail after his original conviction on 45 counts of child sex abuse was overturned by the state Superior Court on procedural grounds, because mandatory minimum sentences were illegally imposed by trial Judge John Cleland.
In re-sentencing Sandusky, Judge Maureen Skerda gave the defendant the exact same original sentence that he got at his trial, only this time around they cleaned up the paperwork.
Sandusky's latest appeal for a new trial is definitely the longest of long shots in Pennsylvania where both the state attorney general's office and the judiciary seem intent on continuing a highly successful cover up, hoping no doubt that the 77 year-old Sandusky dies in jail before he ever gets his day in court.
But the issues raised in the 28-page motion concern serious allegations of prosecutorial misconduct on the part of noted bad actor Frank Fina and the A.G.'s office, as well as new accusations of what Sandusky's lawyers claim is unethical behavior by a couple of plaintiff's lawyers who represented Sandusky's alleged victims.
These allegations aren't going away, even if the mainstream media continues to ignore them, in an effort to pave over its own horrific malpractice in covering the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal, and steadfastly refusing to take a second look at what amounts to a toxic waste dump.
If state judges continue to circle the wagons, Sandusky's last resort, if he lives long enough, may be in federal court, where the odds are better of finding a judge familiar with the U.S. Constitution.
But in the meantime, here are the issues raised by Sandusky's lawyers in their latest appeal:
Collusion between the A.G. and Freeh Group
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers say they want to question Frank Fina about "the specific entries in the McChesney diary referring to him." Those entries include several alleged instances of Fina and others in the A.G.'s office leaking grand jury secrets as well as confidential documents to Freeh's investigators.
The criminal investigation of Sandusky conducted by the state attorney general's office and the civil investigation done by former FBI Director Freeh, which cost Penn State $8.3 million, were supposed to be separate and independent inquiries.
But that's not the story that's told in the McChesney diary, and other newly discovered evidence, Sandusky's lawyers say. They are referring to grand jury leaks and "close communications" between the A.G. and Freeh's office, as outlined in emails.
"These communications indicated that the investigation conducted by the Office of Attorney General and the investigation of the Freeh group were a de facto joint investigation," Sandusky's lawyers write.
For example, on March 7, 2012, McChesney wrote that the Freeh Group continued to be in "close communications with AG and USA," as in the U. S. Attorney. According to McChesney's diary, members of the Freeh Group "don't want to interfere with their investigations."
In the diary, McChesney writes that she and her colleagues were being "extremely cautious & running certain interviews by them." McChesney wrote that the Freeh Group "asked [Deputy Attorney General Frank] Fina to authorize some interviews." And that the AG's office "asked us to stay away from some people, ex janitors, but can interview" people from the Second Mile."
According to McChesney's diary, Fina was actively involved in directing the Freeh Group's investigation, to the point of saying if and when they could interview certain witnesses.
McChesney recorded that the Freeh Group was going to notify Fina that they wanted to interview Ronald Schreffler, the investigator from Penn State Police who probed a previous 1998 shower incident involving Sandusky and a young boy.
After he was notified, McChesney wrote, "Fina approved interview with Schreffler."
According to McChesney's diary, the A.G.'s office also conveniently supplied Freeh with a copy of Schreffer's confidential police report, a document that Freeh was not entitled to see. But it always helps to have a friend in the A.G.'s office.
Besides asking Fina about the McChesney diary, Sandusky's lawyers wrote, they also want to question Fina "concerning any interactions between himself and the Office of Attorney General with any attorneys representing any accusers of Mr. Sandusky, including the number of such contacts, the frequency of same, the nature of the discussions held, and who participated in any such contacts."
After all, all of these folks were playing on the same team.
An overzealous prosecutor
Fina, as I've mentioned previously, has already been proven to be a bad actor in the Penn State case. In 2019, the disciplinary board of the state Supreme Court recommended a suspension of Fina's law license for a year and a day for "reprehensible" and "inexcusable" conduct. That suspension was approved on Feb. 19, 2020 by a 5-1 vote by the justices on the state's highest court.
Fina, the disciplinary board said, was found guilty of purposely duping a grand jury judge into believing that the deputy attorney general wasn't going to press Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's former counsel, into breaking the attorney-client privilege behind closed doors. But that's just what Baldwin did by betraying three top Penn State officials who at the time were her clients.
The disciplinary board found that Fina deliberately conned the gullible grand jury judge behind closed doors. Fina then "proceeded to question [Baldwin] extensively about the very subjects he represented to Judge [Barry] Feudale he would avoid," the disciplinary board concluded.
By threatening Baldwin with indictment, Fina flipped Baldwin, turning her into a cooperator who testified in the grand jury against her own clients, without bothering to notify them of her betrayal.
The disciplinary board concluded that Fina was an "overzealous prosecutor" whose actions with Baldwin were "nothing but intentional and calculated." And when confronted about his misconduct, the disciplinary board said, Fina arrogantly showed no remorse.
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers claimed that post-trial they had discovered "evidence establishing that there were ongoing contacts between the Freeh investigation and the grand jury during the proceedings involving this defendant, and that those contacts had an impact on jury selection in the trial in this case."
"Among the evidence presented in the previous motion were a diary of meetings in the Freeh investigation, [and] emails between Freeh Group members, indicating that there were substantial communications between the Office of Attorney General and the Freeh group," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
Those communications "clearly indicated that the Freeh group and the Attorney General’s Office were assisting each other’s investigations by sharing information," Sandusky's lawyers wrote. "That is, the Office of Attorney General was providing information to the Freeh group during its investigation and the Freeh group was providing information to the Office of Attorney General."
According to Sandusky's lawyers, those "communications would be in direct violation of grand jury secrecy rules, and would subject the participants in the Attorney General’s office to sanctions."
Allegations of jury tampering at the Sandusky trial
The motion for a new trial also discusses possible jury tampering because of Freeh's interview with a Penn state faculty member who was subsequently chosen to be a juror at the Sandusky trial.
During jury selection on June 6, 2012, the juror in question, identified in the motion for a new trial as "Juror 0990," was asked by Joseph Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, what she told Freeh's investigators.
In an April 19, 2011 summary of that interview, the juror is identified by Freeh's investigators as Laura Pauley, a professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State. According to what Pauley told the court at the Sandusky trial, her interview with Freeh "was focused more on how the board of trustees interacts with the president," as well as "how faculty are interacting with the president and the board of trustees . . ."
But in her interview with Freeh's investigators, contrary to what Pauley stated at the Sandusky trial, the subject matter she discussed with the Freeh Group went way beyond how the faculty at Penn State interacts with the president and board of trustees.
According to Freeh's summary of that interview, Pauley revealed that she had already made her mind up about the Sandusky case, because she believed media reports that Sandusky was guilty. She also believed that top Penn State officials were guilty of covering up Sandusky's alleged sex crimes. This, of course, was before Sandusky or any of the top three Penn State administrators ever went on trial.
In her interview with Freeh's investigators, Pauley stated that she was "an avid reader of the Centre Daily Times" and that she believed that the leadership at Penn State just "kicks the issue down the road."
"The PSU culture can best be described as people who do not want to resolve issues and want to avoid confrontation," Pauley told Freeh's investigators, according to their summary of the interview.
Pauley also stated that Penn State President Graham Spanier was "very controlling," and that "she feels that [former Penn State Athletic Director Tim] Curley and [former Penn State vice president Gary] Schultz are responsible for the scandal."
"She [Pauley] stated that she senses Curley and Schultz treated it [the scandal] the 'Penn State' way and were just moving on and hoping it would fade away," Freeh's investigators wrote.
Alleged coercive tactics on the part of the Freeh Group
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers cite a 113-page report leaked in 2019 that was written by seven minority members of the Penn State Board of Trustees, who accused Freeh's investigators of using coercive tactics on Penn State employees.
"Multiple individuals have approached us privately to tell us they were subjected to coercive tactics when interviewed by Freeh investigators," the trustees wrote. "Interviewers shouted, were insulting, and demanded that interviewees give them specific information (e.g. 'Tell me that Joe Paterno knew Sandusky was abusing kids!')."
