Patricia: 22-year-old aggravated sexual assault indictment

Wood: Lions followed law with Patricia hiring

http://www.theredzone.org/Blog-Description/EntryId/70031/Wood–Lions-followed-law-with-Patricia-hiring

Detroit Lions team president Rod Wood said Saturday that his team followed the law when it came to how it approached the hiring process for first-year head coach Matt Patricia earlier this year, even if they didn’t uncover a 22-year-old aggravated sexual assault indictment that has since come to light, Michael Rothstein of ESPN reports.

“We always err on the side of hiring a firm who understands all the laws, follows them, state and federal,” Wood told ESPN on Saturday, “so that we don’t happen upon something that we’re not entitled to have nor would we be able to use.”

In this case, it meant following both federal law and the state laws of Massachusetts and Michigan. The Fair Credit Reporting Act does not allow felony arrests that did not result in convictions beyond seven years old to be considered in possible employment, so most search firms do not include that information on the background checks they provide to employers — and that includes the Lions.

This is all in response to a 1996 aggravated sexual assault indictment following an alleged assault in South Padre Island, Texas, on spring break, when Patricia was a 21-year-old student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The indictment was brought by the grand jury, but Patricia never stood trial, and the case was dismissed in January 1997, when the woman who made the accusation declined to testify.

On Thursday, Patricia maintained he believes he did nothing wrong. He declined during the news conference to go into the specifics of that evening.

“I was innocent then, and I am innocent now,” Patricia said. “I was falsely accused of something that I did not do.”