(CNN) — Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who’s serving a prison sentence for sexually abusing young boys, will not get a new trial, as he’d hoped.
A Pennsylvania judge Wednesday rejected all the post-trial petitions filed by Sandusky and his attorneys, who had claimed they didn’t have enough time to prepare their case.
In a 27-page opinion, Judge John Cleland said the proceeding was “simply not a case where trial counsel’s inability to review before trial all of the discovery material produced can be said to have resulted in a ‘structural defect’ that made the lack of a fair trial a virtual certainly.”
In October, Cleland sentenced Sandusky to no less than 30 years in prison for sexually abusing 10 boys.
Defense attorney Joe Amendola testified that he had been unprepared for the trial, but also conceded that after reviewing the documents post-trial, he didn’t see anything he would have done differently in defending the former coach.
The sex abuse scandal led to the firing of Penn State’s head football coach, Joe Paterno, and the ouster of the university’s longtime president, Graham Spanier. Paterno died in 2012 of lung cancer.
The NCAA slapped Penn State with fines and sanctions over the case, but Pennsylvania’s governor announced a lawsuit against the collegiate athletic board, saying Sandusky’s actions were a criminal matter and not a violation of NCAA rules.
