New court filings detail alleged sexual assaults committed by former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky
by CHARLES THOMPSON, pennlive.comJuly 1st 2005
Defense attorneys have repeatedly asked for more detail in the child sex abuse cases against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
On Friday, they got it.
A battery of new court filings from prosecutors tied specific criminal counts to alleged illicit sexual relationships that progressed through dozens of contacts over four years and others that appeared to have been cut off quickly after one encounter.
The attorney general's office's new paperwork also laid out the variety of locations where Sandusky allegedly committed the offenses: at Penn State athletic facilities, in his home and car, in at least two State College-area hotels and even — as has been reported previously — a middle school in Clinton County.
The documents, technically just formal statements of alleged offenses required by the court, were filed Friday and come after months of argument from Sandusky's defense team that the abuses alleged against their client were so broad that they would be virtually impossible to defend.
Sandusky, the 68-year-old former football defensive coordinator credited with building Penn State's reputation as "Linebacker U," is scheduled to stand trial in Centre County on June 5 on 52 counts stemming from a lengthy grand jury probe of allegations that he sexually abused 10 boys between 1994 and 2008.
The explosive case has already turned the culture of Penn State football on its head, as blowback from the charges last November led to the sudden firing of legendary head coach Joe Paterno and longtime university President Graham Spanier for what trustees and some law enforcement officials characterized as moral failures in the case.
Much of the material in the new documents picks up threads revealed in earlier filings, like the initial grand jury report recommending the charges against Sandusky. No new charges are added, and none of the existing charges is withdrawn.
Two of the alleged victims remain unknown to prosecutors.
But the filings narrow time frames for some of the accusations against Sandusky, shed new light on the type and frequency of the acts committed in certain cases, and in some cases make additional clarifications to the record as it was initially presented.
Such detail — or lack of it — has been at the heart of pre-trial disputes on the case and of still-pending motions by Sandusky's attorney, Joe Amendola, for dismissal of all counts.
"The way prosecutors have done this [asserting repeated abuses over long periods of time], Sandusky virtually has to go through every day of his life — what he may or may not have been doing," Amendola said during a March hearing when the same issue came up.
Prosecutors have countered that the case against Sandusky is different.
Many of the alleged victims were abused several times a week or month, Deputy Attorney General Joseph E. McGettigan III argued in that same hearing. They didn't want to remember what happened and were encouraged by Sandusky to forget, he added.
"I don't think we can do any narrowing," he said.
With Friday's filings, they made an attempt. Some examples:
• In the case of the accuser known as Victim 1, a four-year span of alleged abuse has been narrowed slightly to between June 2005 and September 2008, with more specific accusations of specific sexual contact occurring more than 25 times between June 2007 and September 2008 .
• The case of Victim 4 included new specific allegations of a relationship that progressed to ever more violative sex acts between 1996 and 2000. More than 50 improper contacts are alleged in that time frame.
• Dates of the alleged molestation of Victim 5 were narrowed considerably, from 1996 to 2002 in initial documents to August 2001, while Victim 7's accusations were modified from "1996 to 1999" to September 1995 through December 1996.
Court documents were also amended on May 8, when Judge John Cleland granted a prosecution request to change the date of a key allegation against Sandusky from March 2002 to February 2001. That incident is the alleged sexual attack by Sandusky on a boy, known as Victim 2, in football team showers.
Mike McQueary, who was then a graduate assistant with the football team, has testified he witnessed that incident.
Cleland issued an order late Friday allowing all of the new amendments to go through. Cleland also said the prosecutors' filing had been entered with no opposition from Sandusky's attorneys.
Both a spokesman for the attorney general's office and Amendola declined to comment on Friday's filing, citing a gag order in the case.
Cleland still has not ruled on motions from Amendola for a dismissal of the charges against Sandusky, or for a postponement of the trial.
Original Page: http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/05/new_court_filings_detail_alleg.html
Shared from Pocket
Victor Cuvo, Attorney at Law
No comments:
Post a Comment