Some Initial Thoughts on the Outrageous Graham Spanier Indictments

While I am extremely busy right now with our "anniversary" video which we will be putting out next week, and Barry Bozeman is already out with some strong opinions about what transpired today with the charges against Graham Spanier, I wanted to share some quick random/initial thoughts of my own.

I have spoken extensively to Graham both before and after the indictments about these matters and have found him to be incredibly open, honest and credible. I strongly believe he will never be convicted of these allegations and is being persecuted because of a political agenda.

While rumors abounded that something could happen around November, the timing of the charges, just before an election, is beyond suspicious, especially since the does not appear to be any significant new "evidence" since the release of the highly suspect Freeh Report. It should be noted that some information was dressed up by AG Linda Kelly to seem like it was new (like the "secret Sandusky file" that Gary Schultz allegedly kept but which he himself turned over to the AG office when he realized they might be relevant) but really was not.

In short, these indictments have all of the same markings (suspicious timing, manipulation of testimony/evidence, false presumptions) of the original indictments almost a year ago. There is also similar evidence of prosecutorial intimidation as, much like they may have done with Mike McQueary, it appears very much that former PSU legal counsel Cynthia Baldwin was "convinced" to "flip" on those whom she led the into the lions den of the Sandusky grand jury. How ironic and maddening that Mike McQueary and Cynthia Baldwin, two of the people who may very well have been the most incompetent (or maybe even much worse) in this entire affair are the two people whom the AG office has protected the most.

The charges against Spanier appear to be the most absurd filed so far as, in many ways, they are inherently contradicted by the prosecution's own theory of the case. Since Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are presumed to have lied about all of this, why wouldn't they have also lied to Spanier? Forgetting for a moment why they would even have gone to Spanier in the first place, why would they, under the very worst interpretation of the facts, have told him the "truth"? Quite simply, If the prosecution is right about Curley and Schultz lying, then Spanier is guiltless and he certainly could never be convicted in a court of law.

By far the most bizarre moment of the the AG's press conference today was when Kelly claimed that PSU officials knew that Victim 6 was "assaulted" in their locker room by Sandusky and that they should somehow be held responsible for this. First of all, Victim 6 was not "assualted." Sandusky brushed up against him in a shower. Obviously this was highly inappropriate and, in retrospect was a moment when the monster could have been stopped, but it was not an "assualt." More importantly, Kelly seems to forget that several state law enforcement agencies decided that Sandusky had done nothing criminal and was not a pedophile!

Every school administrator in the country should be outraged and frightened by the insane precedent that was set today, but no one in academia  will have the guts to stand up and say that.

To be clear, Spanier is being charged with perjury and other offenses based largely on the notion that one person (Mike McQueary) who couldn't correctly remember  the month or year of the episode and with whom he didn't meet, contradicts his ten year old recollection of what he was told by two other people who back up his story. And, oh by the way, by the prosecution's own theory of the case,THERE IS NO ACTUAL VICTIM who has come forward to say that they were the child that Spanier, Curley and Schultz allegedly endangered!

This all smacks of desperation on the part of the outgoing Attorney General. She has to know her case is failing apart so now she is doubling down in an effort to poison the jury pool and put pressure (or at least blame) on the next Attorney General when the these cases inevitably are shown to be without legal merit. It is also clear from the comments of the head of the state police that these indictments are intended t cast blame on Penn State for the Sandusky investigation taking so long, something the governor, who began the investigation as AG, clearly has a self interest in doing.

The bottom line is that while in the short run this will harm the perception of our side of this debate (and will cause more unfair hardship on those wrongly accused), in the long run it may actually help the ultimate goal of finding the real truth of this matter. It is certainly not going to come from Linda Kelly.