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Jerry Sandusky’s Lawyers Admit They Were “Unprepared” And Tried To Get Out Of The Case Before Trial

Karl Rominger, one of Jerry Sandusky’s attorneys, admitted on his radio show today that he and Joe Amendola tried to get out of the case the morning of jury selection because they were inadequately prepared. However, the judge in the case, John Cleland, denied the defense team’s request.

We’ll let Sara Ganim of the Patriot-News take it over from here, as she’s been on top of the Sandusky investigation and trial from day one:

“Cleland had repeatedly denied requests for continuances and the trial approached. Sandusky’s attorney said they only had a few months to try to get through all the evidence — thousands of pages of documents — prosecutors acquired over the three-year grand jury investigation.

Friday, after the guilty verdict on most counts was read, Amendola said he was, at times, ‘flying by the seat of his pants’ during trial because he wasn’t read.

After the show, Rominger gave The Patriot-News an example of how unprepared they were:

The morning of jury selection, Amendola’s secretary scrambled to put together a witness list, which wasn’t prepared. It ended up having six dozen names, only because they had little idea who to call, Rominger said.

‘Our witness list was every name we could possibly think of, or that anyone else could possibly think of, because we had no idea … we had no time to figure it out,’ he said.

That’s how Sue Paterno ended up on the list, which drew a lot of media attention.

‘Sue Paterno’s name was only on that list because he name came up on one of the police reports, for no important reason whatsoever,’ Rominger said. ‘We would have taken her off the list if we had actually had time to read the report where her name showed up.’”

Now, I’m no lawyer, but “they buried us in paperwork!” doesn’t seem like an adequate excuse. Isn’t that what paralegals are for? This shouldn’t come as any surprise, as Amendola and company never seemed to have their act together throughout the pre-trial and trial periods, essentially proclaiming defeat on multiple occasions before the trial even began. Then again, Amendola was only spewing truth – the jury of public opinion convicted Sandusky long ago.

[Patriot-News]

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