Press Releases

Monterey, California – September 21, 2015 – The need to publish www.PennLawFumble.info, a review of Pennsylvania Child Protection Services law, arose when Pennsylvania attorneys general purported to have authority to prosecute Jerry Sandusky on reports of alleged child abuse.

In 1990, the Pennsylvania legislature rejected the criminal adversarial system to resolve reports of sexual abuse of children by creating local administrative agencies capable of investigating reports of suspected child abuse "swiftly and competently."  See Act 1990-206

This legislative action was taken against a backdrop of a decade of sensationalized child sex abuse prosecutions, starting in the 1980s with the McMartin Preschool abuse case. Linder, Doug. (2003). The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: A Commentary and other reviews included in the resource collection on the website.

Those failed prosecutions were followed by courts recognizing numerous legal problems when prosecutors interview children alleging sexual abuse. Pennsylvania, in Commonwealth v. Delbridge, recognized that improper interview techniques by the prosecution such as suggestive questioning, vilification of the accused and interviewer bias may influence a child witness to such a degree that the proffered testimony may be irreparably compromised.

A year after the Delbridge decision, the Pennsylvania legislature clarified the role of their law enforcement agencies by the inserted language, "to the extent permitted by this chapter, to involve law enforcement agencies in responding to child abuse". See Act 1994-151

Those "permitted" statutory roles include (1) a mandate to report alleged child abuse to the Department of Public Welfare/CYS agencies for those agencies to conduct the confidential investigation, and (2) assuring the security and confidentiality of the administrative agency's investigations. The attorney general was given the specific task of conducting audits of the administrative agencies to assure that child abuse reports not supported by substantial evidence were expunged. The grand jury investigations and trial in the court of common pleas conducted by the office of attorney general and the Pennsylvania State Police were incompatible with their assigned duties.

In addition, PennLawFumble.info's review of the admissions contained in the post-trial publications of Silent No More by Aaron Fisher (A.F.), his mother and their psychologist and Report to the Attorney General on the Investigation of Gerald A. Sandusky (as amended, June 23, 2014) by H. Geoffrey Moulton, Special Deputy Attorney General lend support to a claim that Sandusky was "framed."

To view the website visit www.pennlawfumble.info.

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