who cares if the costas interview comes in, jerry is going to take the stand! he'll do infinitely more damage to himself during cross-examination.

That is really ****ing creepy. Sandusky obv knew that he was caught by the old dog janitor and was creeping to see if anyone called the po-po.

Or, you know, early signs of dementia?

excited utterance! hearsay! exception!

Man, I'm so furious that camera aren't allowed in the courtroom. Lol Pennsylvania.

to further explain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_utterance

If they used this exception (again no news articles seem to say), teh fact that he was so worked up and they thought he was having a heart attack prob helped, not hurt.

drink!

not sure why people with brains are still debating this. everybody knew. if you're arguing as a lawyer, fine, but in reality... everybody knew. and the coaches knew enough to choose to stay out of the shower when he was in there or make a lot of noise before stepping in. jfc. how can you debate this?

holliday's other post was even better, fully illustrating the extent of the coverup. unless the coaches were clueless to the goings-on, politics and other nonsense native to major college football at a big state university (and they weren't), they knew. they should all go to jail.

Because the evidence and testimony provided to us does not directly lead to the conclusion you are claiming it does. It doesn't mean you are wrong, just that based solely on the snippet I quoted of Victim 1's testimony earlier on ITT it's a stretch to get there.

I think the main difference is that I don't care what "everybody knew" I only care about what is presented at trial, because it is ultimately the only thing that matters in whether or not Sandusky spends the term of his natural life in prison.

At the end of World War II, when allied soldiers liberated the Nazi death camps, German citizens living in neighborhoods adjacent to the camps insisted that they had no idea what was going on inside the camps. They saw trains arriving daily full of people. They saw (and smelled) the thick smoke coming out of the crematoriums, but they had "no idea" what was going on inside the camps. General Eisenhower was so incensed over this attitude that he ordered these people to form in lines, single file, and walk through the camps being forced to witness the dead bodies piled up like kindling. (There are actual newsreel clips of these forced processions through the death camps. You can probably find them on YouTube.)

What happened in those death camps (and the "We didn't know!" reaction of the German people) are not equivalent to the crimes of Jerry Sandusky and the coverup at Penn State, but the reaction of many Penn State partisans are eerily similar. Once a situation attains the proportions of a nightmare, people go into denial. The more horrible the situation, the more likely people are to try and ignore it. (This is an especially prevalent pattern among children growing up in a home with an alcoholic parent.) Denial is a psychological defense mechanism. That's why monsters like Sandusky are able to get away with their crimes - nobody wants to believe it. They go into willful denial.

A lot of truth to this and echos what I read in Banality of Evil (great book, everyone should read it.)

Interesting. Thanks for the cite. What if instead of seeing Sandusky drive through the parking lot at 2:30 am, he saw bigfoot?

Is there a movie with 'excited utterance' as the key plot twist? I know there's one for 'irresistable impulse'.

Fair enough. This is just, like, my opinion, man.

I habitually try to make educated guesses when I have a threshold amount of certainty about something. Incomplete information, estimating probabilities and attempting to "empathise" with people in predicaments to deduce behavious and outcomes, blah, blah, blah...Surely you can see where this habit comes from.

The trial is not about PSU football, so I don't expect them to try to establish whether or not "everybody knew". I do, however, care. Yes it's hyperbole to say jingling keys was SOP and conjecture to say coaches intentionally avoided that shower (and I should point out that my understanding is Jerry "hitting the showers" with kids was no secret at all--separate from raping kids in there), but IMO it's *good* hyperbole and conjecture. As mentioned, I expect further revelations of kids reflectively thinking noises made outside the shower were suspiciously conspicuous. Perhaps not on the stand.

I mean, we have a resident Penn State fan, and he's not jumping on this assertion. I'm getting the vibe that he's a bit creeped out by the suspicious lack of discovery as well. Or maybe he just thinks my idea is too stupid and lowly for him to even comment on (but that really doesn't seem like his style).

My gut is that, outside of McQ, these 'noises' weren't made to give Jerry a heads up to stop the child rape that they knew was occurring. With that said, I am creeped out at the allegation of a file on the situation being kept by Schultz and the allegation of the 'humane' thing to do being not to turn Sandusky in.

At this point, I honestly don't know what the **** to believe but I hope that there wasn't as widespread of a burying of the collective heads in the sand as some are suggesting.

I'm not sure if this anecdote is at all relevant but it comes to mind...

When I was in college I was once in a bank that got robbed. At the time of the robbery I was at the counter depositing a check. A thin, older guy came in wearing a black leather jacket and black sun-glasses looking as suspicious as one could. At the time I thought to myself "hey this guy could be a bank robber" yet at the same time the notion that this could be a bank robbery seemed impossible. I intentionally avoided looking at the guy as he approached the teller next to me, less than ten feet away from where I was standing.

The teller depositing my check seemed to stop working and just fidget around with my check. The teller that the robber approached said something which I heard as "you need to take off your sunglasses, sir" (could have been something completely different, but that's what I thought I heard). An older man dressed in a suit appeared behind the counter and nodded and said something to the effect of its all ok (I didn't actually hear him).

