RE: The whole Wal-Mart thingy comparison.
You are confusing corporate policy and civil law with criminal law. I can assure you the Wal-Mart policy of not reporting incidents did not apply to criminal acts. If it did they would have been sued out of existence years ago.
Under criminal law knowledge of a criminal act occuring must be reported to law enforcement. People harboring information on unreported crimes, and particulary crimes against persons (and children!!) are frequently considered an accessory to the crimes. People go to jail all the time as accessories to violent crimes because they don’t ‘snitch’ on their associates engaged in criminal activity.
In this case, imo, Joe is state-bound and it ain’t the U. A whole lot of others can/should join him in the pokey. Then Penn state can/will be sued to no end by the victims and their families.
I don’t know what position the state is in on this. It may well be an all-or-nothing because once criminal convictions come down the civil cases will quickly overwhelm Penn State’s finances. I notice a distinction has been made between what occured on campus and what occured off-campus. So I’d say the aiding and abetting is pretty thick here and goes back decades.
Due to the state’s liabilities and/or culpability a federal grand jury and FBI involvement are probably warranted.
Yeah it does. The other problem is you sign on the dotted line. They know it’s bogus of course but they try and intimidate you anyway even though I doubt it would stand in court. All big entities want to manage these incidents and their PR people in control. It’s crap but that’s the reality.
In fact I just recalled an example where one of my buddies there was a first-responder. One day a guy fell off the racks from about 20 ft. up to the concrete. He saw it and started treating him, the management came up and told him to back the hell away NOW. He immediately told them he was a first responder and if THEY didn’t back off he was going to have them all thrown into jail. They backed off, but the point was they didn’t want any employee taking things into their own hands without direct authority from them, law be damned.