"Some interviewees were told they could not leave until they provided the information interviewers wanted, even when interviewees protested that this would require them to lie," the trustees wrote.
"Those who were currently employed by the University had been told their cooperation was a requirement for keeping their jobs, and therefore being called uncooperative was perceived as a threat against their employment," the trustees wrote. "One individual indicated that he was fired for failing to tell the interviewers what they wanted to hear; this is confirmed by a notation in the Freeh Group diary of an interviewee contemporaneously reporting his firing to the investigators."
"It is deeply disturbing that members of our community were allegedly subjected to harassment and mistreatment at the hands of Freeh investigators," the trustees wrote. "Further, the use of coercion indicates a lack of neutrality on the part of investigators, and, as previously noted, increases the likelihood of inaccuracy" in the Freeh Report.
Affidavit of Sandusky's trial attorney
In an affidavit, Joseph Amendola, stated that at the Sandusky trial, he was completely in the dark about the synergy that existed between A.G.'s office and the Freeh Group.
"At no time during this colloquy [with the juror], or any other time, did the prosecution disclose that it was working in collaboration with the Freeh Group which interviewed this witness," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"Had counsel for the defendant been aware that the potential juror had been subjected to an interview with what was, in effect, the Attorney General’s Office, his approach to jury selection would have been very different," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
In an affidavit, Joseph Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, stated that "had it [the collaboration] been disclosed to me prior to or during jury selection that juror number 0990 had been subjected to questioning by the Freeh investigators who may have been acting in concert with representatives from the Attorney General’s Office, it is very likely I would have stricken her for cause or, at a minimum, used one of my peremptory strikes to remove her as a potential juror."
"Had it been disclosed to me prior to jury selection that representatives from the Office of Attorney General were collaborating with the Freeh investigators, I would have questioned each potential juror as to whether he or she had any interactions with the Freeh investigators prior to jury selection in Mr. Sandusky’s case," Amendola stated in his affidavit.
"Had I been informed by the prosecution prior to trial that they were working in concert with the Freeh Group representatives, I would have sought discovery of all statements and other related materials obtained by Freeh Group representatives regarding the Penn State/Sandusky investigation," Amendola stated in his affidavit.
In seeking an evidentiary hearing, Sandusky's lawyers say they want to know "the precise relationship between the Freeh investigation and the investigation conducted by the Office of the Attorney General, including taking the testimony of Louis Freeh, Kathleen McChesney, Gregory Paw, other persons involved in the Freeh investigation and Frank Fina, Joseph McGettigan, and Agents [Anthony] Sassano and [Randy] Feathers from the Attorney General’s Office."
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers seek through "the obtaining by subpoena [of] all of the source material of the Freeh Investigation which heretofore has been kept secret," thousands of pages of documents that have been kept under seal by a judge's order.
Alleged prejudicial comments by the civil attorney for Victim No. 5
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers say they have "recently received information regarding actions taken by attorneys representing individuals who have accused defendant of abusing them. Based upon that information, defendant asserts herein that certain actions taken by said attorneys would likely have affected the court testimony presented by alleged victims, and may also have had a significant effect upon decisions made by the jury in this case."
On June 7, 2011, a state trooper interviewed alleged victim No. 5, referred to by Sandusky's lawyers by his initials, "MK."
Michal Kajak, who got involved with Sandusky's Second Mile charity in 1996, initially claimed that he was sexually abused in the shower by Sandusky during the 1998 football season. According to Kajak's testimony at the Sandusky trial, he maintained that the shower incident occurred during the1998 football season in the East Area locker room, when Kajak was 10 years old.
On November 30, 2011, an individual identified as “John Doe A” filed a civil proceeding against The Second Mile and Penn State University, after which Penn State forwarded the claim to its insurer, the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association [PMA].
"On May 17, 2012, MK changed the date of alleged abuse to August, 2001, and the location was also changed to the Lasch Building locker room," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"As noted below, by this time, Penn State’s settlement subcommittee had adopted criteria for consideration of settlements of civil claims in which claims beginning in 2001 and later would receive the highest settlement offers," Sandusky's lawyers.
On July 12, 2016, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Penn State had agreed to pay $93 million to more than 30 of Sandusky's alleged accusers. In the same article, the newspaper reported that PMA was "challenging the assertion that it should cover these payments," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"An expert hired by the company reported that: 'It appears as though Penn State made little effort, if any, to verify the credibility of the claims of the individuals.' ”
This is an understatement, as I previously documented in a story headlined Easy Money at Penn State, which chronicles how the Penn State trustees passed out $118 million to 36 victims, with virtually no questions asked. https://www.bigtrial.net/2018/08/easy-money-in-sandusky-case-penn-state.html
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers state that Kajak was represented by "a highly respected and recognized civil attorney." According to Sandusky's lawyers, that attorney, who is not named in the motion, "made ongoing public statements expressing his opinions of the evidence" in the Sandusky case.
Kajak's attorney who appeared on TV was noted Philadelphia lawyer Tom Kline, who did not respond to a request for comment.
On Dec. 10, 2011, Sandusky's lawyers say, Kline commented on TV about what might happen at a preliminary hearing in the Sandusky case.
“You will see at this hearing many victims testifying about a pattern of conduct, which occurred over a long period of time and was predatory in nature," Kline said, according to Sandusky's lawyers.
When Sandusky's trial began on June 18, 2012, according to Sandusky's lawyers, Kine appeared on TV again and stated that he was not impressed by Sandusky's defense.
“If this is what we are having to preview as to the strength of the defense, I am not overwhelmed, and I think it was really not a very strong beginning," Kline stated.
The next day, on June 19, 2012, Kline told the media that two defense witnesses did not do the defendant any favors.
“There was an odd and bizarre attempt to convince the jury somehow that showering [with kids] is culturally accepted in this world. I don’t see how that takes anyone very far," Kline was quoted as saying.
On that same day, Kline also defended what Sandusky's lawyers described as "suggestive questioning of the accusers by law enforcement."
“I think it was perfectly appropriate for a trooper with a reluctant witness, an investigator with a reluctant witness, especially in the face of sex crimes that were done to children when they were young to suggest, look, you don’t want to talk about this, you should know you’re not alone," Kline said.
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers quote the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct, specifically Rule 3.6, as stating:
“A lawyer who is participating or has participated in the investigation or litigation of a matter shall not make an extrajudicial statement that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know will be [disseminated] by means of public communication and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter.”
"It is readily apparent that [Kline] had participated in the investigation of this matter, and had actually participated briefly in the litigation by filing in the criminal proceedings a motion to preserve the confidentiality of the identity of his client in those proceedings on May 29, 2012," Sandusky's lawyers wrote. "Accordingly, his conduct was governed by that rule."
"It is clear that counsel commented multiple times on the credibility of witnesses, and made clear his opinion as to the guilt or innocence of appellant, in these recordings and in other statements made to media and/or publications," Sandusky's lawyers wrote about Kline.
"The propriety of counsel’s conduct in this matter is not the issue that must be addressed," Sandusky's lawyers wrote. "Rather, the issue is whether, given the statements made by counsel, the violation of this rule, and the clear indication that, in a proceeding of this type, those violations 'are more likely than not to have a material prejudicial effect' on the proceeding," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
On Sept. 4, 2013, Kajak's claim against Penn State was settled for $8.1 million.
In their motion for an evidentiary hearing, Sandusky's lawyers seek to question Kline about "the nature and extent to which counsel for MK made statements to media or publications prior to, or during, appellant’s trial in these cases."
Sandusky's lawyers also want to question Kline about "The nature and extent to which counsel for MK participated in the investigation and preparation for the criminal proceedings in which [Sandusky] was defendant."
