The stench from the bench

Senior Judge Maureen Skerda pulls a dirty trick to bury the Penn State prosecutors scandal

In the Penn State sex abuse case, there’s a bonafide scandal involving the two top prosecutors who sent Jerry Sandusky to prison taking control of a $20 million trust fund set up for the alleged victim at PSU who pocketed the most cash.

Sandusky’s lawyers went to court last September, seeking an evidentiary hearing that would compel former deputy attorney generals Frank Fina and Joe McGettigan to appear in court under oath and explain their apparent conflict of interest, as well as how they allegedly profited from putting Sandusky in prison essentially for life.

But Sandusky’s latest post-conviction appeal wound up in Centre County Common Pleas Court in front of Senior Judge Maureen Skerda. And five months later, Judge Skerda not only decided to cover up shocking evidence of corruption by turning down the appeal, and denying the evidentiary hearing.

But Her Honor also pulled a dirty trick that not only violates the law, but ensures that Sandusky sits in prison for up to another year or two. The hope seems to be that the 82 year-old Sandusky will die in jail without ever having his day in court.

When Judge Skerda denied Sandusky’s request for an evidentiary hearing under the Pennsylvania Code, Rule 907, she was required to “give notice to the parties of the intention to dismiss the petition.”

Judge Skerda was also required to “state in the notice the reasons for the dismissal,” and give the defendant 20 days to respond.

But when she denied the appeal without holding an evidentiary hearing, Judge Skerda never gave the required notice. Nor did she give Sandusky and his lawyers 20 days to respond.

That means that Sandusky will have to appeal the judge’s procedural error, before he can appeal her decision to deny his appeal, and request for an evidentiary hearing.

In response, Frank Parlato, an investigative journalist and publisher who gathered the newly discovered evidence that Sandusky’s latest appeal was based on, described Judge Skerda’s conduct as “corrupt” and deliberate.

“She chose not to issue the Rule 907 notice,” Parlato wrote in an email. “She chose to deny a hearing on facts that plainly require one.”

“Maureen Skerda should not remain on the bench,” Parlato concluded. “This lawless judge should be brought before the Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline.”

Sandusky, Joe Paterno’s longtime defensive coordinator at Penn State, was convicted on June 22, 2012 of 45 of 48 counts of sex abuse.

When his original sentence was overturned on technical grounds, Sandusky was re-sentenced by the very same Judge Skerda on Oct. 9, 2021, to his same original sentence, 30 to 60 years in prison.

Behind bars, Sandusky, who has spent more than 13 years in prison, six of those years in solitary confinement, still professes his innocence.

After Sandusky was convicted, Sabastian Paden, AKA “Victim No. 9” at Sandusky’s trial, hired a civil lawyer, Dennis McAndrews, who was both a former fellow prosecutor and a future law partner of McGettigan’s, to sue Penn State for damages.

Paden collected the highest payout of any of Sandusky’s alleged victims, $20 million.

And who wound up controlling the distribution of all that money? Why Gay Warren, Joe McGettigan’s future wife, and former deputy attorney general Frank Fina.

McGettigan, who died on Dec. 31, at 76, and was lauded in an Inquirer obituary today as a “celebrated former prosecutor,” “legal expert” and “avenging hero to crime victims across the Commonwealth,” is no longer around to answer questions under oath.

But Fina’s still available. And so is McGettigan’s widow.

According to Sandusky’s post-conviction appeal filed last September, Fina and McGettigan had “a financial incentive to induce allegations made” by Paden, and that according to Paden’s mother, “critical aspects of his [Paden’s] testimony were false.”

“Joseph McGettigan and Frank Fina financially profited from abuse allegations made by [Paden] and introduced [Paden] to civil attorneys during the course of Sandusky’s criminal proceedings to facilitate a civil suit against Penn State,” the post-conviction petition stated.

In an affidavit filed in support of Sandusky’s petition, Parlato stated that according to Paden’s mother, around the time of the Sandusky trial, the prosecutors told her son, “You will never have to work a day in your life.”

In Parlato’s affidavit, he explained that Paden’s mother told him that Paden’s civil lawyers bought her son “expensive gifts, moved the family to a Bryn Mawr condo, then to multiple homes in Malvern, and provided cash on request.”

Paden’s mother, Parlato’s affidavit stated, later learned that these funds were borrowed against a future settlement, including hundreds of thousands of dollars at 27% APR (monthly compounding) from US Claims, used for living expenses and numerous paid ‘therapists/professionals.’ ”

Trust committee members, the PCRA petition stated, were paid an annual $5,000, plus “reasonable hourly compensation.”

