Notes revealed in Freeh report on Penn State sex-abuse scandal show quick decision to avoid scrutiny
by MCT Information Services, bostonherald.comJuly 15th 2012
PHILADELPHIA — Three days after Mike McQueary saw Jerry Sandusky molesting a boy in a shower in 2001, two top administrators at Pennsylvania State University had begun to craft a plan:
They would not notify authorities.
This apparent rush to judgment was made clear in a set of handwritten notes made public last week by the investigative team led by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
The Penn State officials, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz, came up with this approach before anyone — other than football coach Joe Paterno — had talked to McQueary about what he had seen.
The decision not to contact authorities was made final two weeks later in a flurry of e-mails among Curley, Schultz and then-university president Graham B. Spanier. The earlier notes revealed in the Freeh report show just how quickly Penn State officials floated the prospect of avoiding official scrutiny.
Investigators did not find the handwritten notes until May, months after one of the worst scandals in the history of college athletics had enveloped the campus and after prosecutors had charged Curley and Schultz with lying to a grand jury and failing to report child sex abuse.
The notes join a growing stack of documentary evidence, including e-mails and other long-hidden files, that seems sure to transform the prosecution of Schultz and Curley from a war of words with McQueary, an assistant football coach, into a rare perjury case with a documented paper trail.
The fresh documents also threaten to ensnare former university president Spanier, who has become a focus of intensive grand jury scrutiny.
"The hardest thing to disprove in a criminal case are words out of a defendant's own mouth or own typewriter," said Gilbert Scutti, a former federal prosecutor in Philadelphia now working as a defense lawyer.
How had Freeh's investigators unearthed the new documents? In a news conference after he released his highly critical report on the Penn State sex-abuse scandal, he would not address this. But he described the e-mails and other material as "the most important pieces of evidence" in his investigation.
"They're very critical notes," he said. "It was an active case of trying to conceal evidence."
The key handwritten document was dated Feb. 12, 2001, by Schultz, only three days after the locker-room assault, the Freeh report said.
In his memo, Schultz wrote that Penn State would not report the attack provided that Sandusky "confesses" to administrators.
Schultz wrote this down after he had talked over the issue with Curley, but before either had a chance to talk to McQueary — or to Sandusky.
On Feb. 25, 2001, Spanier signed off on that plan, calling it "humane" and "reasonable" in an e-mail also made public in the Freeh report.
Shared from Pocket
Victor Cuvo, Attorney at Law
No comments:
Post a Comment