BELLEFONTE, Pa. — — Jerry Sandusky has chosen to remain silent.
After much anticipation that the former Penn State assistant football coach would directly address the child sex abuse charges against him, his lead attorney, Joe Amendola, faced Judge John Cleland and said, “Your honor, at this time the defense rests.”
The prosecution also rested. Such was the anticlimactic end of testimony in the Sandusky trial. Sandusky’s voice has been heard by the jury only in an excerpt of the interview he gave to Bob Costas of NBC last fall, shortly after he was arrested.
Closing arguments are scheduled for this morning. The judge will then give his instructions to the seven women and five men of the jury, all of them residents of Centre County. They’ll be sequestered during deliberations.
Sandusky’s legal team chose a strategy of trying to chip away at the credibility of certain witnesses and suggesting that they were coached by investigators and may be hoping for a payout in civil litigation still to come.
Wednesday morning brought to the stand two men who, as troubled boys lacking father figures, had been in the Second Mile program founded by Sandusky. They said Sandusky never behaved inappropriately with them.
The defense also called a witness whose testimony contradicted that of Mike McQueary, the Penn State assistant coach who last week said he saw Sandusky sodomizing a boy in a locker room shower in 2001.
Jonathan Dranov, a medical doctor who is a close friend of the McQueary family, went to the home of McQueary’s parents the night of the incident and found the assistant coach extremely shaken by what he had seen. But McQueary, Dranov said, didn’t say that he saw a sexual incident. Rather he said he heard sexual sounds, Dranov recalled, and saw a boy’s head pop out of the shower and then an arm pull the boy back.
“I kept saying, ‘What did you see?’ Each time he would come back with sounds. I kept saying, ‘What did you see?’, and each time it just seemed to make him more upset,” Dranov said.
But the state’s case against Sandusky does not pivot on any single witness. There are 51 counts related to sex abuse involving 10 boys over the course of 15 years. Sandusky has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
