I was not going to say anything about the Jerry Sandusky case, the Penn State assistant football coach who has been charged with a shitload of child sex abuse offenses, but I saw a picture of the courthouse yesterday where he was to plead at his preliminary hearing this morning and I had a flashback.
A couple of years ago I was doing some courtroom technology setup for a defense attorney from Harrisburg. The case was to be tried in the same Centre County Courthouse that Sandusky would plead at this mornings hearing. I had arrived in State College the day before the trial, scoped out the old courthouse and met with the attorney and sat with him for an hour or so and discussed what he would need technology wise to show the jurors his evidence. The courthouse is ancient and there have been a few updates over the years, but nothing modern, so there are no flat screens, no TV's of any type or wireless connections for jurors to view any sort of transmissions. Everything would have to be projected onto a screen, which I was going to have to set up in the courtroom itself.
Because there was a case being heard that day, I would not be allowed to set up anything until 7AM the day of the trial, so it was kind of stressful. Since I had worked in State College a few times before that, I had a couple of friends in the area, one a college instructor, another a long distance cyclist and we all got together that night and we all worked out ways to alleviate not only the stress of the next day, but also the upcoming state elections that was on everyones mind.
I ended up sleeping at the cyclists house and at 5 AM I was out and in my hotel room, showering, dressing and gathering all the equipment from computers and projectors to the actual diagrams and evidence that would be needed that day in court. I pulled into the parking lot at the old courthouse at about 6:30 and everything had to go through an elaborate security procedure for god knows what reason. This is a courthouse literally in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, until the Sandusky trial, I doubt that a TV camera crew has been there, ever.
I got to the courtroom, the same one Sandusky spent about 15 minutes in this morning, probably wondering if all those years molesting children could possibly be worth dying in prison as an old and frail loser, and I was alone, setting up computers and technology that would no doubt influence a jury to rule in the favor of the attorney I would be helping. I had massive amounts of cables and screens to set up. There was a high quality sound system that had to function perfectly, in fact, from the start of the trial, everything had to run flawlessly, so while I was there hours before anyone else would enter, I was nervously checking and re-checking everything to make sure it was all perfect.
Courts and lawyers and laws and legal stuff are interesting in that they are never interesting in the way that they are depicted on TV. Nothing is fast, nothing is dramatic and no one ever gets caught lying on the stand and then just as quickly admits guilt, is carted away and locked into a cell. It just does not happen that way, sadly. This morning, that sad dog of a pathetic human Jerry Sandusky waddled into court and waddled right back out, quickly passing on his preliminary hearing, accomplishing nothing if not saving himself the disgrace of hearing grown young men describe what it was like to be young boys being sexually molested by a sick and twisted monster.
No, Jerry walked out. Just like that. Justice will find him and he will go to jail to die. That much is clear. In the meantime he will spend the holidays with his enabling wife thing and whatever family he pretends to have.
The court case I spent house preparing for? The sweet little attorney walked in right before the trial was set to start and all my technology was up and working perfectly, he pulled me aside and said, "they settled." They never do that on TV either. What took me hours to set up took about 20 minutes to dismantle. I stopped by my friend the adventure cyclist and we went for a coffee and talked about sports, cycling and ironically enough, Penn State Football.
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