‘The children’ weren’t AG’s priority

Our state attorney general collectively charged Penn State administrators Tim Curley and Gary Schultz and former president Graham Spanier with 22 counts, 14 of which were felonies — and slowly ground them through the glacial pace of the court process, at not only a cost of millions of dollars in Pa. taxpayer resources, but also at immense personal and professional costs.

The total costs to private citizens, livelihoods, a regional economy, insurance companies, the university and the commonwealth for this yearslong epic mess birthed from a singular lie in a November 2011 grand jury presentment range from $250 million to $500 million.

Many of us witnessed our commonwealth last month in a fifth-floor Dauphin County courtroom horribly failing to prove:

1. that a “conspiracy and cover up” ever existed at Penn State,

2. about a crime no one else corroborated on that witness stand

3. inflicted on a Second Mile teen our OAG has never bothered to identify these past seven years,

4. committed by the Second Mile chairman who has been convicted of abusing youth all met through the Second Mile,

5. a children’s charitable nonprofit that our OAG has never bothered to investigate in more than eight years,

6. while they had the Second Mile CEO in their witness chair testifying that charity leadership had full knowledge of their chairman’s out-of-program contact with Second Mile youth.

So we have to ask yet again, what were the priorities of our attorney general in all this? Because it wasn’t “the children.”

This story was originally published April 27, 2017 at 10:39 PM with the headline "‘The children’ weren’t AG’s priority."