Sandusky's Lawyer To Anderson Cooper: 'I Promised The Jury Jerry Would Testify'

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'Tomorrow I gather my wits and we start thinking about sentencing,' attorney Joe Mendiola told Anderson Cooper last night in his first interview after the jury announced a verdict 43 times finding Jerry Sandusky guilty of child sex abuse. The attorney argued he saw a path in the appeals process to get Sandusky out, and that he had 'promised' Sandusky would testify and had to rescind that because of Sandusky's son's declaration that he too had been abused.

RELATED: Jerry Sandusky Found Guilty On 45 Of 48 Counts

'If you win on one of the appeal issues, everything probably falls,' Amendola told Cooper, arguing that no matter how many charges Sandusky has against him, one legal foible can cost the court the entire decision. Amendola reiterated that he did not want a plea deal, nor did Sandusky ever claim anything but innocence or consider anything but a trial. 'For better or worse,' he continued, 'none of us were there when any of these things happened.'

Amendola then attacked the Commonwealth of Virginia for bringing in 'literally at the last moment' Matt Sandusky, the adopted son that claimed abusy himself this week. 'At that point, I objected to the surprise and explained to the judge' we had always intended to testify, and it tremendously undercut our defense.' He called it a 'really bad situation' for him to cancel Sandusky's plan to testify because he 'promised the jury' he would, but it would have been 'absolutely catastrophic' to have Sandusky's testimony followed up with his son. He did say he had 'all the other five siblings as well as Dottie [Sandusky, his wife] prepared to testify to rebut what Matt had said,' but he didn't seem confident that that would have changed things.

The interview via CNN below:



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• Remember this clown?

  This is the lawyer who, as a FORTY-NINE YEAR OLD, got a 17 year old girl pregnant in an out of wedlock affair, then married her. This is the lawyer who thought it was a SWELL idea to accompany his client onto a national TV network and submit to an impromptu public interview by certainly the sharpest and arguably the smartest sports journalist in the country in Bob Costas, during which his client not just arguably and but strictly technically CONFESSED to sexually abusing children, and moreover showed himself to be both a deeply creepy person and a disastrously bad witness.

  So ' for months Matt Sandusky tells the police, and the prosecution, for YEARS Matt Sandusky leads everyone in the community to believe that, there is absolutely nothing going on between his (adopted) dad and him, never has, OTHER than he loves his (adopted) dad no different than if he was a real dad. Then, after having listened to and been SO MOVED by the testimony of betrayed, abused former young boys and their suspicious, quite understandably now deeply embittered parents, Matt finally confronts the fact his own abuse, with which he has no doubt lived in horrible denial for all these years, whereupon the scales of denial drop from his eyes, to be replaced by the scales of justice ' and somehow this is the COMMONWEALTH'S FAULT?

  THIS is a get-out-of-jail-free card? This is his killer, no-brainer winning legal grounds of appeal?

  Here's my prediction on this ridiculous piece of 'ground' Mendiola claims he's going to try to stand on: The very moment he raises it before even one single appeal court judge, ANY appeal court judge, anywhere in the country, especially in Pennsyltucky, no matter what that judge's political identification or ideological bent, the instantaneous millisecond that judge hears this 'ground', a tsunami of bile is going to rise in the back that judge's throat, so fast and furious and hard that it'll spill out and fill the courtroom and drown Mendiola in a dinghy of his own absurd hubris, weighed down by the massively leaden effect of his own utterly oblivious denial.And as for backing this up: forget any crummy 'have you got ten thousand dollars' bully bet ' I'll take on all comers, from anywhere, for any amount. It is impossible, utterly impossible, for Mendiola's client to ever go free again. Im. po. si. ble.