A Fine Mess

To say I was shocked this morning to hear the news reports detailing the allegations against Associate Head Basketball Coach Bernie Fine would be one of the greatest understatements of all time. Within moments of hearing the news headline on television I went from a profound sense of dread, to disbelief, to anger.

Unlike the news at Penn State about Jerry Sandusky, this was not an abstract to me. Bernie Fine was somebody with whom I was well acquainted. Not only had I watched him coach on the sidelines for the past 35 years, but I attended his basketball camp for two years in my teens, his wife used to cut my hair (yes I used to have hair), I remember when he got married and what joy he had when his kids were born.

I am not one who came out and defended Fine instinctively and furthermore trashed the accusers as did Jim Boeheim. This isn't because I necessarily believe the allegations, or the denials, but simply because I know through experience that such things are possible. I have never heard someone stand up and state after some pillar of the community is revealed as a horrific, evil, child raping bastard "I have known this man for 40 years and have called him my friend, and I am not at all surprised by these allegations, but in fact always kind of suspected that he was raping children in his basement, I just never had proof." Molesters don't wear signs, they don't act in the open and they don't wear trenchcoats and have straggly beards. More often than not, they are the last person you would expect -- the minister, the Rotarian, the seemingly most moral person in the community.

That being said, I don't know if Bernie Fine did the things that he is accused of doing. I hope, for him, the Syracuse University community that I love, and his family that they are not true. And if they are not true, I hope that justice is somehow served to the accusers. But I am also not willing to state that they could not have happened, because experience has shown me that all too often these seemingly unbelievable allegations are in fact true.

However, what this story does appear to show is that once again the privilege of big time college athletics seems to have skirted around the legal process. Whatever your feelings about Bernie Fine and his accusers, there is no doubt that the several previous investigations of these allegations have at best been botched and at worst have been a cover-up of immense magnitude.

Everything that occurred previously in regard to the allegations of child molestation against Bernie Fine that broke last night on ESPN, whether it be from the Syracuse Police Department, the news media, or Syracuse University could have been completely above board. They could have been honest, hard hitting, exhaustive, unbiased investigations. But the obvious potential biases and the failure to take the necessary precautions and next steps that would have insured an unquestioned investigation and would have indeed helped Bernie Fine were either not identified or were simply ignored.

First, the allegations were apparently reported to the Syracuse Police Department in 2003. Depending on what news report you believe, the department investigated the allegations and found them to be baseless or they simply looked at the complainant and said "Sorry, statute of limitations has run, nothing we can do," and closed the books on the report.

In any case, the actions of the Syracuse Police Department in 2003 because of the individuals and the program involved created the appearance of impropriety and they failed to take the proper actions to address this. At the time of the initial report, the Chief of Police for the SPD was Dennis DuVal. From everything I have ever heard about DuVal, he is a very good human being and was a good police chief. However, he was also a standout forward in the 1970s for the Syracuse University men's basketball program. When an allegation is made against one of the biggest names in that program, the department out of an abundance of caution should have turned that investigation over to someone else. This would have insured an investigation that would have been conclusively and unquestionably credible to any critic. What we are left with is an investigation that raises obvious questions of impropriety and conflicts whether true or not.

Next, the accuser reported the allegations in 2005 to Syracuse University. The university has stated ad nauseum over the past 24 hours that it conducted a four month investigation conducted by the university's law firm which found no credible basis for the accusations. No action was taken by the university.

I have seen first hand the type of cover-up that Syracuse University can conduct under the guise of carrying out a thorough investigation of rape allegations. If these allgations concern someone connected with the athletic program, this cover-up machine goes into overdrive.

I have said this before and I will say it again. Universities are not the proper parties to conduct investigations of felonies. Why they continue to do so simply boggles my mind. I repeated this over and over and over and over again to Syracuse University officials when I was a student there 20 years ago. In 1989 when I arrived on the SU campus as a student, students were told that if they were raped or sexually assaulted to contact campus security, not the police. Rape and other serious felony criminal investigations were handled (and by all indications still are) by a student judicial board made up of minimally trained undergraduates, often either never being reported to law enforcement and sometimes even derailing ongoing law enforcement investigations. There is simply no reason to believe the results of the investigation conducted by the university.

Last, the Onondaga County District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick stated today that at no time during any of these investigations was he or anyone else from the DA's office made aware of the allegations, so they took no part of investigating the allegations. The allegations should have been forwarded to the DA by the Syracuse Police Department in 2003 and should have definitely been forwarded to the District Attorney's office by SU in 2005. As much as the police or private attorneys think they know about felony investigations, the DA is the best judge of whether a case should be brought or not and not reporting these allegations to him, even to simply let him look at it and decide there is no action to be brought, is simply inexcusable.

By failing to take proper actions, the SPD and Syracuse University have done a great disservice to all of those involved in these allegations, and possibly most of all to Bernie Fine. Because of the apparent conflicts of interest and the internal nature of all of these investigations, the prior investigations lack credibility and now have led to an embarassing re-opening of the investigations both by the SPD and the DA. The institutions involved in the prior botched investigations give the appearance of incompetence and of a cover-up whether any such cover-up existed in reality.

In any event, whatever comes of these investigations, the prior actions, or inactions on the part of the university and law enforcement have created a mess which will inevitably leave the university, the basketball program and Bernie Fine with a black eye, which will take a long time to heal, if it ever does.

One last note for the legislators in Albany. YOUR LAWS ARE OUTDATED AND NEED TO BE REFORMED. The simple fact that there is a statute of limitations on these types of crimes in ridiculous. The fact that they are so short (if you are raped under the age of 18 and you don't report it by the time you are 23, you are shit out of luck) is criminal. I don't always think that North Carolina's laws are the best, but the fact that we have no statute of limitations for any felonies is one for which we can hold our heads high. New York needs to immediately and radically change their statutes of limitations as they related to sex offenses and especially child sex offenses. In failing to act on this, the legislature is protecting sick evil criminals and aiding and abetting child rapists.