cw said:
Schultz was the top man at that university for the police and human resources. That is a known fact.
Yes, that's 100% true. It is known and established that Shultz was the civilian administrator responsible for a campus police force that has 3 detectives for a campus of 80,000.
If you really believe that that is the appropriate person to report to when someone tells you about a rape they witnessed then we're simply going to be at irreconciliable differences when it comes to this case.
cw said:
If that is the case, maybe Paterno made an error in judgement assuming the police had been informed because he spoke with the most senior man aside from the university president who oversaw the university cops. And Paterno's boss also knew about the allegation and also concluded it was the way it should go.
No, I'm sorry. I don't care who was in the room and what their motivations were, there is a moral responsibility on the part of everyone there to say "Wow, this is just about as serious as crime gets, we need to report this to the police right now".
Now, I don't know what experience you have with campus police but as someone who attended a large, fairly isolated university with a campus police force it wouldn't have been my instinct to involve them or a university official who oversaw them initially when dealing with a crime like this in a million years. They broke up parties and busted pot smokers. I'd have called the actual police without a second thought.
cw said:
If one reports a crime to the cops, as I have, how often do the police give you the gory details of their investigation? The response I've received is a rather terse "we're investigating" etc. And it's their call and the prosecutor's call if something will go beyond that dependent on the evidence they're able to gather about the crime. It is not Joe Paterno's call nor mine. There are lots of crimes committed without a charge being laid because the police cannot come up with a case that they can convict with. It happens a lot in sex crimes as many of us know.
This may one of those cases where personal experiences differ and lead us to have different perspectives. When I was in University I witnessed a car accident. I gave a statement to the police. The driver at fault contested her responsibility and so the London police sent an officer to my off-campus house and, discovering I'd graduated and left town, tracked me down in Toronto with phone calls to both my parent's place, which is the number the University had for me, and then got my new number from my parents and got me to agree to come up to testify.
Now, maybe it's a sad reflection on the differing levels of the competency and professionalism of the London police and those down south but I can't help but feel that a man in Paterno's position should really have known that when allegations of the rape of a child took place and an investigation was launched that someone, at some point, would have spoken to him about it. If not, I think asking McQueary something along the lines of "Hey, you remember that time you came into my office and accused my former good friend and colleague of raping a child, anything ever come of that?" is the barest minimum of responsibility that Paterno had.
cw said:
And then there's this legal consideration which the media has completely and conveniently ignored:
Former Penn State RB Austin Scott files suit over 2007 rape arrest
(Penn State won that case but that doesn't mean they automatically win every case - there have been plenty who were successfully sued when the charges didn't stick)
With all due respect, that kind of undercuts the argument you're trying to make here. Who is Scott suing in that case? It's not anyone who went to the police. It's not Minder who made the false allegations. It's the police. The police have a responsibility to invest these allegations and be responsible about bringing charges.
That in no way absolves Paterno or any university official of their moral responsibility to bring those matters to the attention of the police. That lawsuit in no way establishes that the university would be at risk for involving the police. Yes, it
could establish that the police can't charge people with no evidence if they'd lost but if Paterno or whoever had gone to the police and the Police had not charged anyone because they couldn't find the evidence, Paterno would have done just about all he could reasonably be expected to. That didn't happen.
cw said:
If you make allegations, you'd better be able to back them up. If they were to paint Sandusky as a sexual child abuser and couldn't prove their case, there's no doubt the lawyers for the university or the witness would express the significant and potential liability and rightfully so - that's part of their duty. But it's convenient to forget about all that with benefit of 20/20 hindsight and a bigger set of facts known now involving 7 other victims - apparently unknown to Paterno at the time.
Whether you like it or not, the law works both ways here as in my opinion, it should so that folks have recourse when wrongfully accused - and we see a ton of it in divorce cases.
There is no legal precedent, that I know of, that says in any way that someone is personally liable if they report something false to the police provided they do so in good faith.
cw said:
So one witness account very probably was legally evaluated as not being enough - because it rarely is. To date, they still don't have a winnable case for this incident because that's all they have. Like their efforts in 1998, the guys accused of perjury may have concluded with the university lawyers and maybe an off the record police investigation that they couldn't put a case together. And one, who Paterno may have perceived as representing the university cops, may well have told Paterno that. Again, at this point in time. we simply don't know. Again, that is not an implausible scenario because it happens a lot in these types of cases.
This just stretches credibility beyond belief. When someone tells you of a crime, which you have reasons to believe could be true, you're saying that you think that people should, what, independently investigate to decide if there's enough evidence for the police to bring charges so that when they notify the police any sort of possible misconduct by the police won't reflect poorly on them or the institution they work for?
You're saying one witness account of rape isn't "enough" to tell that witness to tell the police what he saw and let
them decide if it should proceed further? Paterno's response to one of his employees telling him about a rape he witnessed should be "Well, let me run it up the flagpole and see if the campus cops should get involved"?
cw said:
And so no, I do not have enough to conclude that Paterno was morally irresponsible here. He did what he was supposed to do legally. And he may have done what he thought was right morally or he may have been misled by those accused of perjury to believe he had done what was morally right. As I've said before, it's possible he was morally irresponsible but I won't concede that it's conclusive he was morally irresponsible based upon the facts known to date. To do so at this point is a rush to judgment in my opinion.
cw, I like you and respect you and maybe this is just where we should part ways on discussing this but if you honestly believe that if someone you know and, presumably trust being as they're a subordinate you've hired and can fire, reports a rape to you that you wouldn't advise them to tell the police and ensure that the judgment of actual police officers determines whether or not charges are brought then it's hard for me to think you're taking this matter seriously enough.
If you don't see what Saturday's game could have meant for the University if they hadn't made a change immediately and how that justified their actions, I mean, there's just a chasm we can't bridge here. The reality is that what the Board of Trustees did yesterday justifiably is what Paterno did egregiously and incorrectly in 2002. They put the University's interests first.
