Well, well, well:

Joe Paterno appears to have played a greater role than previously known in Penn State’s handling of a 2001 report that Jerry Sandusky had sexually assaulted a boy in a university shower, according to a person with knowledge of aspects of an independent investigation of the Sandusky scandal.

E-mail correspondence among senior Penn State officials suggests that Paterno influenced the university’s decision not to formally report the accusation against Sandusky to the child welfare authorities, the person said. The university’s failure to alert the police or child welfare authorities in 2001 has been an issue at the center of the explosive scandal — having led to criminal charges against two senior administrators and the firing of Paterno last fall.

More:

To date, the public understanding of Paterno’s subsequent actions has been that he relayed McQueary’s account to the university’s athletic director and then had no further involvement in the matter.

But the e-mails uncovered by investigators working for Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director leading an independent investigation ordered by the university’s board of trustees, suggest that the question of what to do about McQueary’s report was extensively debated by university officials. Those officials, the e-mails show, included the university’s president, Graham B. Spanier; the athletic director, Tim Curley; the official in charge of the campus police, Gary Schultz; and Paterno.

This is the part that kills me:

The Penn State e-mails, according to the person with knowledge of the Freeh investigation, indicate that Spanier, Curley and Schultz seemed at one point to favor reporting the assault to the state child welfare authorities, recognizing that if they did not, they could later be vulnerable to charges that they had failed to act.

But in one e-mail, Curley wrote that after talking to Paterno, he no longer wanted to go forward with that plan.

In the end, the university told no one other than officials with Second Mile, the charity for disadvantaged youngsters founded by Sandusky.

The e-mails suggest that the officials decided that Sandusky could be dealt with by barring him from taking children onto the campus and encouraging him to seek professional help.

Not reporting the accusation to the authorities, the men determined, was the more “humane” way to deal with Sandusky, according to the e-mails.

“Humane” for the kids Sandusky raped and molested? In Penn State jargon “humane” = “easier for the football team and the university.” To be sure, this leak does not tell us what Paterno said to Curley, but insofar as it is accurate, it shows that these university leaders made a deliberate decision not to report what they knew to child welfare authorities. If there is any way at all to charge them under Pennsylvania law, I hope the law will put them all in the dock for what they failed to do, all to protect the sacred football program.

A Texas reader writes:

Now that emails seem to prove that Penn State covered up the Sandusky problem for ca. 12 years. I would propose that for an equal period of time (12 years), the football program be eliminated from Penn State.

Seems fair to me.