A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated former Penn State President Graham Spanier’s conviction for child endangerment over his handling of a report that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused a boy in a team shower. (Matt Rourke/AP)
By MARK SCOLFORO ASSOCIATED PRESS
A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated former Penn State President Graham Spanier’s conviction for child endangerment over his handling of a report that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused a boy in a team shower.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a lower-court judge had improperly vacated Spanier’s misdemeanor jury conviction for the 2001 incident.
Spanier’s defense attorney declined comment.
A federal magistrate judge in April 2019 threw out Spanier’s conviction a day before he was to turn himself in to begin serving a jail sentence of two months, followed by two months of house arrest. The judge gave prosecutors three months to retry Spanier, but that has been on hold during the appeal.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a release that Spanier “turned a blind eye to child abuse by not reporting his knowledge of Jerry Sandusky’s assaults to law enforcement.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Karoline Mehalchick in Scranton had agreed with Spanier that he had been improperly charged under a 2007 law for allegations that dated to 2001.
Prosecutors had argued the 1995 and 2007 versions of the law encompassed and criminalized the same conduct.
U.S. Circuit Judge Mike Fisher, joined by two others, wrote in the opinion released Tuesday that Spanier’s due process rights would only be violated if the state Superior Court’s ruling against him that upheld his conviction had been an ‘unexpected and indefensible’ interpretation of the child endangerment statute in light of prior law.”
“We conclude that it was not,” wrote Fisher, a former Pennsylvania attorney general and state senator.
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