Penn St. ordered to pay court fees for ex coach (Re: Sandusky)
Per ESPN,
Penn St. will have to pay the 1.7 mill. in court fees that the ex assistant coach who blew the whistle on the Sandusky situation had racked up over his defamation lawsuit...which he also won.
http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/19046263/former-penn-st…
I don't like them. I hope we beat them by 40 this season instead of only 39.
Shit happens............
To a very deserving recipient.
Screw Penn State and all their fans that defend what happened there.
I will never change that sentiment.
be interested is seeing the Opinion accompanying this Order, if any. That is boat-load of attorney fees, and I would guess it is on top of an already very lucrative contingency fee. Interesting.
Here you go. Link to Opinion on McQueary Attorney Fees
It was a contingency fee (1/3), which is obviously ends up being much more than the lodestar amont would have been (hours worked x bill rate basically).
The opinion basically says:
- McQueary can't get a job, anywhere, and is viewed as a pariah in the community;
- He likely will have to live off the settlement for the rest of his life (unlike other whistleblowers who are usually just demoted or find a job elsewhere);
- There's a public interest in protecting whistleblowers, especially whisteblowers in the interest of protecting children against sexual predators;
- Given the unique nature of the case, the contingency fee structure was necessary;
- McQueary's grand jury testimony changed how PSU handled investigations, which is the exact type of thing the Whistleblower statute was designed to do.
Entirely possible PSU appeals, given it's a contigency fee finding rather than lodestar.
Serious question here. Did McQueary pay the $1.7 million lawyers fees out of pocket, or were his lawyers like "nah, no worries - we'll win this eventually" and float him balance? This is a dumb question, but I obviously have never used a trial lawyer. And $1.7 million is a steep bill.
EDIT: Previous poster contingency fee may have answered this question. Are all cases like this worked via contingency fees?
was almost certainly a contingency fee, which makes this Order somewhat unusual. I don't know of any statutory reason for it, and the settlement was already quite large. I guess if McQueery was able to prove that the attorneys for Penn State were acting in bad faith or engaging in unreasonable delay or other tactics, they could be hit with an Order for attorney fees as a sanction. But 1.7 mil is steep. That Judge was not a happy camper.
Thx. So lawyers probably got paid off contingency fee for original settlement, but this decree means lawyers get their fee from PSU instead of McQueary's pockets.
I also love that McQueary finally received the $15K bowl bonus. Another judicial middle finger shoved directly at PSU.
Fuck 'em. They should pay for his hot dog and coke at half time too.
No, definitely not all are. However, given the nature of the case it makes much more sense than in some other forms of litigation. You have a guy who has gone for 5 years without a job, how is he supposed to pay a bill? Especially when the nature of the claim is that PSU's actions basically caused him to not be able to get a job.
Paying the contingency fee is much higher than a normal attorney fee amount would have been (and the opinion says that) - it usually goes by what is called a "lodestar" approach which is hours worked (x) bill rate. In the opinion they note that the defendant calculated it at about $202k (although likely higher) if done via lodestar.
Here they say the unique nature of the case made that not appopriate, especially given that the plaintiff had no economic ability to fund the case.
http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/19041184/penn-state-nit…
Seriously though. WHAT THE F***?
I hope, so badly, that this stuff keeps happening until they have to shut down their athletic department.
Reminds me of an album I really like: Good News For People Who Love Bad News For Penn State.
I'm one of those people. Until that school actually comes clean, fuck 'em. Glad to hear they got tagged with legal fees, and I hope the bad news continues.
I would have made Sandusky pay upfront.
McQuery will get a total of $7.3M, even though he physically saw yet did not stop Sandusky while he was sexually abusing a little boy?
Is that correct or did I completely miss something?probably completely missed something, because the basis for your opinion of McQueery is exactly why he was suing Penn State. And it looks like the Judge agreed with him and then some.
IIRC, McQueary got slandered by PSU, claiming that his version of reporting the Sandusky rape he witnessed was false. So McQueary not only got the shame of not breaking things up but also his veracity questioned, all in the administration's efforts to maintain PSU's and rape-enabler Joe Paterno's reputation through the scandal.
McQueary did not act as he should as a decent human being during the shower incident. There's no question about that, and you'd hope people would have a better moral compass. It's really awful that he kept on walking when he suspected there was a rape in progress.
But unlike those ratfuckers Sandusky, Paterno, Schiano, and the rotten administration, McQueary owns that he did not act as he should. There is every sign that McQueary is remorseful, and as a believer in redemption, I think that puts him at a different level than the Paternos and their apologists.
So on one hand, it is a bit hard to accept that McQueary is getting a lot of money after such a stark moral failing. On the other hand, he's one of the few people in this scandal who seems to understand that PSU was enabling the rape of children in order to protect its sacred name.
Again, working from memory here.
Most all of us are working from memory here, because we don't want to visit the sickening stories that exposed this Agree, one would hope that he would have blown the whistle, literally, as in the moment he saw it blew the whistle all coaches wear around their neck while he was intervening and stopping Sandusky. But as you said, he was the only one who did the right thing, albeit twice removed
However, as others have stated, he is the pariah now and those who did nothing like th OSU coordinator has had two jobs now while he'll never coach again in any capacity. It should not be that way. It's rather hyocritical I think that all programs point to PSU as "the school that enabled a molestor for years" but refuse to hire the guy that broke the story. I have no problem with his payout. He was afraid to do the first two things, but at least he did tell the one guy who should have had no problem stopping it and reporting it both
You probably should go back and find out what McQueary actually did to break up the assault he witnessed before you continue to spread the lie that he didn't do anything. He didn't do as much as we would hope we would do in such a situation, but he did stop the assault.
That what is happening at MSU will be as bad as Penn State. What we already know about the gymnastics program is absolutely sickening and it has spread to the US Gymnastics program.