Prosecutor

The prosecutor who sent Jerry Sandusky to jail is leaving the Attorney General's Office to enter private practice. Joe McGettigan will join the McAndrews Law Offices in Berwyn, working mainly in cases involving crime victims in organizational settings such as youth or religious groups, and in suits involving the abuse or bullying of children, the disabled, or the elderly, the firm announced Monday. Sandusky was convicted in June of molesting 10 boys on or near the Pennsylvania State University campus, where he was an assistant football coach.

Chester County District Attorney Thomas Hogan has promoted four longtime staffers to newly created deputy district attorney positions. One of the appointees, Michelle Frei, was part of the prosecution team that recently won the first-degree murder conviction of Laquanta Chapman in the slaying of a high school student. Frei is a Gettysburg College and Villanova Law School graduate and a 12-year veteran of the office. She heads domestic-violence prosecutions. The others are Mark Conte, a Millersville University and Widener Law School graduate, who has been a prosecutor for 13 years and is assigned to the courtroom of President Judge James P. MacElree II; Renee Merion, a 19-year veteran who heads the juvenile unit; and Thomas Ost-Prisco, a prosecutor for the last 15 years, who is in charge of arson and explosives investigations.

HARRISBURG - They were known as "random source" dog dealers. They bought their animals by the hundreds from shady individuals known as "bunchers," who collect dogs from auctions, shelters, the street, theft, and "free to good home" pet ads. Then, prosecutors say, the dealers sold the dogs to some of the nation's leading medical institutions. Floyd and Susan Martin of Shippensburg were part of a federally sanctioned yet controversial method of procuring animals for medical research, known as Class B or "random source" dog dealers.

HARRISBURG - A special prosecutor will examine whether secrecy rules were violated in proceedings by the grand jury that investigated Jerry Sandusky and three former Pennsylvania State University administrators facing criminal charges. Lawyer James M. Reeder was given six months to look into the matter and issue a report to state officials, according to a Feb. 8 order from Judge Barry Feudale first reported Wednesday. The order relates to a grand jury that issued reports in 2011 and 2012 that led to molestation charges against Sandusky and perjury charges against former Penn State president Graham B. Spanier, former athletic director Tim Curley, and retired vice president Gary Schultz.

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused a Texas federal prosecutor Monday of tapping into a "deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice" in his questioning of a black man facing a drug charge. The justices did not accept Bongani Charles Calhoun's request that the court review his conviction, but Sotomayor appended a scathing statement to make sure that the court's denial was not be seen as a signal of "tolerance of a federal prosecutor's racially charged remark. " Sotomayor did not name Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Ponder in her statement, but she denounced his questioning of Calhoun, who maintained in court that he did not know that the friends with whom he was traveling were planning a drug deal.

Prosecutors want a judge to keep reputed Philadelphia mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi in jail pending a retrial, arguing that the mixed verdicts this month against him and others only bolstered their claims about the crime family and its leaders. Brushing aside the jury's acquittals on 46 counts and deadlock on 11 others, the trial team from the U.S. Attorney's Office noted that 10 of the original 15 defendants in the case had pleaded to or been found guilty of felonies, and that the evidence that led to the convictions showed the mob and its leaders ran bookmaking, loan-sharking, and other rackets.

Prosecutors want a judge to keep reputed Philadelphia mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi in jail pending a retrial, arguing that the mixed verdicts this month against him and others only bolster their claims about the crime family and its leaders. Brushing aside the jury's acquittals on 46 counts and deadlock on 11 others, the trial team from the U.S. Attorney's Office noted that 10 of the original 15 defendants in the case have pleaded to or been found guilty of felonies. And that the evidence that led to the convictions showed the mob and its leaders ran bookmaking, loan-sharking, and other rackets.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Mike Folmer (R., Lebanon), whose district sprawls like a run-over turtle from western Chester County to suburban Harrisburg, and a handful of colleagues from both parties are pushing a plan to hire a special prosecutor to investigate how the state's capital city went broke selling bonds that enriched Wall Street banks and investors, Philadelphia law firms and financial consultants, and hometown contractors at taxpayers' expense....

  HARRISBURG - Though his job will be to work as quietly as possible behind the scenes, former Philadelphia federal prosecutor H. Geoffrey Moulton Jr. could become the most closely watched person in Harrisburg this year. And those who know him say Moulton is well-suited to the tricky task at hand. Last week, the state's new attorney general, Democrat Kathleen Kane, tapped him to reexamine, step by step, how investigators for a previous attorney general - Republican Tom Corbett - went after child molester Jerry Sandusky.

AS THE TWO teens accused of killing Autumn Pasquale sit in a juvenile detention center, a flurry of legal action has forced the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office off the case and pitted Autumn's mother against her father. In a news release issued Wednesday afternoon, a spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office said that it was "no longer possible" to handle the prosecution of the two accused Clayton teens because an attorney for Anthony Pasquale, Autumn's father, had filed notice of a potential civil suit.