No timeline for trustee review of Freeh material

Anthony Lubrano has no set schedule for reviewing the Freeh documents.

Alumni-elected Penn State trustees Lubrano, Ted Brown, Barbara Doran, Robert Jubelirer, Ryan McCombie, Bill Oldsey and Alice Pope were granted access to the investigative source materials from the university-commissioned investigation of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal in a ruling by Bedford County Senior Judge Daniel Howare, specially presiding in Centre County, on Thursday.

The documents are due to be turned over in 20 days if they contain no confidential information. If there is confidential information, the university has 45 days to produce them.

The Freeh report placed blame for the incident on four university officials

The trustees have been requesting a review of the documents for more than a year. In November 2014, they called for access and were told they could have it, but not to all documents and only in the Saul Ewing law firm offices in Philadelphia where the documents were kept. The trustees turned down that offer, leading to the lawsuit filed in April.

Now that the documents are within grasp, Lubrano told reporters that he has no idea what the timeline will be going forward.

“Whether we report back to the board remains to be seen,” he said. “We need to look carefully at the material.”

Lubrano rebutted the university’s statement that the petition was about seeing “who said what.” Instead, he said, it was about verifying that information that had been given to the trustees from individuals who were interviewed by former FBI director Louis Freeh’s team matched the information that was presented in the 2012 report.

When and how any of that comes to light, especially in light of the judge’s order on confidentiality, is up in the air.

“It depends on what we find and when we find it,” Lubrano said. “I hope that this leads to some finality in the matter.”

Both Lubrano and Oldsey also brought up late longtime Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno at Friday’s trustees meeting. Paterno, who was fired four years ago this month, part of the fall-out from Sandusky’s arrest, was inducted into the Pennsylvania Hall of Fame last month.

Lubrano read the speeches given by former Nittany Lion and Steeler running back Franco Harris and Paterno’s son and former Penn State quarterback coach Jay Paterno at the induction.

Oldsey read a letter from the coach’s wife, Sue Paterno, to the players, following it with an exhortation to the board to honor the coach. Paterno’s statue, honoring his status as the winningest coach in college football, was removed in 2012 at the height of the scandal.

“There are individuals on this board and in this administration who continue to take the position that at some point in the future, there will come a proper time to make things right with Sue and the Paterno family. I suggest to all of you, and to anyone else who shares this position, that the proper time to have made things right has long since passed us by,” Oldsey said.

President Eric Barron, athletic director Sandy Barbour and others within the university have said repeatedly that they would support honoring Paterno when the time is right.

At a tailgate in September, a fan challenged Barron on that statement, saying he didn’t think that time would ever come.

“I’m not sure that’s true. Give us time,” he said.

This story was originally published November 20, 2015 at 8:47 PM with the headline "No timeline for trustee review of Freeh material."