The Sandusky (and Paterno) Defenses

While we’re talking about the incompetent Sandusky defense team, the examples are endless:

If Joe Amendola’s defense really centers around cracking the case of Victim 2 — the allegations made by assistant coach Mike McQueary — then I’m surprised that cross-examination of McQueary was a job Amendola gave to his assistant counsel, Karl Rominger.

Rominger is a Carlisle attorney who came into the case in November, but he really didn’t seem too engaged in the case until recently. He was scolded by the judge for not filing the right paperwork to be a part of the case soon enough. And he repeatedly said he was focused on more “big picture” issues, rather than details of the evidence.

McQueary was the only witness who Rominger has cross-examined after two days of testimony. He never got that “gotcha” moment, and McQueary’s testimony really didn’t reveal much that hasn’t already been said in his multiple police statements or his testimony in court in December.

Hmm, I think I’ll stick with my theory that Sandusky’s defense team figures that his best chance is winning an appeal on Sixth Amendment grounds.

As to why Sandusky isn’t just pleading it out, I think Emily Bazelon has the right answer: he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what, and if he had any shame he wouldn’t be Jerry Sandusky. Bazelon also has a good summary of the other crucial revelations and what they mean for the elites who enabled Sandusky:

And as Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports points out, it now looks like “McQueary did more than he was credited for when the story broke last fall.” Then, Penn State president Graham Spanier, vice president Gary Schultz, and athletic director Tim Curley said McQueary wasn’t detailed or clear about what he’d seen, and that’s why they didn’t take action against Sandusky. All three officials have lost their jobs, and Curley and Schultz are facing charges of perjury and failing to report a crime. Because of that probe, emails have leaked to NBC that reportedly show that McQueary did clearly report what he’d seen, and that Schultz and Spanier decided not to go to the police in order to be “humane” toward Sandusky. A Pittsburgh TV station, meanwhile, reports that Schultz “kept a secret file with allegations regarding Sandusky and sex abuse.”

A crucial assumption of Paterno apologists has been that what McQueary told his superiors was more vague than he had later claimed. It wasn’t a very convincing defense even if true, but we now know it to be false — Spanier and the Penn State security apparatus knew the credible allegations against Sandusky in detail and made a decision not to report him the authorities anyway. At this point, defenses of Paterno will require us to believe that the most powerful man on campus was not aware of this well-known information about his longtime assistant coach although the source of much of the key information went directly to him. Sure. I would say that even David Brooks would have trouble defending this kind of behavior by elites, except that he has defended it.