Judge Skerda Said She Had No Jurisdiction

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WARREN COUNTY, Pa. — In Part 1 of this series, we reported that Senior Judge Maureen Skerda dismissed Jerry Sandusky’s PCRA petition on February 27, 2026, without issuing the Rule 907 notice that Pennsylvania law requires before a petition can be dismissed without a hearing. That violation alone will likely result in a remand — and a delay of one to two years before any court hears the merits.

The Rule 907 violation is not the only issue with Skerda’s eleven-page order. The substance of the ruling is as lawless as the procedure.

She Declared It Untimely — Then Ruled on the Merits Anyway

Ethically-challenged Judge Skerda ruled the petition was filed too late. She set the deadline at 2022. The defense filed in 2026. That gave her the excuse to refuse to hear it.

Having declared she lacked jurisdiction, she then spent seven pages ruling on every claim substantively. A judge who believes she has no jurisdiction does not write seven pages of merits analysis. She does so because she wants to foreclose the arguments on both procedural and substantive grounds simultaneously — so that if the Superior Court disagrees on timeliness, her merits rulings are already in the record.

It is a form of sandbagging. She built a fallback position into a ruling premised on the claim that she had no authority to rule.

She Dismissed a Recantation She Never Heard

Ryan Rittmeyer — identified in the ruling as “R.R.” and known at trial as Victim 10 — signed an affidavit under penalty of perjury on June 30, 2025. He stated that his trial testimony was shaped by prosecutors’ influences rather than personal experience. He described six-hour preparation sessions in which prosecutors asked him to reframe his account until it aligned with what they wanted. He said he was told a civil settlement would enrich him.

For once, the prosecutors, Frank Fina and the late Joseph McGettigan, did not lie. Rittmeyer received $5.5 million.

Skerda ruled that the defense failed to exercise due diligence because Rittmeyer “was involved after the criminal trial with civil litigation which resulted in a substantial settlement in this matter.” Her reasoning: because Rittmeyer had received money, the defense should have obtained his recantation sooner.

This is the absurdity that is Maureen Skerda, one of the most incompetent and dishonest judges on the bench.

The defense cannot compel a witness to recant. Rittmeyer recanted when Rittmeyer was ready to recant. Skerda’s ruling treats a witness’s moral decision as a failure of the defense’s legal diligence.

Second, she wrote that “the result of the trial was based on overwhelming evidence and thus the newly discovered evidence would most likely not change the outcome of the trial.”

She made that determination without hearing from Rittmeyer. Without hearing from his wife. She evaluated the weight of testimony she refused to receive, assessed the credibility of a witness she declined to see, and concluded it would not matter.

She ruled his testimony would not have changed the verdict. She never heard his testimony.