They Should Have Done More

Joe Paterno said it back in 2011.

Tim Curley said it at Graham Spanier’s trial last week.

Telling Jerry Sandusky not to bring kids to campus anymore wasn’t enough. Telling him to seek counseling wasn’t enough. Telling the guy who ran Sandusky’s charity wasn’t enough.

Not after what Mike McQueary saw in the showers in 2001. Not after an investigation of a similar incident went nowhere in 1998.

Paterno, Spanier, Curley and Gary Schultz should have done more.

Spanier’s lawyer, Sam Silver, tried to argue that the state presented no evidence that the former Penn State president knew Sandusky was sexually assaulting children.

But Spanier didn’t need to know. No one has suggested that it was the president’s – or the vice president’s or the athletic director’s or the head coach’s — responsibility to investigate McQueary’s allegations and determine if there was any substance to them. That was the Department of Public Welfare’s responsibility. The Penn State administrators’ responsibility was simply to report the allegations to the DPW.

Even if they thought it was “horseplay?”

So much has been made of the discrepancy between what McQueary says he told Paterno, Curley and Schultz, and what they say they heard. McQueary says he conveyed that what he saw was sexual. Paterno, Curley and Schultz understood him to have been describing “horseplay.”

(Isn’t it interesting that when we humans want to make suspect behavior sound benign, we move it into the animal kingdom? A naked Sandusky, showering alone with and making physical contact with a naked boy, was “horsing around” in 2001. A naked Sandusky gave a naked kid a “bear hug” in the shower in 1998.)

McQueary testified last week that he never in his life used the word “horseplay.” That rang entirely true to me. The term is kind of archaic – a word I can easily imagine my dad having used but that I’d be surprised to hear my son use.

For this reason, “horseplay” sounds more like his elders’ interpretation of McQueary’s words than like anything the former quarterback, age 27 in 2001, actually said. Ultimately, though, the parsing of McQueary’s description of that scene in the shower was off the point. Whatever words he used, he must have gotten the point across that something inappropriate was going on.

Why else would Paterno have told Curley?

If Sandusky’s actions sounded as innocent as the word “horseplay” suggests, why would Curley, Schultz and Spanier tell him not to bring kids to campus anymore?

Why would they tell him to seek counseling?

Why would they alert Jack Raykovitz at the Second Mile?

Giving Sandusky the benefit of the doubt might have been justifiable if this was the first time anyone had brought forward a concern about Sandusky showering with a kid. But we know it was the second time. And it’s disingenuous to say that the dead-end investigation of the earlier incident should be discounted, because finding insufficient evidence that a crime has been committed is not the same as saying that the allegations were groundless.

In short, Curley, Schultz and Spanier should have done more. Should they now go to prison for not having done enough?

Their friends insist these are good men. They probably are. They’re good men who made a dreadful mistake (and who among us, if we’re honest, can say with certainty that he would not have made the same mistake — out of cowardice, out of wishful thinking, out of a misplaced and misguided sense of compassion?).

We send plenty of people to jail for less.

At the same time, the more I think about our bloated penal system, the more I think that we should only lock up violent offenders and find some other way to punish everyone else. (It wouldn’t break my heart to see Spanier cough up a chunk of the $3 million he’s been paid by the university since he stepped down as president.)

The problem with applying the logic of no-incarceration for nonviolent crimes to these well-paid white guys is that the logic is so rarely applied to poor black guys. Letting the former president and his men off with fines and probation would look too much like unequal justice.

But however the sentencing plays out, we should at least be able to agree, at long last, that some of the responsibility for the crimes of Jerry Sandusky lies at the feet of these three “good” men who are now guilty of child endangerment in the eyes of the law.

That is the story of the outcomes of the cases against Curley, Schultz and Spanier and not, as the director of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship spin-doctored the split verdict at Spanier’s trial, “that there was no conspiracy to cover up child abuse at Penn State.”