A federal magistrate judge has overturned the 2017 child endangerment conviction of former Penn State President Graham Spanier.

The ruling from U.S. Magistrate Judge Karoline Mehalchick was issued on the eve of the date that Spanier was scheduled to report to Centre County Correctional Facility near Bellefonte to begin serving a two-month prison term.

That is not going to happen now.

Mehalchick found prosecutors in the case, as well as trial court judge John Boccabella, incorrectly applied an expanded version of the state’s child endangerment statute from 2007 to the circumstances of Spanier’s case, which dated to a sexual abuse allegation that reached the then-president’s desk in 2001.

“in sum,” the judge wrote, “the conviction in this matter was based on a criminal statute that did not go into effect until six years after the conduct in question, and is therefore in violation of Spanier’s federal constitutional rights.”

With the conviction and sentence vacated, Spanier will not have to report to prison.

By any definition this is a tremendous win for the longtime Penn State president who was forced by trustees to give up his office under pressure in November 2011 after the arrest of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of serial child sexual abuse.

Mehalchick’s ruling reversed earlier decisions at the county court and Pennsylvania Superior Court levels, and earlier this year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had opted not to hear Spanier’s appeal.

Spanier’s attorneys declined comment on the ruling when reached Tuesday evening, and a call placed to Spanier’s State College residence was not answered.

But other supporters of the former president - many of whom believed Spanier’s actions as an executive with a bad situation, if not perfect in hindsight, had been unfairly criminalized - were overjoyed.

“For the first time in seven-and-a-half years, I feel good,” said Anthony Lubrano, a former alumni-elected trustee who became the unofficial leader of Penn State friends and alumni who felt Spanier, his senior managers and even former head football coach Joe Paterno were wrongly villified in the media firestorm sparked by Sandusky’s arrest.

“This decision by a federal judge at least temporarily restores my faith in the judicial system, and I think that justice has finally been served,” said Lubrano, who left the university’s board after two terms in 2018.

“I hope that the Attorney General has enough good sense to not further waste taxpayer dollars by chasing down a rabbit hole for political gain, a prosecution that should never have been brought in the first place,” Lubrano added.

William Oldsey, another of the knot of alumni trustees on the Penn State board who have remained in Spanier’s corner over the years, called the news "spectacular...

"Graham is a personal friend of mine. I have always been a great admirer of his. He was a wonderful president for Penn State, and I am very pleased with this ruling,” Oldsey said.

Reactions were just as sharp from advocates for victims rights, who have used the Sandusky case as a platform to advance the state’s fight against child sexual abuse.

This is a disgusting miscarriage of justice, this criminal never spent one day behind bars proving that skin color and wealth dictate who is held accountible. This is unconscionable. #spanier https://t.co/5QNrCWjIMx — Jennifer Storm (@JenniferRStorm) May 1, 2019

The state Attorney General’s office does have the right, under Mehalchick’s order, to retry the criminal case, but it was not immediately clear if it will.

“We’ve received the court’s opinion and are reviewing it,” said Joe Grace, spokesman for Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

But the ramifications of Tuesday’s ruling could spool out far beyond the present criminal case.

Spanier could now conceivably resurrect a civil defamation lawsuit against former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who led the Penn State trustees’ probe into the university’s role in and responsibility for Sandusky’s predations.

It was Freeh, in tandem with state investigators, who established the narrative that Spanier and his top lieutenants at Penn State turned a blind eye to suspicions that they had a child sex predator on their hands who they collectively failed to stop.

The civil case was suspended upon Spanier’s conviction, though the judge overseeing it noted that Spanier would have the right to refile it if his criminal conviction was overturned.

It could also embolden the Penn State alums who have never abandoned Spanier to make new attempts to have trustees formally repudiate the Freeh Report’s findings, or to formally apologize to the Paterno family for the legendary coach’s abrupt and unceremonious firing.

A Penn State spokesman reached Tuesday night said the university’s lawyers were reviewing Mehalchick’s ruling, and would have no comment tonight.

The back story.

Prosecutors’ attention turned to Spanier and other Penn State officials after they learned of a February 2001 incident between Sandusky and an unidentified boy in a Penn State locker room that was reported first to Joe Paterno, and then to Spanier and his top managers.

Spanier, who has been living in a kind of post-presidency purgatory since his resignation, has steadfastly maintained he never understood the complaint reported by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary to have risen to the level of a criminal act or child abuse.

Emails discovered during the course of the Sandusky investigation, however, showed Spanier, then-Athletic Director Tim Curley and then-senior vice president Gary Schultz jointly reversed course on an initial plan to report the incident to child welfare officials and instead agreed to handle the Sandusky complaint in-house.

In the email thread, Spanier told the other two administrators that the “only downside” to keeping the complaint in-house was if Sandusky did not respond properly “and then we become vulnerable for not having reported it."

That choice, prosecutors have alleged, helped give Sandusky the freedom to prey on four more boys before a complaint in neighboring Clinton County surfaced in 2008.

The problem with the case, Spanier’s attorneys have held for years, is that the child endangerment statute Spanier was charged with was explicitly expanded to include employers of persons who had harmed children in 2007 - six years after the McQueary report.

In arguments before Mehalchick last week, Spanier’s lawyers argued the state courts’, in letting the conviction stand, permitted a violation of Spanier’s rights to not have his behavior subjected to laws that were imposed after the fact.

Prosecutors argued the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in an unrelated 2015 case broadened the interpretation of the original child endangerment law to note that someone can be supervising “the welfare of children” even if they don’t interact with kids in their day-to-day duties.

That means, to the prosecution, that the child endangerment law as it stood in 2001 already encompassed that conduct that the 2007 amendment spells out.

Mehalchick disagreed.

Among other things, she noted, the 2007 changes came after a highly-publicized grand jury report on abuse of children by priests in Philadelphia area churches. That report concluded, in part, that the law as it stood could not sustain charges against those who supervised the problem priests.

Sandusky, the longtime defensive coordinator for the late and legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, was convicted in June 2012 of the serial sexual abuse of 10 boys he came to know through his now-defunct Second Mile youth charity.

Spanier, Curley and Schultz were charged later that year with - in addition to the child endangerment counts that went to trial - far more serious obstruction and perjury accounts stemming from allegations that they withheld information from investigators during the course of the Sandusky probe.

The obstruction and perjury counts were dismissed pre-trial over complaints about how the grand jury process was used.

With Mehalchick’s ruling in the books, Spanier - who remains on Penn State’s payroll today as a faculty member without assignment - has accomplished his goal of clearing his name of any criminal responsibility for Sandusky’s acts.

“The result is just common sense,” said Al Lord, another of the former alumni-elected trustees who has long championed his friend Spanier’s cause.

“But my reaction is I’m over the moon because I was thinking Graham was going to jail tomorrow,” Lord continued. “This is the right answer. It just took a long time to get there.”