Though Penn State violated no laws by waiting more than three months to report the full details of an on-campus sexual assault, legal experts said the community will have to judge how the situation was handled.
"There is no lens to hold up to this to say whether they were right or wrong," said Jonathan Kassa, executive director of the Clery Act-founding organization Security on Campus. "The question is, does Penn State think they could have done it better?"
The federal Clery Act requires universities to report in a timely manner crimes "considered by the campus to represent a threat to students and employees."
Though Penn State Police originally reported what they now suspect was an April 5 sexual assault as an "assault on a female," police said they reported what they thought was appropriate at the time.
"Whether it's an assault or a sexual assault -- that's just a play on words," said Detective Bill Wagner, one of two detectives who investigated the incident.
In this case, determining the veracity of the victim's claims was the first priority, Wagner said.
"We don't go out reporting sexual assaults that don't occur," he said. "We're going to investigate it."
Police eventually filed charges against former Penn State Beaver student Gary Brian Patterson on Wednesday, alleging he sexually assaulted a woman in Redifer Commons in April, according to court documents. Today, at Patterson's preliminary hearing, a judge will decide whether to send the case to trial.
Another man was charged in connection with the assault, but because he is a juvenile, the records are sealed, police said.
Though the Clery Act calls for "timely" reporting of crimes, the law is vague about what constitutes "timely" reporting, leaving room for police and administrators to use discretion with what they report and when, said Virginia Tech associate professor Steven Janosik, one of the leading Clery Act experts.
"The timely warning reporting requirement is very vague," he said. "Not only does it not say what a timely notice is, ... there's no requirement with respect to specificity."
The news of Patterson's charges came three months after the alleged sexual assault, which Penn State Police originally reported as an "assault on a female" via a post on Penn State Live, live.psu.edu while posting surveillance video stills of two suspects.
The alleged victim in this case, who had a blood-alcohol content of .32, was unable to recall what happened to her during the assault, according to court documents. She was found by a Penn State police officer wearing nothing but a shirt in a Redifer Commons computer lab, and after being treated for an alcohol overdose, she returned to the hospital for treatment of a suspected sexual assault, according to court documents.
Center for Women Students Director Peggy Lorah said crime reporting is often complicated in regard to sexual assaults.
"It often is a result of the victim not wanting to go forward that the information doesn't go out," she said. "Sometimes it really is a matter of how something gets reported."
The DNA evidence that needed to be processed in the Patterson case also slowed the filing of charges, Wagner said.
"Sometimes it does take a long time for an investigation to occur, which can be frustrating for the victim and people that want to know what's going on," Lorah said.
The law remains unspecific about timely reporting for a number of reasons, Janosik said.
"The more prescriptive you make a law, the more difficult compliance becomes," he said. "It's a judgement call on their part with how much they want to release."
Janosik said he understands why universities hesitate to report violent crime on campus, concerns about the investigation aside. However, covering up the truth is not the answer, he said.
"When administrators are clear and honest and transparent -- even if it's not good news -- in the intermediate term they gain more than they lose," he said.