The suspicious guy leaves, my teller let's out a massive sigh of relief and says "that was a bank robbery".

Despite recognizing the potential for this guy to be a bank robber AND making the conscious decision to avoid looking over at him AND experiencing multiple other signs that a robbery was taking place, the possibility that a bank robbery was actually occurring seemed completely non-existent in my mind until the teller announced that it had been one.

The point I'm making is that on some level I knew what was happening yet consciously I seemed to reject it as a possibility. I refused to look over at the guy knowing something suspicious was going down while at the same time in my mind rejecting the possibility that it was.

I think this kind of relates to the coaches that knew/should've known but never did anything besides make sure they didn't catch Sandusky in the act. On some level they knew some creepy **** was going down, yet on another they could've been in complete denial that kids were being raped in the shower.

If my mind played some tricks with me when it came to a junky robbing a bank, I can't imagine what went through the mind of the PSU coaches that knew of Sandusky's fondness for showering with kids.

Interesting. This whole ordeal is one large, ugly potential case study in human behavior.

Schultz, Curley, Spanier and all the others weren't as interested in protecting Sandusky as they were in protecting themselves. Think about it. Knowledge of what Sandusky was up to and what he was about had been circulating within the Penn State football program for close to fifteen years. (It was certainly known in 1999 when Joe Paterno told Jerry he would not be Penn State's next head football coach and forced him to take early retirement.) Sandusky himself wasn't going out of his way to hide his depravity. Even after the 2002 "shower rape" incident witnessed by McQueary, Sandusky was showing up at closed practices hand-in-hand with one of these boys while McQueary, Paterno, and Bradley stood there and said nothing.

Each day that went by without Jerry Sandusky and his "problem" becoming public knowledge increased confidence that they could keep this bottled up until good old Jerry dropped dead. Plus, doing the right thing might cost them their careers - and God only knows what else. So the "humane" thing to do was to do nothing - and hope this mess never got aired in public. If they could have just kept a lid on it for another ten or fifteen years, (until they were all safely retired and living off their pensions), everybody would have been happy. I imagine most of the [former] football coaches and administrators at Penn State hate Sara Ganim. The person they should hate is themselves.

http://espn.go.com/college-football/...tickle-monster

...

Penn State wants me to buy season tickets. A New Chapter Begins!

So much pride and history at Penn State. Who was the coach before O'Brien though? They never mentioned him.

Right, but the point isn't that the Penn State nightmare is some grand cautionary tale about individual human nature and the tendency to avoid hard truths. Everyone acknowledges that it's human nature to feel some temptation to avoid conflict and protect yourself. But the point is that in a healthy culture/institution, these tendencies are counterbalanced by other pressures to "do the right thing." The point is that all Happy Valley had turned into a place where everyone had become just some dude in a bank willing to look the other way while hoping that the robber would pretty please just go away now. And actually it was worse than that, because in many cases they weren't just looking the other way, but they were actually jingling the keys to the bank vault, anything so that the mean bad robber man would just quit making them feel so uncomfortable.

Now replace stupid bags of bank money with the actual innocence of eight-year-old boys, and we're getting somewhere. Listen, nobody's saying that Penn State was the only place something like this could have happened. One of the biggest reasons this story is so important is because it isn't about Happy Valley specifically, it's a larger lesson about how the ecosystems around big-time anythings (in this case college sports) can get really backwards and spooky. I don't think anybody itt would have been stunned if something like this had happened at like a dozen places we could have all named. But man, if we had all played that game a year ago and named a dozen places, then Penn State would have 100% been on everybody's list.

It's not because the people in Happy Valley inherently suck worse than the people anywhere else. But once a whole population has bought into any kind of culty groupthink--from small scale stuff like a high school clique, to midrange stuff like the papacy of Joe Pa, to humongous world-changing stuff like a few examples we could all name--then history shows us how ****ed up things can get in a hurry. Yeah it sucks for you that Penn State has become the latest example of this. But now the story moves on to: So what can we do to make it less likely to happen in other places? And that's why I'd be thrilled if Penn State football gets the death penalty for a year or whatever. It's less because I want the Penn State culture to suffer and more because ten years from now I want some potential whistleblower at Notre Dame to go the other way--to take a deep breath, and sack up, and make the decision to trip that mf'ing bank robber.

I've had incidents like this of my mind refusing to consciously acknowledge disturbing things but I can't remember what they were.

It's also pretty interesting to note that Gricar's brother actually committed suicide years earlier in Ohio by jumping off of a bridge into a river. The street where Gricar's car was found in Lewisburg was "Water Street" and was about one block from a bridge over the Susquehanna River.

This DA stuff is certainly weird, although could be a coincidence. People kill themselves all the time, who knows what else was going on with him. But it certainly is very possibly related to this.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaaf--...Xrf7296aw5nYcB