Penn State Starts Settling Abuse Claims
BANFIELD: Welcome back to THE LEGAL VIEW, I'm Ashleigh Banfield. Penn State University has officially settled with one of the victims of Jerry Sandusky's abuse. It's supposedly in the millions of dollars, though no one is saying. According to the university's attorney, 25 more settlement are close to being finished. Sandusky is, of course, serving 30 to 60 years for sexually abusing numerous children. Joining me now is out legal team this morining, CNN legal analysts Mark NeJame and Paul Callan. Let me start with you, Mark. Welcome, by the way. It's nice to see you up here on the set and the new show.</s>MARK NEJAME, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Thank you.</s>BANFIELD: $60 million sounds like a lot of money. But when you have the number of victims that we're talking about in this case, A, is it enough money, and B, do they have to parse this out well in advance of getting into the discussions with each of these victims?</s>NEJAME: I think they estimated it, but you're right, it's really not enough if you think about the real abuse that got heaped on these young people. They've lost their childhood. How do you put a value on that? If in fact you take the number of purported victims, or victims who have come out, and you divide it by the 60, each is looking at a couple of million dollars.</s>BANFIELD: There's the question. That sounds like a logical way of doing it, but some people were affected by Jerry Sandusky's abuse before some of the authorities were supposed to have known about what happened, and some people were affected after, which, Paul, would make me think that their settlement might be higher because there is theoretically more blame on the university for not stopping the continuation of these acts. Is that true? Does it matter?</s>PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Sure. It's another way of saying it's a provable case in court. One of the big problems you have with the cases, the older the case gets, if the university wasn't on notice of this behavior, then it's hard to hold them liable. Now of course, the reports are that this settlement is with victim number five. And this went down supposedly after the famous shower scene when the university became aware that Sandusky had this problem. This was a strong liability case. I would imagine this is one of the stronger settlements that will be negotiated.</s>BANFIELD: What about wild cards? We don't even know, probably, the length of abuse and victims out there who've never came forward. But now knowing there might be money, how do you account for them?</s>NEJAME: You really don't. You just have to really put it out there. And I suspect that at some point there's going to be word out there that all claimants need to go ahead and have their claims put in or otherwise they do run the risk of losing it. But you know --</s>BANFIELD: You can do that?</s>NEJAME: Well, it depends if statutes of limitations have passed on all these or not. And we don't know about the exact abuse that took place with each of the allegations. You can have a sex abuse with a statute of limitation, or you can have some that are cap sex battery and they're not going to have any statue of limitation.</s>BANFIELD: Sounds like we'll be doing this story more and more. The criminal cases aren't even done yet either. Paul Callan and Mark NeJame, hold those fought for a moment if you will. Love you to stick around because we have a lot more legal discussion for the two of you coming up. Remember that plane crash at San Francisco airport, and the amazing pictures that came from the helmet cam of the firefighters on scene? We've got some of the pictures from the helmet cam, but now the chief says no more cameras like this. Why would the chief say that? Is it to protect her department, or is it to protect us, the public, because we also can be targeted with those helmet cams? Find out when we come back.