Nine of the 12 jurors have been chosen for the Jerry Sandusky trial, which will start Monday. There are still seven more selections to go (four alternate jurors are also necessary), but even with the nine already in place, there’s enough there to see just how deep Penn State’s ties are with the area.
As Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel points out, Juror No. 7 is a Penn State senior-to-be. He works part-time in the athletic department, and he showed up to jury duty in a Penn State archery t-shirt.
And he was selected.
In fact, there were several potential jurors wearing Penn State gear. It probably depends person-to-person whether that was intended as a show of support, a cheap way to try to get out of jury duty or just something so ingrained into the person’s routine that why wouldn’t they wear a Penn State shirt.
No. 7 is not the only juror with a history close to the school. As Sara Ganim of the Patriot-News reports, another juror is a retired Penn State professor of 37 years. Yet another is a longtime season ticket holder whose husband worked with Mike McQueary’s father.
McQueary, remember, is a witness to one of the alleged incidents.
And there are seven more selections still yet to be made.
This is Centre County. They are, as they say, Penn State. Not all of them are, of course; some jurors have no connections to Penn State athletics, the school, the Paternos or the Sandusky family. But they’re almost the exceptions that prove the rule in this case.
At any rate, though, it’s also worth pointing out that reducing people to certain particulars of their histories robs them of agency and humanity, and it would be ideal not to do that. The jurors with deep Penn State ties aren’t going to sit in the courtroom and just bellow “WE ARE!” periodically instead of listening to the actual case. People are people. We use our brains, a lot.
But let’s leave the Penn State gear at home for the trial itself, folks.
The last thing anyone needs is to give the losing side of the case the world’s easiest appeal.
