Paterno death brings back memories

Former Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno is dead. It appears to be so. We certainly hope so.

PATERNO: What a diff'rence a day makes



For having a pair of screw-ups with relation to his health would just be too much to bear.

IT SEEMS THAT this particular incident started with a website that covers the Penn State scene. They reported Saturday that Paterno – who had been hospitalized for eight days – had died.

Actually, he was dying. He wasn’t actually pronounced dead until Sunday morning.

But in the desire to be on top of things, the website got a premature tip and went with it – one that turned out to be wrong. Several other websites helped spread the word by also writing about Paterno’s demise hours before it actually happened.

They based their reports on the Penn State student website, and all wound up having to take it back. Of course, they were quick to blame the student website, and my understanding is that someone officially gave up his editorial post with the website on Sunday – expressing shame at what went wrong.

OF COURSE, BY the time this happened, Paterno was actually dead. So it’s not like the report was all that far off the mark.

Now I’m not justifying the reporting of anything that was off the mark. If someone reports the death of a prominent person, the last thing one wants is that person being able to call up the reporter-type who wrote the story and say, “I’m not dead!!!”

DeANGELIS: Caught the error

But I also comprehend how such things can happen. Some times in the confusion of circumstances, people spread bad information and reporter-types get caught up in it.

One of the most-famed of these incidents involved one-time 26^th Ward Alderman Vito Marzullo, who got to read his obituary on the front page of the Chicago Tribune some two decades ago – about a decade before he actually died.

BUT IN MY own time as a reporter-type person, there have been a couple of moments I experienced with this same circumstance.

One was back in the early 1990s when I was working for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago. One day, my editors got a call informing them that one of the leaders of the Republican caucus of the Illinois state Senate – Aldo DeAngelis of Olympia Fields – had died that morning.

Supposedly, the person who spoke to us had got the information directly from a hospital official who “recognized” the man’s name as an important official when she saw the paperwork indicating he had been pronounced dead.

Unfortunately, the man who died that day was someone who had a name similar to that of the state Senate member. It wasn’t the senator, even though a hospital official had said it was.

SO WHEN I started making calls to try to piece together, I quickly found out from the senator’s staff that their boss had been in the office earlier in the day, and – unlike Generalissimo Francisco Franco – most definitely was NOT dead.

Of course, my editor initially didn’t believe me, and persisted with talk that I needed to write an obituary. It was only when I personally interviewed the senator later in the day and got his reaction (he thought it was humorous) that my editor became persuaded that the senator was not dead – and an obituary was not warranted.

I only wish I had been that fortunate a few years later – by which time I was working for United Press International in their Springfield, Ill., office. One day, I got a call informing me that state Sen. Kenneth Hall, D-East St. Louis, had been hospitalized – most likely in St. Louis.

I started making calls, both to St. Louis hospitals (none of which had him) and then to his district office on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Nobody knew nothing.

UNTIL …

A call was made by me to the office of the Illinois Senate’s Democratic leaders. I asked an aide what he knew about Hall’s health, and that aide informed me that Hall had been pronounced dead that very morning. He also informed me that he was preparing an obituary for the Senate Democratic leadership to release – and would I like to see a copy when he was done, so as to help me put together my own obituary of Hall for the wire service.

HALL: Too early



At that point, I wrote something that UPI called a “spotlight” – a two-sentence blurb that said Hall (at that point, the longest-serving member of the state Senate) had died. It was transmitted to the wire service’s clients.

I then started piecing together what information I had in the file cabinets about Hall so as to write a basic obituary that could back up the “spotlight.” It was during my preparation of that basic obituary that I learned Hall had not died. He was admitted to a hospital, and as it turned out he died two weeks later. Yes, I got an apology from that legislative aide – who admitted it was his error.

I WAS SPARED the sight of an obituary for Hall with my name attached. The wire service straightened out the mess, and that basic obit turned into a story about how long-time state Sen. Ken Hall had been hospitalized.

But I’m still the guy who “killed” Kenny Hall a couple of weeks prematurely. (And when Hall eventually died, the competition wire service managed to report that before we did; that really hurt!)

