The two Penn State administrators awaiting trial for failing to properly report suspected child abuse by Jerry Sandusky argue in a new court filing that the charge should be dismissed because the statute of limitations has expired.
 
Gary Schultz and Tim Curley filed a response this week to an effort by state prosecutors to keep the charge in place for trial, now scheduled to begin in a Harrisburg courtroom early next year.
 
The attorney general's office last month said the two men had a continuing duty to go to authorities after fielding a 2001 complaint by graduate assistant Mike McQueary about Sandusky in a shower with a young boy.
 
But lawyers for Schultz, a retired university vice president, and Curley, on paid leave as athletic director, said in the new filing that the state's interpretation would subject doctors, teachers and others to a lifelong obligation to report, and called the prosecutors' argument a "strained and last resort interpretation."
 
Under a 10-year statute of limitations, they said, the clock would have run out in early 2011, nearly a year before Curley, Schultz and Sandusky were charged.
 
Schultz and Curley also face a count of perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury in 2011.