A Man Without Civil Rights

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

The man in the mustard-colored prison jumpsuit apologized in court to the judge for not being able to show remorse for his crimes. But the most notorious pedophile in America had a good reason for not playing along with the well-worn script in his case -- "because it's something that I didn't do," the inmate told the judge.

Jerry Sandusky, still protesting his innocence, was back in court last week to be re-sentenced after the latest official screwup in this ongoing travesty of a case. An appeals court had ruled that the trial judge hadn't properly applied mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines when he put Sandusky away the first time back in 2012 for 30 to 60 years.

But in the grand tradition of the Pennsylvania judiciary, circling the wagons, a new judge, the Honorable Maureen Skerda, gave Sandusky the exact same sentence that he got the first time around -- 30 to 60 years in jail. The message from the Pennsylvania judiciary was unmistakable -- we may have screwed up the details, but when it comes to Jerry Sandusky and the rest of the defendants in the so-called Penn State sex scandal, the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply, and neither does the Bill of Rights. Lock 'em up and throw away the key.

The most nauseating moments of the criminal proceeding at the Centre County Courthouse came when Senior Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Buck, representing a corrupt office that has a shameful track record in this case, charged Sandusky with several new crimes allegedly committed in jail.

Buck the crusader told the judge about Sandusky's shocking prison transgressions  -- not returning his meal tray, objecting to being moved out of his cell, and complaining about phone calls that he wanted to make.

"It's failure to take responsibility, claiming that he is the victim, which is a theme throughout this case, and it's his rights that are being violated," the sanctimonious prosecutor told the judge.

Sorry Ms. Buck, but Sandusky and his lawyers have a point; his constitutional rights have been shamefully violated, as have the constitutional rights of all the other defendants in this case.

Let's briefly review the shocking behavior of the authorities who are responsible for putting Sandusky away for life, and crucifying three former Penn State administrators for an alleged crime that turned out to be unconstitutional.

One of Buck's glorious predecessors is former deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, a lead prosecutor in the Sandusky case. Fina is presently before the state Supreme Court, and it's not because he's representing a client. Fina's in danger of losing his law license because of his overzealous misconduct during the Penn State investigation.

What did prosecutor Fina do? In the secrecy of the grand jury, by bullying a defense lawyer and hoodwinking a judge, Fina cynically worked to deprive the three other Penn State defendants of their constitutional right to be represented by a lawyer.

Cynthia Baldwin, former counsel for those same defendants, is also presently before the state Supreme Court. She's facing public censure for her misconduct in betraying her own clients at Fina's command, by testifying in secret before the grand jury against those clients.

Why did Baldwin violate the most sacred duty of any lawyer? Because Fina the overzealous and unprincipled bully had threatened her with indictment.

And what about Judge Skerda's predecessor, the original trial judge in this case, the Hon. John Cleland? He wasn't around because he had to recuse himself from the case.

Now here's a jurist Pennsylvania can be proud of. Cleland's the judge who oversaw the mad rush to convict Sandusky in just seven months after his arrest. How did the judge pull that off? By trampling on Sandusky's constitutional rights.

Before the trial started, Sandusky's defense lawyer tried to get the trial postponed so he could wade through 12,000 pages of grand jury transcripts he had just received only 10 days before the start of trial.

The defense 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.

But the judge said sorry, we've got a schedule to stick to, so no delays.

"We can't prepare . . . I felt like Custer at Little Bighorn for God's sake," Joseph Amendola, Sandusky's original defense lawyer, testified during an appeals hearing.

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 top off a deal that PSU had struck with the NCAA to voluntarily take their lumps, but save the Nittany Lions from extinction.

Jerry Sandusky also had a constitutional right to confront his accusers, but Judge Cleland took care of that too.

The night before the preliminary hearing in the case, the only 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 meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn. At the meeting, with the prosecutors nodding in agreement, the judge talked Amendola into waiving the preliminary hearing.

So the Pennsylvania railroad that Sandusky was riding on could stay on schedule.

After he recused himself, the Hon. Judge Cleland was replaced by the Hon. Judge John Foradora, who presided over the appeal hearings where Sandusky was denied a new trial. To pull that off, Judge Foradora had to turn a blind eye to all of the shocking unconstitutional transgressions of the judges, prosecutors and other authorities in the case.

