Though both are at home in the courtroom, observers said, their styles and approaches to winning are very different.
McGettigan, 63, is decidedly low key and prefers to do his talking in the courtroom. A Google search of his name Thursday turned up 4,650 stories that mentioned him. Amendola, on the other hand, has been grabbing headlines, often for the wrong reasons.
Many of the 17,000 stories that mentioned him focused on the attorney's baffling decision before the trial to let Sandusky do two media interviews that ended up being widely criticized as damaging. Earlier this week, Amendola compared the trial to the soap opera "All My Children."
There are plenty of news reports from the fall that dredged up the fact that Amendola, at about age 49, impregnated a 16-year-old client named Mary Iavasile in the mid-1990s. They married in 2003, had a second child and split up.
"Joe [McGettigan] is one of the finest prosecutors that I have ever met. He's a fair guy. Joe says something — it's a deal. In other words, there's no going back, there's no double talk," said Philadelphia attorney Jay S. Gottlieb, who has practiced law in the city for 48 years.
"Joe McGettigan is an absolutely competent trial attorney," veteran Philadelphia defense attorney Nino Tinari said. "I have deep respect for him in terms of his trial ability and also for him as a person."
Tinari called Amendola "competent" also, but said he had never tried a case against him.
Contact Mensah M. Dean at 215-568-8278 or deanm@phillynews.com
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