Penn State not covered by state open-records law

If Pennsylvania's open-records law applied to Penn State, the Jerry Sandusky scandal might have been uncovered much earlier, saving some children from abuse, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute writes after hearing from Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who broke the story and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ganim (CNN image) "told a group of reporters and editors at Poynter that the open record exemption made it much more difficult to investigate the sex abuse story," Tompkins reports, and explains why the law doesn't apply to The Pennsylvania State University and three other "state-related institutions." He says they must file less information than publicly traded companies have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That is less than politicians have to file when running for state or federal office." Penn State lobbied to keep the exemption when the law was strengthened in 2008.

Tompkins says forner FBI director Louis Freeh, who investigated the university's handling of teh Sandusky matter, should have included making Penn State subject to the open-records law in his recommendations: "The abuse at Penn State is a lesson to us all about what happens when powerful people and public institutions are allowed to operate in the shadows created by what Freeh called a 'closed culture.' It is a culture that protected abusers, failed to protect victims and survived by closing its records to journalists who might have exposed it." (Read more

Economic woes of rural Pa. may have figured in Sandusky's alleged crimes, and may in his defense

Sandusky arrives for trial today.
(Inquirer photo by David Swanson)

As testimony begins today in the sex-abuse trial of former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, "The economic disparities that made his purported victims vulnerable . . . are also likely to prove central to Sandusky's defense," write Jeremy Roebuck and Jeff Gammage of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

They cite a comment made last year by Sandusky attorney Joseph Amendola: "I can think of nine million reasons boys like these would claim to be a sex-abuse victim," he said. "What better motivation than money - the financial gain that could come from saying, 'I'm a victim'?"

Centre County (Wikipedia map)

"State College is a cultural island," Matt McClenehen, a Centre County defense attorney, told the newspaper. "You have some of the most intelligent, educated people in the world around Penn State. But once you leave the confines of State College, you're practically in Appalachia." Officially speaking, the county is in Appalachia, as defined by Congress and the Appalachian Regional Commission.

"In Clinton County, where Victim 1 lives, 15.5 percent of the population falls below the poverty line, compared with 12.4 percent statewide," the reporters note. "The percentage of single-parent households is nearly twice that of neighboring Centre County," just to the south. (Read more)