Penn St. ordered to pay court fees for ex coach (Re: Sandusky)

I'll raise you one and hope we win by 41. Just because fuck PSU.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

I think the issue is you need to make a distinction between "not doing the right thing" and "actively doing the wrong thing." Sure, McQuery didn't do the #1 right thing in the situation (stop the rape in progress) or the #2 right thing (call the cops himself). But he did the #3 right thing (tell his superior). They then did some seriously wrong things. Since then, he had been suspended/fired, threatened, dragged through the mud and otherwise smeared, and no doubt blacklisted from coaching ranks. He gets death threats, and probably will forever. That's worth millions from people he trusted to do the right thing, who instead stabbed him in the back.

McQuery said he thought he saw some weird shit going on but wasn't sure. So he told Paterno and that was it. As. As as I feel for the victims, I think McQuery did the right thing and now he's been punished as a coach for it.