Joe Amendola: No Call to Police Means No Crime


Joe Paterno. Government conspiracies. The Lasch Building. Mike McQueary. Missing Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar. Jerry Sandusky’s attorney, Joe Amendola, referenced all the above in the first 15 minutes of his opening remarks to the jury.

“Morning folks,” Amendola said approaching the jury. “This is a daunting task. And I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t sure how to even approach it.” He chose all angles.

On Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who allegedly saw Sandusky raping a boy in Penn State’s Lasch Building locker room shower: “We don’t think he lied. We think he saw something and made assumptions.”

On how no one, including Joe Paterno, alerted the authorities: “Think about it in the logical sense: grown men—not one said ‘call the police’.” That, he says, is evidence that there wasn’t a crime committed in the locker room.

He questioned why the government waited so long to file charges against Sandusky, villainizing big-government, and playing into rumors that Harrisburg had other motives when they arrested Sandusky: “He could’ve been arrested in November 2008 by the government, in 2009, in 2010. He wasn’t.”

And he attempted to humanize Jerry Sandusky, even speaking about his wife, Dottie Sandusky, who was sequestered earlier this morning. Sandusky grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania. An only child, his parents ran a local gym. He married Dottie in the 1960s. She couldn’t have children, Amendola told the jury, so they began adopting.

And he prepared the jury for testimony from alleged victims, discrediting them before they have even spoke.

“You might think, ‘I’ve heard enough, this is awful.’ But that doesn’t make it true.”