And why did Judge Foradora have to step down? Because an associate was being investigated by the state attorney general's office.

Let's not forget the other rampant misconduct and malfeasance in this case.

The cops were caught on tape conspiring with a defense lawyer to lie to one of the alleged victims, to extract the testimony they needed to convict Sandusky.

The therapists in the case relied on recovered memory therapy, such as hypnosis and guided imagery, that is completely unscientific and banned as testimony in other jurisdictions.

The victims in the case, civil and criminal, made no contemporaneous reports of abuse. Most came forward after PSU waved the white flag of surrender to the NCAA. And every plaintiff's lawyer in Pennsylvania was trying to get in on the gold rush at Penn State.

All of these alleged victims told improbable and constantly changing stories that were never vetted by anyone.

Indeed, the trustees at Penn State, who completely abdicated their responsibilities, wrote out $118 million in checks to 36 alleged victims in the case without doing anything to vet the truthfulness of the claims.

We're talking about lie detector tests, interviews with private detectives, depositions by lawyers, examinations by forensic psychiatrists, background checks, etc. None of this was done by anybody at Penn State. Instead, they just wrote out checks to put the scandal behind them.

By the way, wasn't it interesting that none of the so-called victims in the case showed up at the courthouse to confront their alleged tormenter after they all got paid?

There is such a stench that hangs over this case, a stench that comes from greedy plaintiff's lawyers and clients who didn't even have to give up their real names in order to hit the lottery.

The stench also emanates from the attorney general's office, where unprincipled prosecutors running wild during the Sandusky case were repeatedly leaking grand jury secrets to investigators at the other ongoing and supposedly independent probe at Penn State being conducted by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.

The prosecutors in the AG's office were also guilty of deliberately twisting the words of their star witness to fictionalize the grand jury presentment, and create the false headline allegation that Sandusky had supposedly been witnessed raping a 10-year-old boy in the shower. Then one of the prosecutors, according to the testimony of that star grand jury witness, deliberately leaked the presentment to prejudice the jury pool.

Eighteen years later, however, no victim of the infamous shower rape has ever came forward -- his identity was "known only to God" the prosecutor told the jury. And a previously unknown but contemporaneous federal investigation back in 2012 not only determined that the facts of the alleged shower rape didn't make any sense, but also that the only alleged star witness to the crime, former assistant Penn State football coach Mike McQueary, simply wasn't credible.

And we're supposed to believe that even though they did everything wrong, the criminal justice system in Pennsylvania somehow got it right when it came time to re-sentence Sandusky?

Like the plight of another defendant in this sorry case, former Penn State President Graham Spanier, Sandusky's only hope is to get out of Pennsylvania. And find a federal judge who may have read the U.S. Constitution.

On May 1st, Spanier was scheduled to report to the Dauphin County Prison at 9 a.m. to serve his sentence after being convicted on one misdemeanor count of child endangerment. But the night before, a federal magistrate ruled that all the previous judges and prosecutors who had been involved in the case had violated the U.S. Constitution. How'd they do that? By charging Spanier with an alleged crime in 2001 under a state child endangerment statute that didn't get passed until 2007.

You can not try a person for a crime ex post facto, or after the fact, the federal magistrate said, if that law originally didn't apply to him. Or to the other two Penn State administrators, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, who were bludgeoned into pleading guilty and going to jail for the exact same unconstitutional crime.

It was something that every judge and prosecutor associated with the Spanier case had completely missed, or willfully ignored.

Like Spanier, Sandusky's only hope is to get his case out of Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, there's one last culprit that needs to be called out in this debacle.

The media. When Sandusky went on trial, 240 reporters were there along with 30 TV trucks. The mindless mob provided hysterical, uncritical coverage of an unconstitutional spectacle that was a travesty of justice.

And for the past seven years, despite a steady stream of documents that have leaked out testifying to the malfeasance, incompetence and outright corruption of what happened at Penn State -- such as the 110-page report on the federal investigation that found McQueary to be not credible -- the media has stubbornly refused to take a second look at the Sandusky case.

Why? Because, like the judges of Pennsylvania, the media has also circled the wagons. To hide their own malpractice and corruption.