Sandusky's lawyers also want to convene an evidentiary hearing to determine: "The precise relationship between the criminal investigation, the Freeh investigation, the settlement committee created by PSU, [and] the Office of Attorney General, and attorneys representing alleged victims," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"It has been alleged by [Sandusky] in pretrial motions and thereafter that his accusers/alleged victims have communicated with each other throughout the course of the investigation conducted by the Office of Attorney General, and that his accusers/alleged victims have changed their testimony over time in ways which would enhance their civil claims against Appellant, Penn State and others," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"If, as previously alleged by defense counsel, the accusers/alleged victims communicated directly with each other, or through counsel, and if their description of what occurred, and where and when it occurred, was changed by them in ways which would enhance the value of their civil claims, and if their counsel tolerated or encouraged such changes, the evidence presented to the jury would have been false and misleading, and a new trial would be warranted," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
An alleged victim peddles a fictitious story of abuse to attorney Andrew Shubin
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers extensively quote A.J. Dillen, a witness who appeared on reporter John Ziegler's April 21st podcast, "With the Benefit of Hindsight."
Dillen was a former Second Mile participant who met with Andrew Shubin, a State College lawyer who represented nine alleged victims of Sandusky, and did not respond to a request for comment.
On the podcast, Dillen said he went to see Shubin "pretending to be a victim of Sandusky." According to Sandusky's lawyers, Dillen told Shubin "a fictitious story about being raped by Sandusky in the park area immediately behind Coach Joe Paterno’s house."
According to Dillen, over a three-year period, as he repeatedly met with attorney Shubin and a therapist, they refined Dillen's story of abuse so that Dillen would have a better shot at getting paid.
"Dillen met with this attorney multiple times over a period of three years regarding his purported claim," Sandusky's lawyers wrote. "During a number of these meetings, Dillen recorded what was being said with the consent of the attorney."
"In his second meeting with this 'victim,' while being recorded, the attorney read back a different story, changing the number of attacks, and the location of the attacks to the Penn State showers," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"He [Shubin] also stated that Dillen had reported the abuse to Penn State officials, who didn’t believe him," Sandusky's lawyers wrote. "None of those new facts were stated by Dillen in the initial interview, and none were true, but all of them would increase the value of any civil proceeding on his behalf."
"Thereafter, the attorney referred him to a mental health counselor, who, according to Dillen, met with him approximately 100 times," Sandusky's lawyers wrote. "Dillen also recorded certain of the interactions with that counselor as well."
"During his sessions with the counselor, a number of which were recorded, Dillen indicates that he was subjected repeatedly to repressed memory therapy, a process that the prosecution in this case denied using on alleged victims," Sandusky's lawyers write.
In an evidentiary hearing, Sandusky's lawyers say they would like to question Shubin about "the nature and extent to which counsel for A.J. Dillen made changes to the information provided by Dillen, including changes to the location and nature of the abuse he claimed, and the nature and number of the occurrences of abuse."
Sandusky's lawyers also want to know: "The nature and extent to which counsel for A.J. Dillen made changes to the information provided by other accusers who had consulted with him, including changes to the location and nature of the abuse he claimed, and the nature and number of the occurrences of abuse."
And: "The extent to which counsel for A.J. Dillen shared the existence of any changes in any accuser’s reporting of alleged abuse" by Sandusky, his lawyers wrote.
Recovered memory issues resurface
Sandusky's lawyers noted that in previous appeals, the courts have accepted the testimony of therapists in the Sandusky case who denied using repressed memory therapy, which is banned in some states, and not accepted by other courts as evidence.
But "in treating A.J. Dillen," Sandusky's lawyers wrote, "the therapist at one point states:
“We are talking about why you repressed or hid these memories. I think that people do repress memories and that people don’t really think there is a whole continuum of what that means. Sometimes it means they totally forget and it is not in their consciousness at all until something happens sometime in their life… "
"At this end of the continuum, the other side is knowing but not willing to think of it so putting it out of your mind, like what you do with anything unpleasant. But knowing it is there, just not focusing and then there are things in between. This over here on the end is repressed memory. I prefer to use the word disassociation - just means disconnect . . . There are all different ways we disconnect.”
According to Sandusky's lawyers, Dillen asked, “can people disconnect for years?”
“Yes, people can disconnect for years," the therapist replies, according to Sandusky's lawyers.
"They can disconnect from the knowledge, from what happened, they can disconnect from the feelings, from body sensations. Disassociation happens when you are in a situation that is beyond what is normal… A person can forget about it, and then something happens. A little like a light coming through a window can trigger the memory after years and years. And suddenly they are 'what the hell is happening…' ”.
According to the podcast, Dillen told the therapist that he blamed himself for not remembering the abuse.
“You’re not crazy because you didn’t remember it," the therapist replied. "It’s the way we deal with overwhelming trauma… Psychological defenses… Kick in automatically. It’s part of your brain that deals with that (compartmentalization). When you’re young you tend to forget. I have talked to quite a few guys that were abused by Sandusky, and this is the case with most of them.”
"This therapist met with Dillen weekly for three years, and had him attending multiple group meetings, despite well-accepted principles, which will be articulated by Defendant’s expert witness, Dr. [Elizabeth] Loftus, to the effect that the combination of the suggestive questioning, the use of repressed memory methodology, and the presence of regular group meetings with others making similar claims," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
"As a result of the foregoing, the trial court should be given the opportunity to hear testimony and evidence on the allegations set forth herein, listen to the podcast referenced herein, and determine whether PCRA relief was improperly denied and should now be granted, whether any of the accusers subjected to repressed memory should be deemed incompetent to testify . . . and whether a new trial should be granted based on this after discovered evidence," Sandusky's lawyers wrote.
The subject of the use of recovered memory therapy at the Sandusky trial was the subject of The Most Hated Man In America; Jery Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, a 2017 book written by Mark Pendergrast, which was excerpted on bigtrial.net.
No investigation into the legal travesty that was the Sandusky case would be complete without interviewing Judge John Cleland, who presided over the media circus known as the Sandusky trial, which attracted 240 reporters and 10 TV trucks.
Nine years later, I'm the only reporter left in North America who thinks the Sandusky case might still be a story. Especially since the first time around, they may have gotten everything completely wrong.
If only Sandusky were a black transexual, the social justice warriors at The Philadelphia Inquirer and other mainstream media outlets might be interested in his case, especially because of the overwhelming evidence of official misconduct and the trampling of a defendant's constitutional rights during every phase of the investigation, prosecution, and trial of Sandusky, not to mention the appeal process that's been willfully blind to all those abuses.
But alas, since Jerry's an old Protestant white guy who might have been completely railroaded by overzealous prosecutors, amateur detectives, quack therapists, tainted judges, lobotomized university trustees, brain-dead reporters, opportunistic "victims" and their greedy lawyers lining up for a big pay day, nobody gives a rip.
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers state that they want to interview Judge Cleland about the events of Dec. 11, 2011. That was the night before the preliminary hearing in the case, when Judge Cleland convened a highly unusual meeting with both prosecutors and defense lawyers at the Hilton Garden Inn.
At the preliminary hearing, Sandusky's lawyers would have had their only chance to confront Sandusky's accusers, the eight young men who would claim at trial that Sandusky had abused them. But Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, testified that if he didn't agree to waive the preliminary hearing, the attorney general's office had made it clear that they were going to seek bail for Sandusky in the vicinity of $1 million.
Having his client in jail, and not free to aid in his defense, would have been an additional hardship at a trial where he was overwhelmed, and didn't even have the time to read thousands of pages of grand jury notes, Amendola stated. So at the meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn, with the prosecutors nodding in agreement, the judge talked Sandusky's lawyers into waiving the preliminary hearing, which was their only pretrial chance to confront Sandusky's accusers.
The Hilton Garden Inn meeting was convened so that the Pennsylvania Railroad that Sandusky was riding on could stay on schedule, and Sandusky would proceed from indictment to conviction in just seven months.
Just in time to save the football season for the Nittany Lions, who were being threatened by the NCAA with the death penalty.
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers want to interview the Honorable Judge Cleland "regarding his participation and circumstances surrounding the off-the-record meeting . . . which occurred the night before the Defendant’s Preliminary Hearing at the State College Hilton Garden Inn."
After Sandusky's lawyers asked the judge to produce any notes he might have taken during that meeting, and the Honorable Judge Cleland complied, and then he promptly recused himself from any further participation in the Sandusky case.
