Spanier's conviction reinstated in case related to Sandusky
HARRISBURG — 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
Spanier was forced out as university president shortly after Sandusky was arrested in 2011 on child molestation charges. A year later, Spanier was himself accused of a criminal cover-up, although many of those counts were later thrown out. A jury acquitted him of what remained, except for the single count of child endangerment.
Sandusky is serving a lengthy state prison sentence.