If the court had granted an evidentiary hearing, Fina and McGettigan’s widow could have been hauled into court, and asked to explain their roles in overseeing the $20 million trust fund, which supposedly is running out of cash.

But on Feb. 27th, Judge Skerda issued an 11-page opinion that said the post-conviction appeal was not timely, and should have been filed four years earlier.

As part of the evidence gathered by Parlato, Jasmine Rittmeyer, the estranged wife of Ryan Rittmeyer’s estranged wife, was prepared to testify that she was with her husband the night he initially told police he hadn’t been abused by Sandusky.

The estranged wife said she watched as her husband’s story changed after meetings with prosecutors. Like Paden, after Sandusky was convicted, Rittmeyer, AKA Victim No. 10 at trial, hired a civil lawyer and sued Penn State for damages, collecting $5.5 million.

In her opinion denying Sandusky’s appeal, Judge Skerda rapped the defendant’s lawyers for not being able to obtain Rittmeyer’s recantation earlier “in the last 13 years since the criminal trial.”

In her opinion, the judge said that the defense’s claim that they couldn’t obtain Rittmeyer’s recantation earlier “is debunked by the fact that [Rittmeyer] was involved after the criminal trial with civil litigation which resulted in a substantial settlement in this matter.”

The judge also noted that Sandusky’s trial “occurred over 13 years ago with several witnesses testifying. The result of the trial was based on overwhelming evidence and thus the newly discovered evidence would most likely not change the outcome of the trial.”

The next issue that Judge Skerda disposed of was the claim “that prosecutors Joseph McGettigan (now deceased) and Frank Fina profited from abuse allegations made by [Paden],” the judge wrote.

“And assisted him,” the judge wrote, “in procuring a civil attorney and in setting up a trust fund for [Paden] in which Fina served as a trustee along with McGettigan’s paramour,” Gay Warren, who subsequently became McGettigan’s wife.

“There is no evidence that any of the prosecutors were actively engaged in the civil litigation nor had a financial interest while prosecuting the defendant in 2012,” Judge Skerda wrote.

“The documentation in Petitioner’s exhibits indicates that three years after the trial concluded, a trust was set up in which Frank Fina was one of three individuals on the Trust Protective Committee,” the judge wrote.

“Again, this behavior occurred post-trial and there is no indication that the behavior was antecedent behavior,” the judge wrote. “As such it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.”

“The PCRA [Post-Conviction Relief Act] court,” the judge concluded, “may dismiss a petition without conducting an evidentiary hearing when the court is satisfied that there are no genuine issues concerning any material fact, the defendant is not entitled to post-conviction collateral relief, and no legitimate purpose would be served by any further proceedings.”

As in hear no evil, see no evil.

Skerda, the president judge on the Warren-Forest County Court of Common Pleas, took over the Sandusky case in October 2019, after the previous judge, John Foradora, had to recuse himself.

In that role, Skerda has consistently denied Sandusky’s appeals.

In a 2023 opinion, Judge Skerda dismissed a 136-page expert report written in Sandusky’s defense by R. Christopher Barden, an internationally known lawyer and psychologist.

In his report, Barden concluded that because of Pennsylvania’s pervasive “culture of corruption,” Sandusky might well be the “victim of one of the most improper, corrupt, falsely investigated and improperly, negligently tried cases in U.S. history.”

In deploying the “junk science” of recovered memory therapy, Barden wrote, the lawyers and therapists in the Sandusky case “were engaged in an unethical and/or criminal scam to manipulate witnesses to produce ‘new memory claims of abuse’ and thus obtain large settlement sums in civil litigation.”

In his report, Barden talked about the misconduct of other prominent actors at the Penn State case. Such as former deputy attorney general Fina, who was “suspended from the practice of law for manipulating and misleading a judge,” Barden wrote.

As well as Fina being “reportedly proven to be a mass transmitter of explicit, racist, violent pornography,” Barden wrote, adding that Fina subsequently had to resign from the Philadelphia D.A.’s office.

But in her nine-page order, Judge Skerda dismissed the expert report by saying that “Dr. Barden’s scatter-shot hypotheses address various conspiracy theories but do not advance any argument that was not previously explored at [Sandusky’s] PCRA proceedings in 2017.”

As I wrote in 2023, when Judge Skerda rejected Sandusky’s previous appeal, thanks to Judge Skerda, Pennsylvania’s “culture of corruption” continues to flourish.

As does the official cover up at Penn State.