Sandusky's lawyers also want to question the judge about "any ex parte communications with any representatives of the Office of Attorney General, the Freeh Group, or anyone else concerning the scheduling of the trial in this matter."
In the McChesney diary, she notes that Judge Cleland was "holding firm on trial date."
In his affidavit, trial attorney Amendola stated that he never talked to anybody at the Freeh Group about what the judge was up to with the trial date.
So that's why Sandusky's lawyers want to question Judge Cleland, to find out whether he was communicating with Fina or anybody else at the A.G.'s office, or with anybody at the Freeh Group about that trial date.
It ended because no one truly cares about what happened there. Fitz will sue and win.
4 more former players came out confirming the allegations and it became harder to defend fitz… and they go back to 2016 so it’s harder to say the current President is ultimately the fall guy.
What are you talking about? The story has faded because no one cares and Fitz easily wins this in court.
I don't have any opinion on Schill one way or another. I do, however, have a hard time placing much responsibility on a person who arrived at the school a little more than ten months ago. The investigation started roughly three months after he arrived, not exactly a sign that he dragged his feet. I thought the school's initial release and initial response to the findings was pitiful, and he deserves any criticism he gets for it. The actual misconduct was largely on someone else's watch. If the school leadership wants to fire him for the lousy initial response to the findings, fine, but the actual problems can't be reasonably blamed on someone who wasn't there when most of it happened.
Last edited:
I would have thought the grifters could have afforded a more intelligent lacky than you.
And OJ didn’t kill his wife and Ron Goldman…after all, it was proven in a court of law (eye roll).
Actually OJ was found guilty of causing the deaths of his ex and Goldman in 1997 and ordered to pay millions. Plus OJ did jail time later as well.
Nothing about this case resembles OJ and this trial was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and still stood.
"Curley and Schultz, in lengthy colloquies with current case prosecutors Laura Ditka and Patrick Schulte, acknowledged receiving McQueary's report and interfering with or preventing its transmission to police and child welfare officials.
They conceded a legal duty to do that and as a result of that inaction, the men admitted, prosecutors could show Sandusky continued to have access to boys and, in fact, abused another boy in Penn State's football facilities before his eventual arrest in 2011."
Not the same with OJ. Sorry, your flawed analogy doesn't work.
Last edited:
Well, I'm just arguing at the level of my opposition(you). Deluded cult members are easy pickin's.
The investigation conducted by the state attorney general's office resulted in the indictment of Sandusky for the alleged rape of the boy in the showers, as well as for allegedly abusing seven other minors.
On June 22, 2012, a Centre County jury found Sandusky guilty of 45 out of 48 counts of sex abuse, and sentenced him to 30 to 60 years in jail.
The state attorney general's office also initially charged Spanier, Curley and Schultz with failing to report allegations of child abuse to authorities, along with allegedly committing perjury during grand jury testimony.
The Freeh Report concluded that there was an official cover up of Sandusky's sex crimes at Penn State. And that during that cover up, the Freeh Report claimed, Spanier, Curley and Schultz had displayed a "total and consistent disregard" for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's alleged victims, as well as a "striking lack of empathy."
In publishing their 267-page report, the authors of the Freeh Report claimed they operated "with total independence," and that "no party interfered with, or attempted to influence the findings in this report."
The media has dutifully reported on the two investigations done by the state attorney general's office, and former FBI Director Freeh, as well as their findings about a rape in the showers, followed by an official cover-up on the part of Penn State's top officials.
But there has been a total news blackout in the mainstream media on the third investigation done at Penn State. It was done by the federal government in 2012, which resulted in a 110-page report that initially was stamped confidential, but was finally declassified in 2017.
The federal investigation was conducted by former NCIS Special Agent and veteran cold case investigator John Snedden, then on assignment for the U.S. Federal Investigative Services.
Against the backdrop of the Penn State sex abuse scandal, Snedden's job was to determine whether former Penn State President Spanier deserved to have a high-level national security clearance renewed amid allegations that he had orchestrated an official cover-up of Jerry Sandusky's sex crimes.
With national security at stake, Snedden conducted a five-month investigation on the Penn State campus in 2012. And what did he find?
That the rape in the showers story told by McQueary made no sense, and that McQueary, who told so many different versions of that story -- according to author Mark Pendergrast, a total of five different accounts -- wasn't a credible witness.
Snedden also concluded that there was no cover up at Penn State, because there was no sex crime in the showers to cover up. It was the exact opposite of the conclusions reached by the state attorney general's office, and the Freeh Report.
As a result, the feds cleared Spanier, and renewed his high level security clearance.
Why didn't Snedden buy the rape in the showers story?
Back in 2001, Snedden told Big Trial, Mike McQueary was a 26-year-old, 6-foot-5, 240-pound former college quarterback used to running away from 350-pound defensive linemen. If McQueary actually saw Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in the shower, Snedden said, he probably would have done something about it.
"I think your moral compass would cause you to act and not just flee," Snedden said.
If McQueary really thought he was witnessing a sexual assault on a child, Snedden said, wouldn't he have gotten between the victim and a "wet, defenseless naked 57-year-old guy in the shower?"
Or, if McQueary decided he wasn't going to physically intervene, Snedden said, instead of going home and doing nothing about a child rape in progress, why didn't he call the cops from the Lasch Building?
As Snedden says, the story makes no sense. It was also egregious prosecutorial misconduct for the state attorney general's office to fictionalize and sensationalize such a flimsy, decade-old story, and then hang an entire grand jury presentment on it.
Evidence of Corruption, Collusion & Illegal Grand Jury Leaks
While the Freeh Group investigation claimed to operate with "total independence," there's a confidential record that meticulously documents ample evidence of routine collusion between the criminal investigation of Penn State conducted by the state attorney general's office, and the supposedly independent investigation conducted by the Freeh Group.
And that evidence comes from a seemingly unimpeachable source, former FBI Special Agent Kathleen McChesney, who was credited with starting the investigation that led to the capture of serial killer Ted Bundy.
In "Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes," McChesney revealed on camera how the federal investigation of the serial killer got started. A woman called and said, "I'm concerned about my boyfriend -- his name is Ted Bundy."
The girlfriend proceeded to detail Bundy's suspicious behavior that included following women around at night, hiding a knife in his car and keeping a bag of women's underwear in his apartment.
McChesney, who was on the task force that ultimately arrested Bundy, rose to become the only female FBI agent appointed to be the bureau's executive assistant director. Her credibility was such that in 2002, in the wake of the widespread sex abuse scandal involving the Catholic clergy, the U.S. Conference of Bishops hired McChesney to establish and lead its Office of Child and Youth Protection.
McChesney is also the author of a 2011 book, "Pick Up Your Own Brass: Leadership the FBI Way."
But in the Sandusky case, the decorated former FBI special agent is now known for another book she wrote -- an unpublished, confidential 79-page diary written in 2011 and 2012, back when McChesney was a private investigator working for her old boss, former FBI Director Freeh, while investigating Penn State.
In her diary, McChesney records multiple contemporaneous instances of then Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Penn State case, leaking grand jury secrets to the Freeh Group.
It's clear from the McChesney diary that multiple grand jury documents were also regularly leaked to the Freeh Group, as was a 1998 police report on an earlier alleged shower incident that was investigated and found to be unfounded, resulting in a report that was supposed to have been expunged in 1999.
While the Freeh Group claimed in their report that they operated with "total independence" and "no party interfered with, or attempted to influence the findings in this report," the McChesney diary tells a different story.
Namely, that in conducting their supposedly independent investigation, the Freeh Group was regularly colluding with and working seemingly under the direction of the state attorney general's office, and particularly under the direction of deputy Attorney General Frank Fina.
According to McChesney, members of the Freeh Group "don't want to interfere with their investigations," and that she and her colleagues were being "extremely cautious & running certain interviews by them."
McChesney wrote that the Freeh Group even "asked Fina to authorize some interviews." And that the A.G.'s office "asked us to stay away from some people, ex janitors, but can interview" people from the Second Mile, Sandusky's charity for disadvantaged youths.
