Ex-Penn State President Graham Spanier should have his child endangerment conviction overturned, or at least be granted a new trial, because the jury that convicted him grossly misapplied the law, his lawyer contends.

Simply put, the jury was wrong to find that Spanier had a legal duty to protect the children who were molested by Jerry Sandusky, defense attorney Sam Silver argued in a

filed with Senior Judge John Boccabella on Monday.

can't be allowed to stand because he never supervised or had charge of the abused children and so cannot be held legally responsible for what happened to them on Penn State's campus, Silver contended.

He also insisted that the child endangerment charge, which was tied to a 2001 incident on a Penn State shower room, should never have gone to trial because it wasn't filed by the state attorney general's office until 2012, well beyond the two-year state of limitation for bringing child endangerment cases.

Silver placed blame on Boccabella as well, arguing the judge should not have reinstated a conspiracy charge against Spanier that the state Superior Court dismissed. Although Spanier was acquitted of the conspiracy count during his trial in March, the trial was tainted by the very presence of that charge, Silver said.

He argued that Boccabella didn't adequately instruct the jurors on the law before they started to deliberate, either.

Filing of Spanier's motion comes less than two weeks after Boccabella sentenced him to 2 to 12 months in prison, with the first two months to be served behind bars and the last two to be served under house arrest.

The lodging of the motion doesn't come as a surprise since Spanier had vowed to appeal. The motion's filing marks the first step in an appeals process that could spill into the state courts.

Spanier's child endangerment conviction stems from the jury's finding that he failed to notify police and child welfare authorities after learning that Mike McQueary had reported seeing Sandusky naked with a boy in a shower at Penn State's Lasch Building in February 2001.

Spanier's co-defendants, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and ex-Vice President Gary Schultz, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution during Spanier's trial. Boccabella also sentenced them to prison.

Silver devoted much of his 19-page motion to arguing that Spanier's child endangerment conviction lacks a legal foundation. He contended that prosecutors didn't prove Spanier either owed a legal duty to protect any child from harm or was tasked with supervising any of Sandusky's victims.

"The duty of care, protection or support...must exist in law and cannot be the duty owed by all citizens to one another or the duty a stranger may owe to a minor child," Silver wrote.

"No evidence was presented at trial that Dr. Spanier had any contact with minor children who were Sandusky's victims," he wrote. Nor, he said, was there evidence Spanier was responsible for handling reports of child-sex incidents on campus, or that he supervised the by-then-retired Sandusky.

"Dr. Spanier was not uniquely responsible for safeguarding the welfare of minor children on Penn State's campus," Silver wrote.