PHILADELPHIA — A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated the child-endangerment conviction of former Pennsylvania State University president Graham B. Spanier, ending a yearlong reprieve he received just hours before he was due to report to jail.
In a 34-page opinion, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit determined that a lower court had improperly dismissed the charges centered around Spanier's mishandling of a 2001 claim that former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused a boy.
It was not immediately clear when Spanier might now have to start serving a minimum two-month jail sentence he received upon his 2017 conviction on one misdemeanor count of child endangerment.
His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether they intended to appeal or whether they'd seek to postpone his jail sentence.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office tried the case, declared vindication.
"No one is above the law, especially when it comes to the welfare of children," he said in a statement. "Today's ruling to reinstate the conviction ... proves just that."
Previously, a U.S. magistrate judge in Harrisburg had overturned the conviction saying Spanier, 71, had been unfairly convicted under a law that was changed six years after the date his alleged crime took place.
Spanier's conviction was tied to his failure to adequately respond to the 2001 complaint from then-graduate student Mike McQueary, who has said he reported seeing Sandusky abusing a boy in a locker-room shower.
Though Spanier has maintained that what was described to him was nothing more than horseplay, the former university president and two top aides — former Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and ex-university vice president Gary Schultz — agreed to notify Sandusky's charity for at-risk youth and the source of many of the ex-football coach's victims, and to bar Sandusky from bringing boys onto campus.
But they did not report McQueary's account to authorities.
Spanier's lawyers argued at his trial that state law at the time required only "a parent, guardian or other person supervising the welfare of children" to report suspected abuse and that as a college president he did not fall under any of those categories.
The law was revised in 2007 also include people that "employ or supervise such a person," but in arguing for Spanier's conviction, prosecutors maintained revision did not actually change the law but only clarified a category of mandatory reporter that had been inherently included before.
Once ranked among the most well-respected, highest-paid, and longest-serving university presidents, Spanier was ousted from his post in the days after Sandusky's arrest in 2011. He has said he regrets not acting more forcefully at the time of the McQueary complaint.
Curley and Schultz both pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child endangerment charges and testified as government witnesses in Spanier's case. Both have since served jail terms and waived their appellate rights as part of their plea agreement with the government.
Sandusky is serving a 30- to 60-year sentence at a state prison.
