Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/79325
Jumping to conclusions S ince the early days of the child abuse scandal that has changed Penn State forever, I have been appalled by the lack of due process and the frenzied rush to judgment. No one has been hurt more than the victims and their families, but thousands of others – including most Penn State graduates and many, many central Pennsylvania residents – who had absolutely no involvement with or knowledge of Jerry San- dusky's heinous crimes are being punished simply because of their loy- alty to their school or their associa- tion with it. All this is exemplified by the woefully deficient Freeh report and the draconian sanctions placed on the football team by a hypocriti- cal, sanctimonious and power-hun- gry NCAA leadership. This is not a defense of Joe Pater- no, Tim Curley, Gary Schultz, Gra- ham Spanier and others who are part of current criminal proceedings and continued investigations, or may be in the future. In that regard, I again stress the need to allow the judicial process to run its course before mak- ing final judgments on what those four did or did not do in this case. Nor is this a tirade against the bi- ased, agenda-driven portions of the media that are so convinced of their own infallibility that they have al- ready prejudged individuals and Penn State as an entity and have persuaded a majority of the public to do the same. We'll leave that dis- course for another time. My grievance here is with a special group of people connected to the Freeh report. First, there is the Penn State administration and board of trustees that hired Louis Freeh's con- sulting group at $6.5 million and meekly accepted without public chal- lenge the final report as factual and indisputably truthful. Second is Freeh himself, with his own baggage, his team of unidentified investigators and the hundreds of anonymous "witnesses" who were questioned in secret by the committee – none of whom gave sworn testimony under oath no matter what they said. Then there was Freeh's premature news conference, held only an hour after the report was released, giving none of the media proper time to read it all and fully analyze it. With Penn State's grossly apologetic and self-serving officials turning a defective report into gospel, Mark Emmert and the NCAA's 21-person executive committee and 18-person Division I board of directors pounced, and for their own reasons went be- yond the NCAA's own legal structure to destroy and humiliate the univer- sity as much as they could. We now know from Penn State president Rod- ney Erickson and legal counsel that the NCAA used strains of blackmail and extortion to be the judge, jury and executioner without any inde- pendent investigation whatsoever. Finally, there was the equally self- righteous and surprising attitude of Jim Delany and the Big Ten leaders who jumped on the overflowing Freeh- NCAA bandwagon with an additional threat of even more harsh punish- ment for the foreseeable future. It is beyond my comprehension how any fair-minded, unbiased and re- sponsible person, one who under- stands how the Freeh report devel- oped and has read it in detail, can accept the 267-page document as the ultimate truth. Even more inconceiv- able, many people within the media and the public have refused to read the report yet have attacked Penn State and anyone associated with the university – frequently in the most nasty and vitriolic language – for supposedly harboring a serial pe- dophile for years strictly to benefit the football program. Dozens of people, including many with solid legal backgrounds and many with no ties to Penn State, have dissected and analyzed the Freeh report in minute detail. Anyone truly interested in a countering view of the document can easily find many of those evaluations on the Internet. From what I have read of these analyses and from my own examina- tion of the report, there are two parts that are not being overly criticized, but are still open for clarification and additional concrete evidence. These are contained in chapters eight and 10 regarding requirements for report- ing child sex abuse and recommen- dations for the future protection of children at Penn State. But the rest of the report is loaded with inaccuracies, distortions, innu- endoes, misinformation, inconsisten- cies and arguable conclusions. It also is incomplete in many aspects, in- cluding the lack of personal inter- views with several people still entan- gled in formal criminal proceedings. And many of the key elements de- pend on seven handwritten notes and several selected e-mails and doc- uments out of 3.5 million that were turned over to the investigators. The most egregious and incendiary distortion of all is contained in the ini- tial findings on page 14 that allege a "total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims" and that "Four of the most powerful people at Penn State [Spanier, Schultz, Curley and Pater- no]... failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade. These men concealed Sandusky's activities from the Board of Trustees, the University community and authorities. They exhibited a striking lack of empathy for San- dusky's victims by failing to inquire as to their safety and well-being…" That charge is pure conjecture with- out legal factual proof and ignores the