Sandusky: 'Not the monster I was made out to be'

BELLEFONTE, Pa. - Testifying Friday in a bid for a new trial, Jerry Sandusky unleashed a torrent of attacks on the process that sent him to prison.

He lambasted his trial lawyer's decision to keep him off the witness stand. He questioned rulings by the judge that gave him just months to prepare his defense.

And as for the eight young men who in 2012 persuaded jurors he was a serial sexual predator - "what they call victims" is how Sandusky contemptuously described them - the former Pennsylvania State University coach forcefully sought to impugn their credibility.

"I wasn't a pedophile," Sandusky said. "I wasn't a preferential sex predator. I wasn't the monster I was made out to be."

His hour on the witness stand led off what is scheduled to be three days of testimony and evidence that his appellate lawyers hope will persuade Senior Judge John M. Cleland to overturn Sandusky's conviction.

His previous appeals have failed. And whatever Cleland decides, it will likely have little effect on the case that continues to reverberate - in lawsuits, courtrooms, and campus debates - across the state four years after the jury's decision.

But Friday's hearing showcased a new strategy for Sandusky, as appellate lawyer Al Lindsay tries to prove that the 72-year-old former assistant football coach never had a chance at trial because of a woefully ineffective defense team.

In that way, the nature of the proceedings made strange bedfellows of lawyers once on opposite sides of the case - and exposed fractures between former allies.

Prosecutors have repeatedly described Sandusky's arguments as meritless. On Friday, their chief adversary during the trial agreed with them.

Joseph Amendola, Sandusky's former defense attorney, insisted the defendant had signed off on every strategy decision during the 2012 trial.

"Jerry was a football coach at Penn State. He's not a wimp," Amendola told the judge, who also presided at the trial. "He made his own decisions. If Jerry had said, 'No, I want to testify,' I would have blessed myself, hoped for the best, and put him on the stand."

But Karl Rominger, the now-disbarred Carlisle lawyer who was Amendola's cocounsel at trial, lobbed his own attacks. He told Cleland he strongly disagreed with Amendola's decision to waive Sandusky's preliminary hearing months before a trial, and thought they had lost a crucial opportunity to question their client's accusers before they went before a jury.

"A preliminary hearing shapes how you handle a case for trial," he said. "It is the most important hearing in a criminal case."

Amendola maintained that if Rominger felt that way, he never voiced his concerns.

Despite the bickering between the onetime cocounsels, the weight of Friday's proceedings largely belonged to Sandusky.

It was not the first time he had addressed the court since Cleland sent him to prison on a 30- to 60-year term. At his October 2012 sentencing, Sandusky delivered a rambling speech that incorporated sports metaphors, discussion of his sexual relationship with his wife, and comparisons of himself to other sports underdogs, like the racehorse Seabiscuit.

But his statements Friday were the first time he had given sworn testimony about the allegations against him.

As he entered the courtroom in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit, Sandusky appeared frailer, thinner, and balder than he had four years earlier. His face broke into his typical wide, toothy grin when he spotted his wife, Dottie, and other supporters in the gallery. He patted his hand on his heart and pointed his index finger toward them.

By the time he was seated in the witness box, all of his former vigor had returned. He spoke so forcefully at times that he cut off his lawyer's questions, forcing Cleland to advise Lindsay several times to rein his client in.

Asked by Lindsay whether he had ever engaged in oral sex or anal sex with anyone, let alone children, Sandusky lunged into his response.

"Absolutely not," he spat into the microphone. "That idea is totally foreign to me. It's not something I would have ever thought of or engaged in. It's absolutely disgusting to me."

He described his defense at trial as "chaos." But, he said, "I was a novice, and I assumed that Mr. Amendola was the expert on this and that I would take his advice."

Chief among Sandusky's attacks on Amendola was the lawyer's decision to set up a disastrous November 2011 interview with NBC's Bob Costas that was later used against him at trial.

Asked by Costas whether he was sexually attracted to young boys, Sandusky seemed to struggle to answer the question over several excruciating seconds.

Sandusky said Friday that Amendola sprang the interview on him with 15 minutes' notice.

Amendola, however, maintained that he saw the Costas interview as a "golden opportunity" for a client who had become one of the "most despised people in the world" to get out his side of the story.

"Coach Paterno was fired. That resulted in riots in State College," Amendola said. "What I was being told was that Jerry was even [worse than] Adolf Hitler."

Asked by Lindsay whether he would now agree that the interview was a mistake, Amendola paused.

"I think generally the interview went well," he said. "But the pregnant pause, which I guess will haunt all of us forever, came after the question about whether he was sexually attracted to young boys. I wanted to jump out of my chair."

Though Sandusky began his trial dead set on testifying, he reversed course under Amendola's advice in the trial's waning days, when his adopted son alleged to investigators that he, too, had been abused. Matt Sandusky had been a potential defense witness, not one for the prosecution.

"Mr. Amendola called me extremely upset and concerned ... and I believe the words he used [were] 'he flipped, he changed his story,' he would testify against me," Sandusky said Friday.

Amendola - who described Matt Sandusky's accusations as "a nuclear bomb set off in the middle of trial" - said he feared that if Sandusky testified in his own defense, prosecutors Joseph McGettigan and Frank Fina would call Matt as a rebuttal witness.

"It would have been exposing Jerry to an intense cross-examination by Mr. McGettigan, who was quite good at cross-examination," Amendola said. "Almost as good as Bob Costas."

Sandusky has indicated he intends to call both Fina and McGettigan to question them about another potential victim who was kept off the stand at his trial when the hearing resumes Aug. 22.

Several other accusers also appear on the witness list.

jroebuck@phillynews.com 215-854-2608 @jeremyrroebuck