Karl Rominger, one of Jerry Sandusky’s attorneys, said the Paterno family is owed an apology.
“I personally believe Joe Paterno was collateral damage to a trumped up document,” Rominger said.
The grand jury presentment that was released about the child sex abuse charges against former assistant coach Sandusky was intentionally written poorly to mislead the public, Rominger said.
Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s office, said it is important to remember that a grand jury presentment is a preliminary summary of the grand jury’s findings that may not include all of the evidence in the case.
“When we go to trial, then we will be there with all the evidence and all the testimony and all the facts. Then the public will be able to decide [what they think] and then the jury will be able to decide,” Frederiksen said. “Until then, people are twisting things for their own benefit.”
Rominger said the grand jury presentment made it seem as though former assistant coach Mike McQueary told late head football coach Paterno he saw Sandusky perform “anal rape” on a child in the shower of the Lasch Football Building.
According to the presentment, the morning after McQueary saw Sandusky and a boy in the shower area, he “telephoned Paterno and went to Paterno’s home, where he reported what he had seen.”
The presentment continues: “Joseph V. Paterno testified to receiving the graduate assistant’s report at his home on a Saturday morning. Paterno testified that the graduate assistant was very upset. Paterno called Tim Curley (“Curley”), Penn State Athletic Director and Paterno’s immediate superior, to his home the very next day, a Sunday, and reported to him that the graduate assistant had seen Jerry Sandusky in the Lasch Building showers fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy.”
Curley and former Interim Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz are charged with perjury and failure to report abuse in connection with the Sandusky case.
But McQueary testified at former athletic director Tim Curley and former interim Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz’s preliminary hearing that he did not tell Paterno he saw “anal rape,” Rominger said.
At the preliminary hearing, McQueary said he never used the term “anal intercourse” with Paterno “out of respect.”
“Joe Paterno got fired because of what the grand jury presentment said,” Rominger said. “It made it sound like he was aware a kid was raped and he did nothing about it.”
If the presentment was written the way McQueary testified at the preliminary hearing, Rominger said the Board of Trustees’ decision to fire Paterno would have likely been different.
But Frederiksen said a grand jury presentment such as this one is common to dissemble criminal conspiracies.
“There was nothing different done in this case than in any of the other grand jury cases we have been involved in,” Frederiksen said.
State College attorney Matt McClenahen disagreed. He had never heard of a child sex abuse case that went through the grand jury process — he said grand juries are normally used in cases where witnesses are reluctant to give information.
“In a case like this, you don’t have a situation where the witnesses are in any trouble if they talk to the police,” McClenahen said. “They are pure victims.”
Though McClenahen said he was unable to determine whether the presentment is misleading, he said it is not uncommon for a presentment to seem misleading because of the way it’s written.
“[Grand jury presentments] leave out a lot of the details and are bare-boned,” McClenahen said. “That’s par for the course in cases like this. Inherently, they are misleading because they don’t put all the evidence in the presentment.”