That is more delusional than MSN. Old Main did not throw the party, force their pledges to drink, videotape it, and not call 911.
MSM wants to make drinking a Penn State problem............how can a
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That is more delusional than MSN. Old Main did not throw the party, force their pledges to drink, videotape it, and not call 911.
You can't market your way out of a student death. How about the students grow a brain and not have someone die at their house.
The only problem with this plan is it makes waaaaaaaay too much sense. As someone pointed out before, these boys had to make a choice between:
- Call 911, have an ambulance take him to the hospital, get cited for underage drinking, lose their charter and be kicked off campus or
- Hope he is simply passed out and will wake up in the morning with a bad hangover
I never thought twice calling 911 that there could be severe consequences, but this was the mid-80s when people were more likely to take responsibility for their own actions. I'd like to think I would have done the same thing at Beta this winter, but I can't honestly say I would knowing all of the consequences today.
And like you Ned, I didn't join a fraternity for the parties (although that was a nice perk) and was looking for a sense of belonging. It was the best decision I made while in college.
That reminds me of the time in Snyder when a couple of the guys on my floor were having floor races and one of them was so drunk he forgot to stop. Luckily for him, they'd not taken the screens out of the window yet, which broke his momentum enough that he did not go out the window three stories up after he crashed through the glass and was severely cut. But they had to rush him to the local hospital and then Geisinger in Danville (and I think finally to Philly) as they had trouble stopping the bleeding. There was a large pool of blood outside my door, as my room was adjacent to that window. No frat involved--just stupid kids. Of course the cops were called right away, somehow (I would have said 911, but (a) I'm not sure 911 existed then and (b) we did not have room phones (those came later in the year or the following one)). Very scary.
Stacy Parks Miller has made a habit of exaggerating the deeds of the accused and demonizing them. As a state attorney, you shouldn't be looking to ruin the lives of good people who maybe made a poor judgment and then got hit with bad luck. These guys did little different than thousands of others at college drinking parties, but in this case, things went bad. Ms. Miller is now out to compound the tragedy by ruining their lives and adding that to the life already lost.
Pa already has a good Samaritan law that protects an underage drinker that calls 911. It would not have mattered. The members were too stupid to know the law. They pretty much did EVERYTHING wrong. I don't know what makes you think ONE new law(that already exists) was going to solve their problem. Their problem was stupidity.
This was not A vs B. There are about 100 ways this could have gone down an the chapter did EVERYTHING wrong! The victim was not the first kid to get drunk and fall. It happens all the time. Between fights, falls, drugs, alcohol, I know of dozens of incidents where underage students were taken to the hospital.
Your choices were a little off. The choices were:
- "Call 911, have an ambulance take him to the hospital, get cited for underage drinking, lose their charter and be kicked off campus", nobody dies, very little bad PR, NO national headlines and most of the serious charges would not exist or
- Hope he is simply passed out and will wake up in the morning with a bad hangover.
- Do the right thing, don't break the laws and never have to worry about anything.
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Wrong. Nobody dies at thousands of other drinking parties. IF their party was the same they would have received the same punishment which would be zero punishment.
I thinks its strictly because of the way it went down. People have died from things like this, but they didn't let the kid lay there and die and then try to hide their mistakes.
Things probably have gone down like this many times over the years at many schools. BAck in the day, everything was not on video. These idiots had a video of the whole incident.
This is a reflection of the pitt culture and is a university-wide problem. Everyone in the pitt community, including their alumni and athletic supporters, is responsible. crapstain sidney reilly should have done more.
the stupidity to haze pledges in front of video cameras is so unbelievably dumb
question for all the legal minds out there...will during court proceeding the video of this awful incident be made available to the public? I really hope not but just wondering if the press has the right to request these and show them
Your point goes out the window when you admit they did NOT avoid ANYTHING they were trying to avoid They still lost their charter, lost their house, sued by their alumni for $10 million, charged with manslaughter and 800 other charges.
This was not the FIRST kid to get drunk at a party and need medical attention. Happens ALL the time!!!! I know of kids that broke their backs after falling off a cliff, broken jaws, knocked out, hit in the head with a SWORD, brain injury and comas.
PSU played ZERO role in the kids death. This was 100% on Beta. PSU did charge the members with 800+ crimes. PSU did not sue the chapter for $10 million. PSU did not evict the chapter. PSU did not pull the charter. PSU did not do chit. Their alumni, national, local authorities all took care of business. These kids will be lucky if they are not sold to cell block D for a pack of smokes.
PS. YOU ARE saying they should dodge responsibility.
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JMO but I didn't get that at all from any of NittanyNed2's posts.
Your point is flawed. You seem to think they were worried about PSU policy and not the law. You have no idea what they were thinking. The laws are MORE important than PSU policy. Like you said they are going to jail. A PSU amnesty policy won't keep them out of jail and therefore the PSU amnesty would be irrelevant.
They could have gotten around the amnesty BS by simply taking the kid to the ER. No cops and no ambulance. Problem solved.
Your example is a reach. YOUR daughter did not break any laws and did NOT need amnesty. The girls in the dorm had NOTHING to lose because they did not break any laws either. The person that broke the law was the girl on a "bad trip." If that was PSU the kid that died would have been given amnesty. Do you think your daughter and her friends would have called 911 if they provided the drugs, made the victim take the drugs, and had a good shot at going to jail? Where does your daughter go to school? I doubt their policy is much different than PSU.
Didn't an underage student fall out a window at PSU party a few years ago? Did PSU punish the victim? Didn't the other students call 911?
