Earlier today, lawyers for Jerry Sandusky formally launched their effort to overturn Sandusky's conviction last summer for child molestation. Their main argument? They didn't have enough time to mount an adequate defense.
The former Penn State football assistant and his attorneys will argue basic fairness Thursday, contending they had no chance to put their best case forward because of a rush to trial by presiding Judge John M. Cleland Jr.
Cleland, in pre-trial proceedings, denied at least three separate requests for a postponement until later in the year.
Sandusky's lawyers
even tried to pull out of the case before trial, saying they hadn't had enough time to prepare. Cleland turned the request down.
During the hearings, Sandusky's lead trial attorney, Joe Amendola, claimed that the prosecution buried him with a slew of documents that he didn't have a chance to adequately review.
(Amendola) testified he received well over 10,000 pages of paper items along with about 45 computer disks and drives that were potentially pertinent to Sandusky's defense.
He further said much of time in the five months he spent preparing for the June, 2012 trial was occupied by court proceedings and by the burden of copying documents to distribute to defense team members. He said all the copying was done in house, to protect against leaks, and eventually the copy machine broke down.
A few weeks before the trial, Amendola said, he told his investigators to stop exploring things such as collaboration among Sandusky's accusers, because he need to focus on trial preparation. "In the end, we didn't have time to be thorough," he said.
However, even they admit they face pretty long odds in their efforts to toss out their client's sentence of 30 to 60 years in prison--at his age, essentially a life sentence. One of them rated their chances as
"a long three-point shot."
You may recall that Amendola shot himself in the foot twice in the run-up to the trial by allowing Sandusky to grant interviews to NBC and the NYT--moves that look horribly ill-advised in hindsight. He even admitted that his client was likely headed to prison--a statement that some legal analysts considered to be highly unethical.
Amendola didn't do anything to help the cause today either. He admitted on cross that he hasn't found anything that would have changed his approach to the trial.
All told, unless something comes out that we haven't heard or seen, Sandusky is probably going to die in prison.