According to McChesney, Fina was actively involved in directing the Freeh Group's investigation, to the point of saying if and when they could interview certain witnesses.
For example, McChesney recorded that the Freeh Group was going to notify Fina that they wanted to interview Ronald Schreffler, an investigator for Penn State Police who probed the earlier 1998 shower incident involving Sandusky and another boy that turned out to be unfounded; he also wrote the police report that was supposed to be expunged.
After he was notified, McChesney wrote, "Fina approved interview with Schreffler."
According to the McChesney diary, Fina also routinely kept the Freeh Group up to date on what was going on with the grand jury investigation, telling Freeh's investigators secrets that the defendants and their lawyers weren't privy to.
For example, the night before former Penn State President Spanier, Curley and Schultz were going to be arrested, Gregory Paw, another Freeh investigator, sent an email to his colleagues at the Freeh Group, advising them of the imminent arrest.
The subject of Paw's email: "CLOSE HOLD -- Important."
"PLEASE HOLD VERY CLOSE," Paw wrote his colleagues at the Freeh Group. "[Deputy Attorney General Frank] Fina called tonight to tell me that Spanier is to be arrested tomorrow, and Curley and Schultz re-arrested, on charges of obstruction of justice and related charges . . . Spanier does not know this information yet, and his lawyers will be advised about an hour before the charges are announced tomorrow."
When I asked Freeh, through a spokesperson, whether he as a private citizen during the Penn State investigation, was authorized to have access to grand jury secrets, Freeh declined comment.
Other emails contained in documents under seal show that while investigating Penn State, Freeh may have had a conflict of interest. According to the emails, Freeh, whose investigators had telephone conferences with every Friday with NCAA officials, saw the Penn State investigation as a way to land the NCAA as a permanent client.
On July 7, 2012, a week before the release of the Freeh Report on Penn State, Omar McNeill, a senior investigator for Freeh, wrote to Freeh. "This has opened up an opportunity to have the dialogue with [NCAA President Mark] Emmert about possibly being the go to internal investigator for the NCAA. It appears we have Emmert's attention now."
In response, Freeh wrote back, "Let's try to meet with him and make a deal -- a very good cost contract to be the NCAA's 'go to investigators' -- we can even craft a big discounted rate given the unique importance of such a client. Most likely he will agree to a meeting -- if he does not ask for one first."
It took seven years but Freeh's efforts finally paid off. In August, 2019, the NCAA hired five employees of the Freeh Group to staff its new Complex Case Unit.
The McChesney diary was the basis for a motion for a new trial filed with the state Superior Court in 2020 by Sandusky's appeal lawyers. In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers requested an evidentiary hearing where McChesney would have been summoned to testify under subpoena and asked to authenticate the diary.
But a year later, on May 13, 2021, the state Superior Court denied that motion, ruling that Sandusky's lawyers did not file their appeal in a timely fashion.
Instead, the state Superior Court blasted Sandusky's appeal lawyers, saying that they "dithered for one-half a year" before bringing the newly discovered evidence to the court's attention.
Evidence of Jury Tampering
The Freeh Group's investigation at Penn State involved interviewing hundreds of people, including a Penn State faculty member before she was chosen as a juror in the Sandusky case.
And when it came time for defense lawyers to question the juror, she misrepresented what she had told the Freeh Group.
The juror was identified by Freeh's investigators as Laura Pauley, a professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, who did not respond to a request for comment. During jury selection on June 6, 2012, Pauley was asked by Joseph Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, what she told Freeh's investigators.
"It was focused more on how the board of trustees interacts with the president," Pauley told Amendola, as well as "how faculty are interacting with the president and the board of trustees . . ."
But an April 19, 2011 confidential summary of that interview shows that the juror had already made up her mind about the guilt of Sandusky, by reading her local newspaper. According to the report of the interview, Pauley had also already decided that Penn State's top administrators were guilty of a cover up.
In her interview with Freeh's investigators, Pauley stated that she was "an avid reader of the Centre Daily Times" and that she believed that the leadership at Penn State just "kicks the issue down the road."
"The PSU culture can best be described as people who do not want to resolve issues and want to avoid confrontation," she told Freeh's investigators.
Pauley, a tenured professor who served on the Faculty Advisory Committee for three years, told Freeh's investigators that Penn State President Graham Spanier was "very controlling," and that "she feels that [former Penn State Athletic Director Tim] Curley and [former Penn State vice president Gary] Schultz are responsible for the scandal."
"She stated that she senses Curley and Schultz treated it [the scandal] the 'Penn State' way and were just moving on and hoping it would fade away."
While Pauley was being questioned by Amendola, Sandusky's appeal lawyers wrote, "at no time during this colloquy, or any other time, did the prosecution disclose that it was working in collaboration with the Freeh Group which interviewed the witness."
Had Amendola known what Pauley told Freeh's investigators, he would have sought to have her stricken from the jury. He would have also asked the judge to find out whether any other jurors had met with Freeh's investigators.
At Sandusky's trial, while Amendola was questioning Pauley about what she told Freeh's investigators, Deputy Attorney Frank Fina sat silently at the prosecution table and said nothing.
Since the McChesney's diary documents how the Freeh Group routinely kept the attorney general's office abreast of the Freeh investigation, it's possible that Fina knew all about the Freeh Group's interview with Pauley.
It's also possible that Fina may have even been given his own copy of that interview with the juror.
The Corruption Of Frank Fina
On Feb. 19, 2020, the state Supreme Court of Pennsylvania voted to suspend for a year and a day the law license of former deputy attorney general Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Penn State case, for his "reprehensible" and "inexcusable" misconduct during the grand jury investigation of three Penn State officials that he accused of orchestrating a cover up.
Fina, the disciplinary board found, was guilty of purposely "misleading" a grand jury judge into thinking that Fina wasn't going to press Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's former counsel, into breaking the attorney-client privilege behind closed doors and betraying three top Penn State officials who were her former clients -- Spanier, Curley and Schultz.
Fina got Baldwin to cooperate by threatening her with an indictment for obstruction of justice. So Baldwin went into the grand jury and testified against her clients, without even notifying them of her betrayal.
After deliberately misleading the judge back in October 2012, Fina then "proceeded to question [Baldwin] extensively about the very subjects he represented to Judge [Barry] Feudale he would avoid," the disciplinary board concluded.
"These actions are reprehensible" and "inexcusable," the disciplinary board wrote.
Even worse, the disciplinary board found that Fina's alleged defense of his behavior before the board was "without substance." What Fina did, the disciplinary board said, was to tear down all the safeguards built into the criminal justice system by turning defense attorney Baldwin "into a witness for the prosecution against her clients."
"Unlike other lawyers, the prosecutor is more than a zealous advocate for a client," the state Supreme Court wrote. "The prosecutor bears as well the high and non-delegable duty of ensuring a fair process for the defendant and of comporting himself or herself always in a manner consistent with a position of public trust."
"To state it plain, instead of Baldwin serving as a shield for her former clients, her testimony was elicited and used by Fina as a sword against them, to devastating effect," the court wrote. In addition, when he was brought up on charges of misconduct, the disciplinary board concluded, Fina "failed to acknowledge he had a special responsibility to ensure justice and utterly failed to acknowledge the ramifications of his conduct."
The board found that "deflecting responsibility and displaying a lack of sincere remorse constitute aggravating factors."
Clearly, Fina was a man who would stop at nothing to accomplish his goals. Even if it meant breaking the law.
There was more fall-out from Fina's actions.
In 2013, then state Attorney General Katharine Kane ousted Judge Feudale from his duties as supervising grand jury judge in Harrisburg, citing his close relationship with Fina and lack of objectivity.
On Feb. 21, 2020, the state Supreme Court publicly censured Baldwin, a former state Supreme Court justice herself, for her "unfathomable" and "incompetent" actions in betraying her own clients.
In censuring Baldwin, the court noted her "lack of remorse for her actions," saying she "cast blame for her problems on everyone involved," but never herself.
The Corruption Of the Trial Judge In The Sandusky Case
The trial of Sandusky was presided over by the Honorable John Cleland, who oversaw a rush to judgment that resulted in Sandusky going from indictment to conviction at trial in just seven months.
