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OT; PSU Administration facing more jail time.

ERICCARTMAN

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Jul 5, 2001
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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania prosecutors want a judge to order former Penn State president Graham Spanier to begin serving a county jail sentence for endangering children by the way he responded to a complaint that Jerry Sandusky had attacked a boy on campus.

The attorney general’s office wrote in a Monday letter to retired Berks County Judge John Boccabella that no legal impediment prevents him from enforcing the minimum sentence of two months in jail, followed by two months of house arrest.

Senior Deputy Attorney General Patrick Schulte told the judge he would support allowing Mr. Spanier work release with medical furloughs, and suggested the judge could order Mr. Spanier to report at some future date to lower the risk of COVID-19 exposure.

Mr. Spanier, 72, was convicted by a jury of misdemeanor child endangerment for his handling of a report that Sandusky, a former football team assistant coach, had attacked a boy in a team shower.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month overturned a federal magistrate judge’s decision to vacate Mr. Spanier’s conviction.

Sam Silver, Mr. Spanier’s defense attorney, on Friday asked Judge Boccabella to revise the sentence to house arrest with electronic monitoring. Mr. Spanier had heart surgery in 2019 and suffers from an advanced stage of prostate cancer, Mr. Silver wrote.

Mr. Silver said in an email to The Associated Press on Wednesday that Mr. Spanier is a first-time, nonviolent offender and called it astonishing that prosecutors want to send him to jail at this time.

“It’s simply absurd and irresponsible right now,” Mr. Silver said.

Mr. Spanier was forced out as university president shortly after Mr. Sandusky was arrested in 2011 on child molestation charges. A year later, Mr. Spanier was himself accused of a criminal cover-up, although many of those counts were later thrown out. A jury acquitted him of what remained, except for the single count of child endangerment.

A graduate assistant told Mr. Spanier’s top aides he saw Sandusky abusing a boy late on a Friday night in a team shower. Mr. Spanier has said the abuse of the boy, who has not been conclusively identified by authorities, was characterized as horseplay.

When those aides proposed not reporting the matter to police, Mr. Spanier approved, writing in an email that “the only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it.”

Mr. Spanier did not testify at his trial and told the judge at sentencing that he regretted not intervening more forcefully.

Sandusky has lost a string of appeals and is serving a lengthy state prison sentence.
 
It's probably been answered before, but is Judge Boccabella the former major league baseball player of the same name? (The Montreal Expos' public address announcer should be in the Hall of Fame. "John! Boc-ca-bel-lllllla!"
 
He appealed it for 8 years then he got another 2 years free when he finally got a psu judge to overturn it last time the day before he was to report. Time's up.
 
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It's probably been answered before, but is Judge Boccabella the former major league baseball player of the same name? (The Montreal Expos' public address announcer should be in the Hall of Fame. "John! Boc-ca-bel-lllllla!"

Apparently there is more than one John Boccabella out there. The former catcher is 79, alive and was last known to be living in his native California.
 
One can't help but wonder how Jopa's death affected the rest of the crew who were convicted.

Of course the question is rhetorical, but I'm gonna speculate that had Joe not gotten his fatal illness, the legal system would've gone easy on him - if only because of who he was. So we might speculate further that the other people involved would've "piggybacked" on their affiliation with Joe, and so they might've gotten-off easier as well.

Of course, we'll never know for sure......
 
One can't help but wonder how Jopa's death affected the rest of the crew who were convicted.

Of course the question is rhetorical, but I'm gonna speculate that had Joe not gotten his fatal illness, the legal system would've gone easy on him - if only because of who he was. So we might speculate further that the other people involved would've "piggybacked" on their affiliation with Joe, and so they might've gotten-off easier as well.

Of course, we'll never know for sure......
I agree. When you review his testimony you’ll see how gingerly he was treated by counsel. The testimony that he didn’t want to ruin anyone’s weekend would have been an invitation to any reasonably skilled lawyer to eat joe alive.
But the Commonwealth lawyer let it go and Joes legacy as some modern day Moses remained largely intact.
Moreover, had his secretary been deposed with vigor (meaning the threat of the pains and penalties of perjury were hung over her head like the sword of Damacles) the sordid tale would have been exposed.
Those fools from Penn State who criticized the university for settling never realized that the board did what it had to do to keep the truth from coming out.
Whatever Penn State paid was a bargain.
 
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I agree. When you review his testimony you’ll see how gingerly he was treated by counsel. The testimony that he didn’t want to ruin anyone’s weekend would have been an invitation to any reasonably skilled lawyer to eat joe alive.
But the Commonwealth lawyer let it go and Joes legacy as some modern day Moses remained largely intact.
Moreover, had his secretary been deposed with vigor (meaning the threat of the pains and penalties of perjury were hung over her head like the sword of Damacles) the sordid tale would have been exposed.
Those fools from Penn State who criticized the university for settling never realized that the board did what it had to do to keep the truth was coming out.
Whatever Penn State paid was a bargain.
Exactly. And that doesn't even address their good fortune to have their sanctions dropped much earlier than originally planned. Otherwise, the Nits might have been the subject of an ESPN "30 for 30" special pertaining to "the destruction of their football program" - a la SMU.
 
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JoePa damns himself in his own testimony and then in his later interview with the OAG investigator Sassano when he said straight up that McQueary told him was not horseplay but sexual molestation.
 
If they went after Paterno with an aggressive posture then he would have been charged. He would then get leniency for testifying against others.
 
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