The Case Against the Case:
Two prosecutors in Centre County, Pennsylvania — Frank Fina and the late Joe McGettigan — didn’t just control the narrative around Jerry Sandusky’s conviction. They controlled the money. Sabastian Paden TRUST
Prosecutors Frank Fina and the late Joseph McGettigan
A seven-figure trust fund established for one of the eight accusers, a man named Sabastian Paden, is under the direct management of Fina and McGettigan’s widow. Paden doesn’t know how much money is in his trust. He has no say over it. He was moved to Colorado, where he rents a home from the trust they administer.
Sabastian Paden’s story, though fictitious, won him a $20 million trust from Penn State, but he does not control it
The truth about Paden’s testimony is this: of all eight accusers, his story was the wildest, the most improbable, and the most effective. He testified that Jerry Sandusky locked him in a soundproof basement every weekend for three years, starved him, and sodomized him. He screamed and screamed, he said, but nobody could hear because the basement was soundproof.
Here’s the kicker: every Sunday, he went home. He went to school on Monday. He said not a word to anybody. And then, according to his testimony, he went back the next weekend for more.
He went home. He went to school. He said nothing. Then he went back.
We’re not talking about an eight-year-old child. We’re talking about a 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old — a teenager fully in charge of his faculties, who supposedly never once said to anyone, “I’d rather not go back to be raped, sodomized, and starved this weekend.” Not once in three years. And this passes for sanity and justice in Pennsylvania.
The Accuser Who Said He Was Coached
There is another accuser, Ryan Rittmeyer, who has now stated:
“Joe McGettigan and Frank Fina coached me every inch of the way. They told me to remember things I didn’t remember. They said it’s okay to testify to things I didn’t remember because it probably happened.”
Ryan Rittmeyer
This is not an allegation against Sandusky. It is an allegation against the state.
Prosecutors told a witness it was acceptable to testify under oath to events he could not recall, on the theory that the abuse “probably happened.”
The McQueary Lie That Destroyed Everything
Consider the stupendous irony at the center of this case. The single event that made Jerry Sandusky notorious — the allegation, driven by assistant coach Mike, that Sandusky raped a young boy in a Penn State shower — was the one charge the jury rejected outright.
Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary.
They acquitted him on the McQueary counts because the testimony was so palpably false that even a jury predisposed to convict wouldn’t buy it. The one thing that destroyed Sandusky, that killed Joe Paterno, that sent Penn State president Graham Spanier to jail, that triggered the NCAA’s nuclear threat against Penn State football — was a lie. The jury said so.
Nobody cared. Not Josh Shapiro, then a prosecutor riding the case to political stardom. Not the media. Not Penn State, which had already begun writing checks to anyone who walked through the door with a claim, terrified the NCAA would cancel their football program. They couldn’t sacrifice Penn State football, so they sacrificed a man they figured was probably guilty anyway.
Pay anybody who comes. Pay anything they ask. Get this behind us.
The Hotel Room Where Due Process Died
Court hearings are held in courthouses. That’s how it works in America. But Jerry Sandusky’s constitutionally guaranteed preliminary hearing was waived in a hotel room during a secret meeting among the judge, the prosecutors, and Sandusky’s own defense attorney, Joe Amendola — without Sandusky’s knowledge or consent.
What would have happened at that preliminary hearing? The defense would have challenged the repressed, recovered-memory testimony through a Frye or Daubert hearing—the standard legal mechanism for challenging dubious science. And repressed memory therapy is dubious science. It has been compared, fairly, to facilitated communication, the discredited 1990s practice where counselors guided the hands of nonverbal children on letter boards — a kind of Ouija board justice — to manufacture testimony from people with cerebral palsy and severe autism. That pseudoscience was debunked and abandoned. Repressed recovered memory has been debunked everywhere they held a Frye or Daubert hearing.
But a Frye or Daubert hearing would have pushed the trial back a full year. The prosecutors (and the judge) couldn’t afford that. Because without repressed, recovered memory, they had no case against Jerry Sandusky.
And without a conviction – fast and furious – the NCAA was going to cancel football.
So they held a meeting in a hotel, waived the hearing, and rushed him to trial.
That was it. The case was decided before it was tried. The trial was a formality.
The Appeal the Commonwealth Doesn’t Want You to Know About
Most of the above — the coached testimony, the McQueary acquittal, the secret hotel meeting — has been litigated and denied at various stages. But there is now newly discovered evidence that has never been before the court: the prosecutorial motive, the hijacked trust fund, the accuser who says he was coached word by word.
This evidence forms the foundation of an amended Post-Conviction Relief Act petition currently before the court. Sandusky Reply to PCRA Sandusky PCRA (time-stamped)(Original PCRA)
The Commonwealth’s response? A timeliness objection (Cmwlth Response to Sandusky Petition). They argue the defense should have raised this evidence 12 years ago.
The Commonwealth didn’t answer the allegations. They checked the clock.
But “newly discovered” doesn’t mean “newly happened.” It means newly found. Discovery concerns knowledge, not chronology. The Commonwealth blurred the two, hoping no one would notice. They aren’t citing good law to support their objection. They’re BS-ing their way out of it.
The defense has filed a response dismantling every one of the Commonwealth’s arguments, and an amended PCRA — with even more newly discovered evidence — is forthcoming.
Jerry Sandusky sits in a Pennsylvania prison. He has been there for over a decade. The big media event that put him there, the shower allegation, was rejected by his own jury. The other testimony that convicted him was built on repressed memory therapy that was never subjected to scientific challenge because his own lawyer waived that right in a hotel room.
Jerry Sandusky
The prosecutors who put him away — Fina and McGettigan took control of millions of dollars in trust funds meant for the accusers. And at least one of those accusers says every word was coached.
This is not justice. This is Pennsylvania.
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