How did the judge pull that off? By trampling on Sandusky's constitutional rights.
Before the trial started, Sandusky's defense lawyers tried to get the trial postponed so they could wade through 12,000 pages of grand jury transcripts he had just received only 10 days before the start of trial.
Amendola, Sanduksy's trial lawyer, begged for a continuance, telling the judge that he needed time to read the files and find out what Sandusky's accusers were saying about him; he also needed time to subpoena witnesses.
"We can't prepare . . . I felt like Custer at Little Bighorn for God's sake," Amendola testified during an appeals hearing. But Judge Cleland turned him down.
[Besides being unprepared, Joe Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, was painfully inept, as detailed on this blog by author Mark Pendergrast.]
Jerry Sandusky had a constitutional right to a fair trial. But in order to save Penn State football, which was being threatened with the death penalty by the NCAA, Sandusky had to be convicted and sitting in jail before the start of the 2012 college football season to wrap up the Penn State scandal in a nice, neat bow.
Putting Sandusky in jail for life fit right into the deal that PSU had struck with the NCAA, which was to voluntarily admit guilt and take their lumps, which included a $60 million fine. But the payoff for Penn State was that the Nittany Lions would escape the death penalty that the NCAA had threatened to impose on the football program in Happy Valley.
Jerry Sandusky also had a constitutional right to confront his accusers, but Judge Cleland took care of that as well.
The night before the preliminary hearing in the case, the only pretrial opportunity where Sandusky's lawyers would have had the right to confront his accusers -- the eight young men who claimed that Sandusky had abused them -- Judge Cleland convened an unusual off-the-record meeting of prosecutors, a magistrate, and defense lawyers at the Hilton Garden Inn at State College.
At the meeting, with prosecutors nodding in agreement, the judge talked Amendola into waiving the preliminary hearing so that Sandusky could remain out on bail for his trial. On their end of the deal, the state attorney general's office, which had previously requested bail of $1 million for Sandusky, agreed to lower that amount to $250,000.
The A.G. had also had threatened to file more charges against Sandusky, but according to the deal worked out by the judge during the off-the-record session at the Hilton Garden Inn, no more charges would be forthcoming.
So Amendola caved and took the deal. The grand result of Sandusky's lawyers waiving the preliminary hearing was that the Pennsylvania railroad that Sandusky was riding on would stay on schedule.
During the appeal process, after Judge Cleland's actions were disclosed regarding the Hilton Garden Inn conference, the judge had to turn over notes that he had taken during the off-the-record session. Cleland then voluntarily recused himself from continuing to preside over the appeals in the Sandusky case.
While the Sandusky case was headed to trial at breakneck speed, some people in the know were aware that the Honorable Judge Cleland wasn't going to budge on the scheduled trial date.
In the McChesney diary, on May 10, 2012, the former FBI agent noted in a conference call with Gregory Paw and Omar McNeil, two of Freeh's investigators, that Paw is going to talk to Fina, and that the "judge [is] holding firm on date of trial."
In an affidavit, Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, stated that McChesney didn't get that information from him.
"An obvious question arises as to whether or not the trial judge was communicating with a member of the Freeh Group, attorneys for the attorney general's office, or anyone else concerning the trial date," Sandusky's appeal lawyers wrote.
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers sought to question Judge Cleland at an evidentiary hearing "to determine whether, and to what extent, collusion between the office of the attorney general, the Freeh investigation and the NCAA had an impact on the trial."
But the court denied that appeal.
Gullible Judges Deny A New Trial For Sandusky
During the appeals of Sandusky's conviction, his lawyers accused deputy attorney generals Fina and Eshbach of breaking state law by repeatedly leaking grand jury secrets.
But on Oct. 18, 2017, Jefferson County Presiding Judge John Henry Foradora issued a 59-page opinion where he cleared Fina and Eshbach of leaking, while denying Sandusky a new trial sought under the Post Conviction Relief Act.
In his opinion, Judge Foradora concluded that Fina and Eshbach weren't the leakers who were feeding reporter Sara Ganim intel about the impending grand jury presentment.
Why? Because Fina said so.
The judge bought Fina's alibi that he and Eshbach had supposedly set an "internal trap" to find the real leakers. But apparently the two prosecutors were about as successful as O.J. Simpson was in his hunt for the real killers.
Fina had asked his old buddy, Judge Barry Feudale, the supervising judge of the grand jury, to investigate the leak, Judge Foradora wrote. So, Judge Foradora decided, after hearing testimony from Fina, that it couldn't be Fina or Eshbach who were doing the leaking at the A.G.'s office.
At the PCRA hearing, "the testimony, then did not support the idea that the prosecution leaked grand jury information for any reason, let alone for the purpose of generating more victims," the judge wrote.
"If anything it supports the opposite conclusion, because while someone might be skeptical about the validity of Eshbach and Fina's internal 'trap'" to catch the real leakers, the judge wrote. "It is a fact of human nature that one engaged in or aware of misconduct he does not wish to have exposed does not ask an outside source to investigate it."
Unless the judge in question is an old pal. As in wink, wink.
One of the allegations of a leak raised by Sandusky's lawyers involved an incident related by the prosecution's official whistle blower in the Sandusky case, Mike McQueary.
At the 2017 trial of former PSU President Graham Spanier, McQueary was asked by a prosecutor how he found out that Sandusky was going to be arrested.
During the bye week of the 2011 Penn State football season, McQueary said, "I was on my way to Boston for recruiting and I was going from the F terminal over to the B terminals over in Philadelphia Airport."
That's when "the AGs called," McQueary said, referring specifically to Eshbach. According to McQueary, Eshbach told him "We're going to arrest folks and we are going to leak it out."
But rather than believe McQueary, Judge Foradora decided to trust Fina and Eshbach.
In denying Sandusky a new trial, Judge Foradora foolishly staked his entire 59-page opinion on the credibility and integrity of Frank Fina, which is now in tatters.
On Feb. 5, 2019, the state Superior Court, in a 70-page written by another gullible judge, the Honorable Judge Carolyn Nichols compounded this lunacy by denying Sandusky's appeal of Judge Foradora's opinion not to grant a new trial.
Once again, Judge Nichols and another court bought Fina and Eschbach's explanation that they had set an "internal trap" to find the real leakers, and didn't do any leaking themselves.
Recovered Memory Therapy
According to Mark Pendergrast, therapists in the Sandusky case used scientifically-discredited recovered memory therapy on six of Sandusky's eight accusers at trial, and on several other alleged victims who wound up getting civil settlements.
Pendergrast focused on the work of therapist Mike Gillum, who for three years, in weekly and sometimes daily skull sessions, basically brainwashed Aaron Fisher, Victim No. 1, into recalling memories of abuse, after he had originally denied he had been abused.
In a book Gillum co-wrote with Fisher, Silent No More, the therapist, who was convinced from the get-go that Sandusky was a serial abuser, stated that he sought to “peel back the layers of the onion” of Fisher's brain to recover memories of abuse that Gillum already knew were there.
During these weekly and sometimes daily sessions, Fisher didn't have to say anything. According to Silent No More, Gillum would guess what happened and Fisher only had to nod his head or say Yes.
“I was very blunt with him when I asked questions but gave him the ability to answer with a yes or a no, that relieved him of a lot of burden,” Gillum wrote. In the same book, Aaron Fisher recalled: “Mike just kept saying that Jerry was the exact profile of a predator. When it finally sank in, I felt angry.”
The grand result of Gillum's work --- Fisher cashed in for $7.5 million.
Another alleged victim who initially denied he had been abused, Dustin Struble, Victim No. 7, dramatically changed his story after he also underwent recovered memory therapy.
Like many of the other alleged victims in this case, Struble's story kept evolving. Struble told the grand jury that Sandusky had never touched his privates or touched him in the shower, which Struble said he and Sandusky shared with other coaches and players.
But at Sandusky's trial, Struble changed his story to say that Sandusky put his hands down the boy's pants when they were riding in Sandusky's car. And this time when he told the story about showering with Sandusky, Struble claimed that Sandusky was alone with him in the shower. And that Sandusky grabbed the boy and pushed his own naked front against the boy's backside, then he touched the boy's nipples and blew on his stomach.
