What the fuck does the jury pool have to do with anything? Joe Paterno wasn’t charged with a crime and was never put on trial. So why does it matter if they became public? And #7 is supposed to be a good thing about Paterno, so why is it bad if it became public?
No one ever said he witnessed a crime. Ever, ever, ever. At no point did anyone say he saw anything in person. I don’t know why you think that’s new information. The question is whether he knew about the rapes and whether he tried to do anything about them. There was never a question of whether or not he was personally a witness. That’s why this point doesn’t matter. I don’t know who “the witness” is supposed to be in point #4. I think it’s that redheaded ex-coach, and the way I remember it, it comes down to how exactly he described an act of abuse he either saw or overheard. What exactly he said, saw, and did is probably unknowable because he contradicted himself several times. That the Penn State football program was all kinds of fucked up is beyond dispute. My guess is that that’s why you’re not disputing it.
Maybe I would. Like I said, I do feel bad for the guy. I still think he’s an ass for trying to have this fight in public. It’s insensitive to the actual victims in this story. The reputation of a football coach really doesn’t mean shit; Paterno may have been a good coach and a good mentor but he never deserved the Holy Man bullshit that came to surround him over the years. It’s not his fault that we make heroes out of people based on their public images, but I think it is his fault that he embraced it and promoted it. And his saintly reputation arguably contributed to what happened at the school. Nobody wanted to mess with the coach or the program.
I think the investigators they paid did what they were paid to do. That’s how that works.
So yes, you DO believe the family influenced the investigation? The reason I brought up the Joe committed no crime is because the narrative that emerged doesn’t reflect that. You seem hellbent on convicting Joe from beyond the grave. One last thing: Joe freely acknowledged he screwed up, should’ve done more. Unsure anyone else did.
The investigation they started and funded specifically to counter the Freeh investigation? I’ll go out on a limb and say they influenced it. The correct word would be “sponsored,” or you could say “bought and paid for,” or “bankrolled as part of a desperate attempt to whitewash a more credible and objective investigation,” or… well, you get the idea.
I think the narrative generally reflects what happened. To that end I’ll correct your wording: he was never accused of committing a crime. Whether he did commit one - or whether he did something morally wrong even if he didn’t break the law - is a different dispute. And if the question is whether or not he did something wrong, the legal answer isn’t the whole answer.
Hellbent? You started a thread based on Jay Paterno’s self-serving book and you’re defending it to the hilt, sometimes by making points that nobody ever argued against in the first place or by making statements that don’t have much bearing on anyone’s opinion. My view is that no matter what, he doesn’t come off looking very good. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. And I don’t know what it means to convict someone from beyond the grave. He’s the one beyond the grave, actually. I haven’t proposed any punishment for him or said he broke the law. I’ve said that in the big picture, he played a major role in what went wrong at PSU and that there is no way to make him look good in all this and I don’t think it can be proved what his exact level of responsibility was, so the hit to his reputation is fair overall.
No shit he screwed up. Everybody knew he screwed up and said so, so I can’t give him a whole lot of points for admitting the obvious.
Not by a long shot. I am a casual sports fan and I don’t know the name of the coach at my favorite team off the top of my head and even in my younger years where I was a fairly rabid sports fan, I didn’t even admire the head coach let alone deify him. What an incredibly ignorant thing to say.
Okay. And therefore, he deserves a spotless reputation? I mean, by your words, he admitted to screwing up in a situation that resulted in the rape of multiple children. But that shouldn’t impact his reputation because…?
Or maybe his reputation* took exactly the hit it deserved.
Reputation. Not his freedom, not his innocence (or guilt) of any crime. Just his reputation.
Jay and Sue Paterno need to have Joe’s reputation restored because they don’t have anything else. They are entirely dependent on Penn State, and Jay, in particular, has traded on his father’s name and reputation for so long that he cannot possibly be his own man. He’s tainted and he knows it; any defense of his father is a self-serving attempt to salvage his own identity. Anything else about this horrible, sordid affair doesn’t matter here. It’s just Jay doing the only thing Jay knows how to do: milk his last name for all he can.
Absolutely. If you haven’t done so, have a look at the news article I linked upthread. It talks about his (wholly specious) lawsuit against PSU, and agrees with your assessment pretty much 100%.
One has to pity - not sympathize with, but pity - Jay Paterno. Frankly, the guy was doomed. He was raised in a family where football was everything, living in a place where football was everything, where his father was basically the God of football, to the point that people turned a blind eye to child rape to keep the football going, and even when they could not, tried to play down the child rape because football football football. He was raised in, breathed the air of, a situation that looked fine most of his life but turned out to be toxic and horrible.
He’s a product of all that. Is it any wonder he is but a pathetic shadow of his father? Can any of us say for sure that raised in the same situation we wouldn’t be like Jay Paterno? What does he have except a gianty vulture of history sitting on his shoulders? He isn’t very bright - if you read anything he writes, you realize he would not excel in a high school writing class. He knows little aside from what his father did for a living. He either rehabilitates his father’s name, and thus his own, or he has to go work in a Best Buy, and I’m not sure he’s ever held an actual job.
A poster suggested that it was physically impossible for a grown man the height of Sandusky to rape a pre-adolescent boy while standing, and suggested that this can be “proven” by placing a cardboard tube at the height of a pre-adolescent boy’s special place, and trying to, well… you get the picture.
