Spanier Trial Closes With Appeal to Moral Outrage

Dan Gleiter, PennLive.com via AP

The fight of Graham B. Spanier’s life is coming to an end. In closing arguments here on Thursday, a lawyer for the former Pennsylvania State University president dismissed evidence that Mr. Spanier had failed in his duties to protect children from a serial child molester, as the lead prosecutor appealed to jurors’ sense of moral outrage over crimes that might have been stopped sooner had Mr. Spanier acted more forcefully.

In a rare criminal trial of a highly respected academic leader, prosecutors charged that Mr. Spanier conspired with his lieutenants to endanger the welfare of children who were sexually assaulted by Jerry Sandusky, a former Nittany Lions assistant football coach, in locker room showers at Penn State.

Jurors deliberated for more than six hours on Thursday without reaching a verdict. They returned to courtroom on two occasions to ask some highly technical questions about the often complexly worded legal charges. Deliberations will resume on Friday morning.

The case against Mr. Spanier centers on how he responded to an incident, in 2001, when Mr. Sandusky was spotted in the shower with a young boy. Rather than report the matter to authorities, Mr. Spanier went along with a plan to only tell the Second Mile charity, an organization for at-risk youth where Mr. Sandusky groomed his victims, and to bar Mr. Sandusky from bringing children into university facilities. After that decision was made, Mr. Sandusky went on to abuse more boys, including one who testified in court that he was sexually assaulted, in 2002, in the shower of a Penn State football building.

“They took a gamble,” said Laura Ditka, Pennsylvania’s chief deputy attorney general, who led the prosecution. “But they weren’t playing with dice; they were playing with kids.”

Mr. Sandusky was convicted, in 2012, on charges related to the sexual abuse of 10 boys.

Mr. Spanier is charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of children and one count of criminal conspiracy, all third-degree felonies that each carry a maximum penalty of seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

Penn State Scandal

This selection of articles from The Chronicle’s archives looks back on the Jerry Sandusky scandal and its fallout at Pennsylvania State University.

• With Last-Minute Ruling, Graham Spanier Evades Jumpsuit and ‘Hard Cell’
• Seeking Closure in Verdict, Penn State Finds More Discord
• Spanier’s Conviction Highlights Lessons of Sandusky Scandal
• Guilty Verdict Puts a Dark Coda on Spanier’s Fall

Penn State’s former president is among a trio of administrators who were charged in connection with their handling of the Sandusky abuse scandal. Timothy M. Curley, Penn State’s former athletics director, and Gary C. Schultz, a former Penn State vice president for finance and business, had faced the same charges. But both men, who were called as witnesses for the prosecution this week, recently pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of child endangerment in exchange for the other, more-serious charges being dropped.

Mr. Spanier has worked for years to restore his reputation through civil lawsuits against his toughest critics and a limited number of interviews with news media. But he did not take the stand in his own defense. Indeed, the defense did not call a single witness, which Mr. Spanier’s chief counsel described as evidence of the weakness of the prosecution’s case.

“That’s why I didn’t call any witnesses,” said Samuel W. Silver, Mr. Spanier’s lawyer. “Her witnesses made the defense’s case.”

Since his firing from Penn State, in 2011, Mr. Spanier has contended that he was never told of Mr. Sandusky having had a “sexual” encounter of any kind with a minor. Rather, he has said, he heard of “horseplay” between the former coach and the boy in the shower.

As Mr. Silver pointed out, Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz testified that they had never received a report that Mr. Sandusky had abused children before his arrest, in 2011, and that they had never conveyed that to Mr. Spanier.

But there were red flags.

Focus on One Email

Evidence presented in the trial showed that Mr. Spanier was looped into conversations about an investigation, in 1998, of Mr. Sandusky showering with a young boy in a Penn State locker room. No charges were filed in connection with that incident, but the pattern continued. In 2001, Michael J. McQueary, a football graduate assistant, said he saw Mr. Sandusky showering with a boy in a Penn State facility.

The 2001 incident, evidence and testimony showed, was a subject of great concern and persistent deliberation on the part of Mr. Spanier and his fellow administrators. But lawyers on both sides differed sharply in their assessments of what those conversations and meetings meant. Were they indications of serious, good-faith efforts to respond to vague reports of inappropriate behavior by Mr. Sandusky? Or did they instead represent a calculated conspiracy to protect the university’s reputation with a scheme that endangered the welfare of children?

More than any other single piece of evidence, prosecutors zeroed in on an email, from 2001, in which Mr. Spanier and Mr. Schultz agreed with Mr. Curley’s suggestion that they should not report the shower incident to child-welfare authorities. Throughout the trial, including during closing arguments, the email was projected on a large screen near Mr. Spanier’s defense table.

“The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for having not reported it,” Mr. Spanier wrote. “But that can be assessed down the road. The approach you outline is a humane and reasonable way to proceed.”

This email, Ms. Ditka argued, was not the innocent musing of an administrator trying to do the right thing. Rather, she said, it was the sealing of a criminal pact that let a serial abuser “run wild.”

Every step of the way, the prosecutor continued, Mr. Spanier behaved like a criminal knowingly trying to prevent a report of child abuse from being made. The former president’s discussions with his lieutenants and their elliptically worded emails, Ms. Ditka said, suggested that the men knew something far more troubling than “horseplay” had occurred between Mr. Sandusky and that boy in the shower.

“Use your common sense,” Ms. Ditka said. “Do you think every time a towel is snapped or shampoo is thrown, they’re over at Graham Spanier’s house” trying to decide what to do?

“They needed to keep their Jerry Sandusky problem under wraps,” she said.

Leadership Under Scrutiny

There is little if any precedent for a college leader of Mr. Spanier’s national stature facing high crimes of this nature, and the prosecution of Penn State’s prominent former president reopens a bitter debate at the university about how its top officials handled the Sandusky abuse scandal.

In the years since the controversy erupted, a number of Penn State alumni who are sympathetic to Mr. Spanier have been elected to the university’s Board of Trustees. Nearly all of the board’s alumni-elected members attended the trial this week, but it did not appear that any of the university’s other board members came out to show their support.

Trustees close to Mr. Spanier say that he and Joe Paterno, the legendary Nittany Lions football coach, who died soon after Mr. Sandusky’s arrest, were scapegoated in an independent investigation commissioned by the board.

Mr. Spanier’s trial, while focused on serious criminal charges, amounted to an excavation of how Mr. Spanier and top Penn State officials managed the university. Prosecutors delved into Mr. Spanier’s fondness for handling nearly every matter before him over email, sometimes sending out queries in the middle of the night that he expected to have answered by morning. Jurors heard stories about filing cabinets and the fashioning of press releases, all in service of a case that sought to cast Mr. Spanier and his colleagues as men consumed by damage control at the expense of children.

Mr. Spanier’s defense was built on the simple premise that all of the evidence, compelling as it may have appeared, showed nothing more than a man doing his job appropriately.

William F. Oldsey, an alumni-elected trustee, said after the trial concluded that a conviction would deter good people from entering higher-education administration.

“If this process finds Graham guilty,” he said, “then we’ve got a bigger problem.”

But the prosecution argued that, despite his sterling reputation and remarkable 16-year presidency, Mr. Spanier failed to do the one job that he was hired to do.

“Graham Spanier was corrupted by his own power,” Ms. Ditka said. “He was a leader that failed to lead.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.