So I can appreciate how someone trying to be diligent managed to get too diligent in their efforts to report a tidbit that would catch national attention (unlike the death of Hall, which wasn’t noted outside of Illinois).

Just like what seems to have happened with Paterno this past weekend.

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Do we all need courthouse crash course?

I recall a moment some two decades ago when I covered the Cook County Criminal Courts building for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago. The “story” for the day involved a man who had raped and brutally-beaten a young woman.

It's really not that mysterious a place



He was promptly arrested, and on this particular day he was brought to 26^th and California for his first court appearance in this case.

I WAS SITTING in the courtroom so I could see just what kind of bond the judge would set in the case. As it turned out, I sat within earshot of two older women – whom it seems were related to the young woman who was the crime victim.

I had to hold back a chuckle when I overheard one of the women tell someone else, “There’s going to be a trial today.”

There were dozens of trials that took place in the Criminal Courts building that day, but not for this case. It was just a bond hearing; the first step in a legal process that may seem excruciatingly slow to some people but must be followed to the letter to ensure that our judicial system produces verdicts that can stand up to review on appeal.

In fact, if I recall, that particular case took about a year-and-a-half to get resolved. The defendant eventually pleaded guilty in exchange for a prison sentence with a few years knocked off of what it could have been.

I WONDER HOW disappointed and confused those women (whom I have never seen or heard from again in my life) were with what happened that day.

Because my guess is that it is remarkably similar to the confusion/dismay/disgust that was being expressed Tuesday morning with regards to the case of the former Penn State University assistant coach who now faces criminal charges that say he forced himself sexually on 10 young men.

SANDUSKY: Following the process

Tuesday was the day in Centre County, Penn., court that was supposed to be the preliminary hearing.  Yet what wound up happening was that Jerry Sandusky made a brief court appearance and waived his “right” to such a hearing.

So Tuesday was just a procedural point that lasted just a couple of minutes.

TO LISTEN TO the outrage that was being expressed on many of the cable television news reports I saw (many of which were broadcasting the event LIVE), there was massive disappointment.

Apparently, some people were expecting the legal equivalent of a head on a pike. Instead, they got a bit of legalese that – in the long-run – doesn’t mean much.

Perhaps it is evidence that I have hung around too many courtrooms as a reporter-type person during the past 24 years. But it always amazes me how mysterious the whole legal procedure is to people.

It’s no wonder that real criminals who come into contact with the system can better figure out their options than the so-called typical person who happens to stumble into the system.

FOR THE RECORD, the point of a “preliminary hearing” is that prosecutors are supposed to present in public the types of “evidence” they say they will have to use against the criminal defendant – should the case be allowed to proceed to trial.

In short, it is about requiring prosecutors to “put up or shut up,” so to speak, and justify why this person is suspected of a crime and why his arrest and criminal charges are warranted.

A judge, in theory, has the ability to rule that the evidence put forth is weak and that the person should never have been charged and dismiss the whole case.

But that usually doesn’t happen. Judges usually wind up ruling that the arrest and charges are justified, and that the case can proceed. In fact in Cook County, prosecutors usually announce that they superseded the need for a preliminary hearing by getting a grand jury to indict the defendant.

WHICH MEANS THAT Sandusky, with advice from his attorneys, likely decided it wasn’t really worth bringing all this up right now – particularly since the degree to which prosecutors have to prove anything (none of that “beyond a reasonable doubt” rhetoric at this point in the process) is low.

They just have to show that someone made a complaint, and that they have no reason to believe these young men are lying about what they say happened to them.

Instead, it was being billed as some sort of coverup. Sandusky and his people denied “the people” a chance to hear from the accusers. They did NOT get their chance to tell their stories.

Heck, they lost their chance to begin the process of emotional recovery from their ordeals.

NONSENSE!!!!!

That point, if it ever comes, will occur during an actual trial – which also is where we get into the details to a degree that we will truly be able to comprehend what really happened between Sandusky and these young men.

It may well turn out to be such a sordid tale that many of us won’t really want to hear it. Perhaps Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” was correct in screaming, “You can’t handle the truth!”

And the fact that we’re going to have to follow a detailed, complex process to get to those details is a good thing. It is going to be what justifies whatever verdict and/or punishment is ultimately handed down.

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