Penn State official mired in Sandusky scandal wants to be cleared
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When Penn State’s Gary Schultz stepped down in November after an emergency meeting of the Board of Trustees amid the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal, he said he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Now he wants a judge to agree with him.
Schultz, former senior vice president for finance and business at Penn State, on Tuesday asked a judge to throw out charges against him, according to the Associated Press. He maintains -- then as now -- that he did not lie to a grand jury investigating Sandusky, a former assistant football coach.
Lawyers for Schultz and former Penn state athletic director Tim Curley said in November that the state attorney general had mounted a ‘flimsy and irresponsible case’ against the two men, the Patriot-News reported at the time. Curley and Schultz are each facing a charge of perjury for allegedly lying to the grand jury.
It wasn’t perjury, Schultz’s lawyer Tom Farrell says, according to records obtained by the AP. Schultz says he was simply stating his opinion when he told the grand jury that allegations he heard in 2002 about Sandusky were ‘not that serious’ and that he believed it wasn’t clear that a crime had occurred.
Former Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary has said that he told both Schultz and Curley in 2002 that he’d seen Sandusky and a boy -- both of them naked -- in a football locker room shower.
As The Times reported in December, McQueary testified that he was embarrassed because he instinctively knew something sexual was going on. He said he saw Sandusky with his arms wrapped around the boy’s waist.
The meeting between McQueary and Curley and Schultz is central to the charges against the two former administrators.
The AP reports that Schultz also joined a motion filed Monday by co-defendant Curley, challenging a failure-to-report charge. They maintain that the law was different in 2002, when McQueary informed the pair that Sandusky was in the campus shower with a young boy.
A spokesman for the attorney general’s office told the AP on Tuesday that the agency had not received the filings but would review them when it had.
Sandusky most recently took the stand Friday, when a judge ruled that he could visit with his grandchildren. He stands accused of molesting at least 10 boys through a charity he founded, the Second Mile. He has denied all charges.
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-- Amy Hubbard