When asked why his account had changed, Struble testified, "That doorway that I had closed has since been reopening more. More things have been coming back and things have changed since that grand jury testimony. Through counseling and different things, I can remember a lot more detail that I had pushed aside than I did at that point."
Struble's new story won him a civil settlement of $3,250,000.
A prominent critic of recovered memory therapy is Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world’s foremost experts on the malleability of human memory. Loftus, who testified at a hearing on behalf of Sandusky’s unsuccessful bid for a new trial, has given lectures on how memory works to the Secret Service and FBI; she also has a contract to work for the CIA
On May 11, 2017, testifying by phone, Loftus told Judge Foradora, “There is no credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression."
Nor is there any credible support, she added, for the idea that “you need psychotherapy to dig it out, and you can reliably recover these memories . . . in order to heal yourself.”
In many jurisdictions, Loftus told the judge, cases involving repressed memories have been thrown out of court.
Human memory “doesn’t work like a recording device” that can simply be played back at a later date, Loftus told the judge. Memories evolve over time and can be distorted or contaminated with suggestive and leading questioning. Her experiments have also shown that people can be talked into believing things that aren’t true.
“You can plant entirely false memories in the minds of people for events that never happened,” she explained to the judge. And once those false memories are planted, she said, people will relate those memories as if they were true, “complete with high levels of detail and emotion.”
But at the Sandusky trial, repressed memories were consistently presented as fact. Prosecutor Joseph McGettigan told the jury before calling his witnesses that he would have to “press these young men for the details of their victimization,” because “they don’t want to remember.” That’s why the investigation was slow,” McGettigan told the jury, because “the doors of people’s minds” were closed.
After a jury found Sandusky guilty, then Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly held a press conference outside the courthouse where she said of the alleged victims, “It was incredibly difficult for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
During the appeal hearing over Sandusky's conviction, memory expert Loftus told Judge Foradora, “It seems pretty evident that there were drastic changes in the testimony of some of the [Sandusky] accusers.”
One reason for those changes, she testified, was the “highly suggestive” way police and psychotherapists interviewed them.
But rather than listen to Loftus, and the science, Judge Foradora chose to believe the recovered memories of the victims, which was the basis for the state attorney general's X-rated fractured fairy tale.
Victims' Stories Totally Unvetted
At Penn State, the university paid out $118 million to 36 alleged victims without investigating anything.
The average cost of the settlements was $3.3 million, more than double the average settlements paid out by the Catholic Church in abuse cases in Los Angeles and San Diego.
In 2013, the extravagant payouts prompted the university’s insurance carrier, the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association Insurance Company [PMA], to sue Penn State and the various “John Doe” claimants. The lawsuit ended three years later in a confidential settlement that lawyers in the case told Big Trial they were prohibited from discussing.
One of those lawyers is Eric Anderson of Pittsburgh, an expert witness who testified on behalf of the insurance carrier.
“It appears as though Penn State made little effort, if any, to verify the credibility of the claims of the individuals,” Anderson wrote on October 5, 2015. In his report, Anderson decried “the absence of documentation” in the claims, saying in many cases there was “no signed affidavit, statement or other means of personal verification of the information which I reviewed."
“I do not know why so many of the cases were settled for such high sums of money,” Anderson wrote.
In paying out the $118 million, the university did not undertake any of the usual methods to vet the stories of the accusers, such as having them questioned by private investigators, deposed by lawyers, personally examined by forensic psychiatrists, or subjected to polygraph tests.
Instead, the university just wrote checks.
How The Alleged Victims Were Recruited
On May 1, 2009, deputy state attorney general Eshbach wrote a formal request to initiate a grand jury probe of Sandusky. Nineteen months later, the state attorney general's investigation of Sandusky the alleged serial pedophile, had produced only one alleged victim, the brainwashed Aaron Fisher.
To make matters worse, the first grand jury that heard Fisher testify didn't believe him, so they issued no indictment.
But in November 2010, the A.G. got a tip about the shower incident that Mike McQueary had supposedly witnessed a decade earlier, a breakthrough that suddenly energized the Sandusky investigation.
On March 10, 2011, the state attorney general convened a second grand jury. They were aided by reporter Sara Ganim, who on March 31, 2011, wrote the first story about the secret grand jury probe of Sandusky that revealed for the first time the allegation that Sandusky was a serial sexual abuser of children.
The Ganim story basically functioned as a want add for the A.G.'s office to recruit more sex abuse victims.
The state police and the attorney general's office promptly created a seven-member joint task force and sent them out knocking on the doors of hundreds of young men who were alums of Sandusky’s Second Mile charity for disadvantaged youths, hunting for alleged victims.
But the joint task force didn't have much success.
As one frustrated investigator emailed on June 3, 2011, as recounted by author Mark Pendergrast in his book, “We have recently been interviewing kids who don’t believe the allegations as published and believe Sandusky is a great role model for them and others to emulate.”
On Jan. 4, 2012, Anthony Sassano, a narcotics agent from the state attorney general's office who led the Sandusky investigation, testified that the special task force interviewed 250 men who were former members of the Second Mile charity, but found only one man who claimed to be a victim of abuse.
Ask yourself a simple question. If Jerry Sandusky was allegedly the most notorious pedophile in America who's been on rampage in a small town of 42,000 for nearly four decades, why does the state have to create a special joint task force to go out knocking on doors, and hunting down victims?
Shouldn't they be lined up around the block?
But then the grand jury presentment hit the media. On Nov. 10, 2011, Business Insider ran a story predicting that Penn State wound wind up paying Sandusky's accusers a total of $100 million.
Suddenly, every plaintiff’s lawyer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had been alerted about a possible jackpot at Penn State. All they had to do to hit the lottery was to round up some guys who were willing to claim they were abused.
In seeking a lottery payoff, these alleged victims wouldn't even have to give up their real names. The media, for sure, could be counted on to keep their identities secret. While they were vilifying and destroying Jerry Sandusky's name and reputation every day.
After Sandusky was convicted, the floodgates opened, and 41 men filed civil claims for damages. Thirty-six of them would eventually get paid.
And it didn't require any heavy lifting.
Penn State had hired Kenneth Feinberg, dubbed “The Master of Disaster,” to oversee the settlement process with victims. Feinberg specialized in a global approach to settlements, rather than duke it out in court with one individual claim after another.
At Penn State, Feinberg prepared a form for alleged victims that merely required their lawyers to make their allegations, as part of what was billed as a “claims resolution process."
The claims as submitted in more than 120 pages of confidential records that the press or public has never seen, are entirely devoid of evidence.
None of the initial claims were authenticated by signed affidavits, there were no reports of forensic evidence or witness testimony, or corroboration of any kind. Except when a few of the victims who were pals got each other to vouch for their stories.
The stories of the alleged victims, which were often improbable, and featured constantly changing details, remain completely unvetted to this day.
Jack Rossiter, a former FBI agent of 30 years, investigated more than 150 cases of alleged sex abuse as a private detective employed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia between 2003 and 2007.
As far as the Penn State case was concerned, Rossiter told Big Trial he was surprised to hear that apparently not one of the 36 alleged victims ever told anyone about the attacks when they allegedly occurred -- a period that spanned nearly four decades.
Got that? Over four decades, in at least 500 alleged sex crimes involving 36 innocent victims, there was not one contemporaneous report of abuse.
If a pedophile was running loose for that long in small town, Rossiter said, "You would think someone would pick it up. Either at school or the parents or a close friend."
On top of that, in a scandal involving national publicity, like the Sandusky case, Rossiter said, if you were a gate keeper at Penn State, you'd have to be on guard against criminals and drug addicts coming forward to seek a pay day.
"With national headlines and all these people lining up, you'd have to be more skeptical" of the claims," Rossiter said.
But Penn State never even ran background checks to see if any of the alleged victims had criminal records. When Big Trial checked, we found that 12 of the 36 alleged victims who got paid did indeed have criminal records, including arrests for tampering with and fabricating physical evidence, identity theft, criminal conspiracy, theft, receiving stolen property, theft by deception, robbery and terroristic threats.
