After months of public silence, with only sealed documents filed, the attorney for former Penn State President Graham Spanier broke the silence.
Attorney Elizabeth Ainslie of Philadelphia filed a motion Tuesday asking Dauphin County President Judge Todd Hoover to order the Attorney General’s Office to comply with Spanier’s request for pre-trial discovery.
Spanier, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and former Senior Vice President for Finance Gary Schultz face a number of charges including perjury, failing to report child endangerment and conspiracy related to the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal. All three men have pleaded not guilty.
At issue is a database of more than 20 million e-mails and other electronically stored documents thought to be permanently deleted, but the Attorney General’s Office later recovered as part of an internal review of the Sandusky criminal investigation.
“Until last fall, we believed that OAG e-mails for the relevant time period had been permanently removed from OAG storage systems (pursuant to a then-existing document-retention policy) and were unrecoverable. Since then, we have developed a recovery process that is ongoing,” Attorney General Kathleen Kane said in a Feb. 5 prepared statement.
In recent months, Ainslie, along with attorneys for Curley and Schultz, filed requests for access to relevant documents in the recovered database based on a list of provided search terms. Ultimately, Ainslie argues the Attorney General’s Office has not complied with the requests.
On Sept. 4, Ainslie says she received a letter from Chief Deputy Attorney General Laura Ditka, which included three e-mail exchanges from the database. Ainslie says the response did not include a privilege log or other explanation for having withheld the documents nor an explanation for why the process took five months.
“It strains credulity that there would be only three-email exchanges within the 20 million recovered e-mails that were responsive to defendants’ numerous discovery requests,” Ainslie writes.
Ainslie asks Hoover to order the Attorney General’s Office to release all relevant documents from the recovered database as well as create an inventory of documents related to Spanier, which the office did not release, along with an explanation for withholding such documents.
The Attorney General’s Office declined to comment on the motion, but said prosecutors will respond in court at a later date.
The motion was the first publicly filed document in the case in months. During that time, all attorneys involved filed several documents; however, they were sealed. Before Tuesday, the last public filing in the case happened in March.
Hoover is presiding over the case for Spanier, Curley and Schultz. The criminal proceeding is taking place in Dauphin County because that is where the grand jury met and where the charge of perjury allegedly occurred.
While authorities charged Spanier, Curley and Schultz nearly two years ago, a trial date has yet to be set.
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