Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky is escorted to the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte on Thursday for a hearing.

BELLEFONTE — Joe Amendola, the lawyer representing Jerry Sandusky, had a mission in the months leading up to the trial — get the prosecutors in his client’s case to turn over as much information in their case as possible in the hope of raising doubt about the victims’ accusations.

Amendola got more than 9,400 pages of documents during the discovery process — plus another 2,100 from subpoenas and 674 pages of grand jury transcripts. He amassed a collection of 12,000 copies.

As it turns out, Amendola testified Thursday during a court hearing for Sandusky, many of the documents the attorney labored to get were irrelevant to the trial he tried to have delayed multiple times on the grounds he needed more time to prepare a defense.

Amendola took the stand as part of a hearing for Sandusky’s defense to try to persuade Senior Judge John Cleland to overturn the conviction and grant a new trial because the attorneys were deluged with paperwork that kept them from building their case.

Cleland did not immediately rule from the bench after the 90-minute hearing.

While answering questions from his co-counsel Norris Gelman, Amendola testified he made 50 requests in the months before the June trial. By mid-May, with trial imminent, he called off his private investigators from tracking down witnesses and evidence, Amendola said.

But when pressed by prosecutor Joseph E. McGettigan III on cross-examination if any of the discovery materials he has since read would have changed the defense strategy, Amendola said no. Many were irrelevant, Amendola said.

Prosecutor Frank Fina does not think the defense will prevail.