By George Diaz, The Orlando Sentinel –
Jerry Sandusky deserves the death penalty.
So does Penn State.
Sandusky is a monster, a pedophile who preyed on the most innocent and vulnerable of children — many of them foster kids dealing with issues of self worth and trust in adults. He is a monster beyond repair, a waste of space in prison, a temporary pit stop before he rots in hell.
Penn State officials — including the dearly departed icon Joe Paterno — harbored the monster for years and years.
Neither will get the death penalty of course, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the moral truths staring us in the face following Sandusky’s conviction on 45 counts of sexual abuse late Friday night.
Ignore is the operative word here for Penn State officials.
They knew. They had to know. There were multiple incidents involving Sandusky, incidents that Paterno dismissed as some sort of “horseplay.” With all due respect to the dead, anal sex in a shower with a boy should never be considered “horseplay.”
It is a brutal, heinous crime.
So Paterno, the university president, the athletic director, the whole lot of them, had to know or at the very least strongly suspect that something evil was going on. And they did nothing about it. For more than a decade.
Doesn’t the death penalty involve a lack of institutional control? What could be more obvious than this case?
This is the most despicable crime in the history of college football. It doesn’t get any worse than child molestation.
SMU got the death penalty because boosters threw cash money at players. That’s a misdemeanor compared to this.
It’s also very important to note that there are multiple victims in this, undoubtedly many more than the 10 brave souls who stood up to testify before a jury, recalling their worst nightmares in shocking detail. No question there were more. Sandusky set up the perfect shop for a pedophile — his Second Mile program for troubled kids.
As a foster parent, I have seen children scarred — many of them for life — but from the sins of their mothers and fathers. Sandusky set up the perfect scam to gain their trust, and then betray them in the most horrific of ways.
They were easy prey.
Today, we need to commend the victims for their courage for sharing, as one of their attorneys called it, “the horrible memories buried in their soul.”
None of this involves “horseplay.”
