Graham Spanier Charged

By Marcos Gonzalez

State prosecutors charged Penn State’s former president with perjury and child endangerment, accusing him of allowing Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child molester, to prey upon kids.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly called it a “conspiracy of silence working to conceal the truth, an absolute disregard to the safety of minor children,” containing Graham Spanier and two other officials at Penn State.

“If these men had done what they were supposed to do…several young men would not have been attacked by a serial predator,” Kelly said, accusing the men of failing to alert authorities of Sandusky’s suspicious activities that had been brought forth in 1998 and again in 2001.

The prosecutors brought felony charges against Tim Curley, the ex-athletic director, and Gary Schultz, an ex-Penn State vice president who oversaw the campus police. Both men had been previously charged in the case, and along with Spanier were aware of Sandusky’s doings and refused to act.

The new charges are blamed on Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who has been accused of bringing the charges on Spanier to divert attention from the fact that when he was attorney general, he had failed to bring criminal charges against Sandusky back in 2009. This is a major issue that Democrats have criticized him for. Kelly has openly denied that the case has any correlation to that event.

The charges come a year after Sandusky was charged with the molestation of children dating back to 1998, creating one of the biggest scandals in college sports. Sandusky , advisor to the late, Joe Paterno, was convicted on 45 counts of child sex abuse last June and was sentenced last month to 30 to 60 years in state prison.

“This case is about three powerful men who held high positions — three men who used their positions to conceal and cover up for years the activities of a known child predator,” state Attorney General Linda Kelly said at a news conference in Harrisburg. “This was not a mistake, an oversight or a misjudgment.

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