The way the system is supposed to work, somebody at Penn State should have investigated the stories told by the alleged victims.
"That's what you do, you investigate," Rossiter emphasized. "The key is to find corroboration for the victim's story, to see if their stories hold up."
But Penn State didn't do any of that. Instead, they just wrote checks.
Why? Because the trustees had already decided that they would pay any price to save their beloved Nittany Lions.
As for Jerry Sandusky, and his constitutional rights, nobody gave.
In their civil claims of abuse, the 36 alleged victims portray Sandusky as a sexually insatiable predator with the virility of a male porn star in his 20s. According to the claims, Sandusky was constantly on the prowl for forced sex with boys, and never had any problems achieving an erection.
Sandusky’s medical records, however, from 2006 to 2008, depict a man in his 60s suffering from all kinds of ailments and conditions, including atrophied testicles and chronic prostatitis.
A doctor who reviewed Sandusky’s medical records, but asked to remain anonymous, told Big Trial in an email, “This guy couldn’t get an erection no matter how he tried. Even Cialis/Viagra would probably not work.”
The doctor added that because the medical issue was never raised at trial, Sandusky should have sued his lawyers for malpractice.
Doctors described Sandusky as having an “androgen deficient state,” meaning he had levels of male sex hormones so low it was unhealthy. Sandusky’s medical records state that he was undergoing “testosterone replacement therapy for significant low levels of both free and total testosterone.”
Sandusky's medical records reveal that he was being treated with antibiotics for chronic prostatitis, an inflammation of the prostate commonly caused by bacterial infection that results in frequent and painful urination. Prostatitis can also cause sexual problems such as low libido, erectile dysfunction, and painful ejaculations.
Sandusky’s chronic prostatitis began in 2005 and continued through 2008, his medical records state. Doctors described Sandusky as being “light-headed” and suffering “dizziness” from using Flomax, which he began taking in 2006, because he was having trouble urinating.
In addition to his urological problems, Sandusky’s medical records list many ailments that raise the question of whether Sandusky was healthy and energetic enough to be out having rampant, promiscuous sex with all those boys.
Sandusky’s ailments include cysts on one of his kidneys, a small aneurysm in his brain, a 2006 hernia operation, bleeding hemorrhoids, chest pains, headaches, drowsiness, elevated blood pressure, and sleep apnea.
He was on thyroid medication when he went to the doctors and told them he began “falling apart” in 2005. By 2008, his doctors wrote, Sandusky reported he was falling asleep at the wheel and gotten involved in two car accidents.
The medical records also describe a distinctive feature of Sandusky’s anatomy that none of his accusers have ever mentioned.
On February 2, 2006, Dr. Frank B. Mahon at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, who was treating the 62-year-old Sandusky for chronic prostatitis, wrote that Sandusky had “small” testicles of “perhaps 2 cm” or centimeters each, which equals .787 of an inch. The average size of adult testicles are between two and three inches.
On December 18, 2008, another doctor at the Hershey Medical Center wrote that the 6-foot-1 210-pound former coach, nearly 65, had “marked testicular atrophy with very little palpable testicular tissue.”
In stark contrast to the way he is portrayed in the claims against him, a couple of law enforcement types who have observed Sandusky in close quarters describe him as an anomaly in the hyper-macho world of football coaches, saying he comes across as asexual.
There may be genetic reasons for that. Sandusky’s medical records state that as a boy, he had “delayed development of secondary sexual characteristics” that required shots, but they don’t say what kind of shots. Sandusky told his doctors he was “unable to have children” because his “sperm counts were low.”
Sandusky's medical records state that he suffered from hypothyroidism, [underactive thyroid] as well as hypogonadism, meaning his body didn’t produce enough testosterone to maintain good health.
The medical records, which date from 2006 to 2008, cover the same time period during which a couple of key trial accusers, Aaron Fisher and Sabastian Paden, claimed they were being raped hundreds of times by Sandusky.
Fisher settled his civil case against Penn State for $7.5 million. Paden, whose lawyers won in court access to all the confidential records in the Penn State case that are still under a judge's seal, got the biggest pay out of all the alleged victims, $20 million.
Totaling up the allegations made in 36 civil claims that were paid, the alleged victims stated that they had been raped or sexually abused by Sandusky at a minimum of least 520 to 620 times.
At his trial, Sandusky’s lawyers never used his medical records in his defense, probably because they didn’t have time to even read boxes of grand jury testimony, or serve subpoenas on witnesses.
In prison, Sandusky’s appeals lawyer said, he remains on a half-dozen medications, including continuing testosterone replacement therapy, and Terazosin for continuing prostate infections.
There’s another angle to the story of Sandusky’s medical records -- there are 36 alleged victims who got paid after claiming they were raped and abused hundreds of times by Sandusky, including nine alleged victims who claim that Sandusky had engaged with them in high-risk and apparently unprotected anal sex.
Yet not one of these alleged victim has ever asked to see Sandusky’s medical records, to find out whether he had HIV or any venereal disease. Nor has any victim ever sought to have Sandusky tested for any diseases.
That's the kind of evidence that would aid a criminal case. In a civil case, if Sandusky was found to have infected his victims with disease, it would have raised the damages.
But in the Penn State case, none of the alleged victims ever pursued the disclosure of any of Sandusky’s medical records.
You have to ask why.
And whether the answer is because it never really happened.
Jerry Sandusky is a relic from another time. He's an only child who was the son of Polish immigrants. His father, Art Sandusky, a trolley conductor, was the coach of a local baseball team who ran a recreation center that took in troubled kids and hired disabled people as employees.
At the recreation center, the motto hung on the wall by Sandusky's father said, "Don't give up on a bad boy, because he might turn out to be a great young man." Jerry Sandusky, a devout Methodist who grew up in that rec center, adopted his father's mission, and was out to save the world one troubled kid at a time.
At the rec center, it was a common practice for men and boys to shower together. When Sandusky first got in trouble in 1998, for taking a shower with 11 year-old Zachary Konstas, after a complaint from the boy's mother, the incident wound up being investigated by authorities that included an official from the Centre County Children and Youth Services, a detective from the Penn State police, an investigator from the state Department of Public Welfare, the boy's therapist, as well as a psychologist hired by the county.
The authorities concluded that there was no evidence of abuse or of any sexual conduct whatsoever, so the mother's alleged claim was officially deemed unfounded. As recounted in The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, by author Mark Pendergrast, the psychiatrist who questioned young Zach Konstas for an hour concluded:
"The behavior exhibited by Mr. Sandusky is directly consistent with what can be seen as an expected daily routine of being a football coach. This evaluator spoke to various coaches from high school and college football teams and asked about their locker room behavior. Through verbal reports from these coaches it is not unusual for them to shower with players. This appears to be a widespread, acceptable situation and it appears that Mr. Sandusky followed through with patterning that he has probably done without thought for many years."
The problem in the Sandusky case is that the customs of an earlier time, as in a communal shower for men and boys, are being viewed through a modern lens.
Since he couldn't have kids of his own, Jerry and his wife Dottie adopted six children, five girls and a boy. Only one of those adopted kids, Matt Sandusky, who took his adoptive dad's name, would ultimately claim to be abused.
According to author Mark Pendergrast, after Matt sat next to his adoptive mother on the first day of the Sandusky trial and heard the alleged victim spout accusations of abuse that were the result of recovered memory therapy, Matt came home and told one of his siblings, "This is ridiculous. Anyone can make accusations without evidence, and get paid. I could, you could, anyone could . . . but I actually have morals."
Three days later, Matt famously flipped. After first telling authorities he hadn't been abused, Matt gave a statement to the police that said that after he went to a psychiatrist, he had recalled memories of past abuse. His flip earned him an appearance on Oprah, and a civil settlement of $325,000.
If you need to post an article about something it means you lack the intelligence to articulate your point. At least just post a link to the nonsense.
You incredible freak. Please crawl back into your Jerry rock, football season is almost here.