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The real problem is Beta were idiots. IF they were at your daughter's school they would have provided the illegal substance, forced someone to take it(hazing), videotaped it, and still would not have called 911. The policy was not the problem. Amnesty does not fix stupid.
Conservative leaning station whereby the prevailing thought is personal accountability. The NBC reporting is far left which espouses the community or government being responsible for anyone and everyone's personal failures. It's just different thinking.
Actually she was tossed off the cheerleading squad and charged w/ underage drinking. So I guess she was punished.
I'm convinced that most lawyers are horrible people. Not all, but I think that the reasoning that leads to this career choice coagulate a lot of scum.
Did the other students still call 911? A measly underage drinking charge probably looks pretty good to Beta right now.
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That is a given but they are the same everywhere. It is not like Pa has all the low class lawyers. The real problem was Beta.
That is a given but they are the same everywhere. It is not like Pa has all the low class lawyers. The real problem was Beta.
If PSU is not sufficiently committed to implementing serious policies to curb alcohol use at fraternities, it deserves what it gets. And if it curtailed or completely eliminated Greek Life, I doubt it would have much difficulty filling its freshman classes.
Exactly. There was a 3rd choice. Namely: "Do the right thing."
Admittedly, I see gray areas as regards "do the right thing." I'm not a puritan who is against underage college kids drinking. Nope, that's generally fine with me.
But FORCING someone to drink alcohol (and that was a mandatory part of the initiation process) is NEVER the right thing. Never.
These kids crossed the line and they deserve to face charges for such.
Penn State --- and the national organizations that charter the various fraternities --- ought to have an absolute zero tolerance as regards "forced alcohol consumption" and "brothers physically touching a pledge as part of an initiation process." If either of those things happen even once, the fraternity's charter is revoked immediately.
They broke the law by buying alcohol for minors and forcing the minors to drink excessive amounts of alcohol. While thousands of others at college may do the same thing, this incident was different because one of the minors died. When somebody breaks the law and a person dies as a result, the stakes are obviously and justifiably raised in terms of punishment because involuntary manslaughter comes into play rather than simply serving alcohol to minors.
As for ruining these peoples lives, at least they get to live their lives, unlike the victim. Your sense of justice is flawed.
cnn doing their usual bang up job in this photo from back in March - credited to them as being Beta Theta Pi. Maybe they "fact checked" this one w/ SG. "Yeah. That looks like it. They all sort of looked alike at 6:30 in the morning though."
Link to original story
Link to original story
After reading this article I'm convinced the Beta Brothers are toast...
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/penn-stat...-evidence-174617093--abc-news-topstories.html
It is not a Penn State problem. It is totally related to developmental, stages. Think back when you were in college. Hmmm, thousands of 18-22 year olds living in large groups, away from home and parental supervision, connecting with a "social" activity like drinking where you meet people, hook up with people and have a common experience. It's the recipe for high risk behavior which teenagers and young adults are prone to. Frontal lobes, where your ability to regulate and monitor your behavior and view the big picture, is not totally connected and enervated until about25 years of age. Why does this stuff happen on college campuses, why do you read about or see stories on the news about some poor teenagers who died ina car crash? Teenage years and young adulthood years are a dangerous time for a bubbling brain.
I think this is pretty accurate. I saw way more heavy drinking in the Navy than I did in college, with very similar age groups.
I understand the military no longer tolerates it like they once did.
Agree with a lot of what you say, but our Prez Barron just said we have been working on it for a decade now. If this is what you get after working on it for a decade, then just stop, and STFU.
Well, Barron was right about one thing. Private property. That makes anything but the nuclear option (banning all Greek activities) a challenge. Heck, the house was under new rules regarding alcohol and had video to enforce those rules. They still ignored it. PSU did what they legally could here, I think. It's not like this isn't a problem throughout the US in colleges and universities and it is not limited to the Greek community either--as we've seen from the cheerleader here that almost died falling out of a window and the recent Pitt occurrence (and those are only a fraction of what goes on). Now we could go back to the days of "in loco parentis". But how does that work for what are now legally adults in most cases. Back in the day when the age of majority was 21, you could do that. 18?? Not so much. Now you could do what tOSU and other schools are doing--building more dorms and requiring frosh and sophs to live there (of course, tOSU has such a large commuter community, as Columbus is a fairly large city, that it doesn't fully work). But college is a place where you go to learn how to be an adult in many ways. That means the opportunity to make mistakes--and learn from them. The challenge is how do you do that without becoming helicopter parents (you never grow up that way) while keeping those errors from becoming fatal.
Its not just that they broke the rules. They set up a systematic avoidance of the very rules that were set up.
We are far past the point Flounder was in when they ruined his brothers car: "You f#cked up. You trusted us."
No argument with that--but I'm not sure what more PSU could have done proactively--which was the point of my comment. Other than the nuclear option--which they (rightly) have now exercised against the frat in question. The only other thing I can think of would have been requiring their video to be reviewed on a weekly basis (as it was these kinds of issues with this specific frat that caused it to be put in in the first place)--but that gets into all kinds of privacy issues.
BUT if a student has to die each time in order to take action, by definition the plan is a failure.
No. A university cannot control all actions of people making free-will decisions. Especially dumb ones. On private property.
“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.”
(Translated "against (with) stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain" (also the title of an Asimov novel).)
And that is why there should be no association between the University and the frats. At all. Too much risk, not enough upside. Now, I do not think it is very common anymore, if it ever was, for students to die of alcohol poisoning in the dorms.
