In the news today....
Why Campus Rape Tribunals Hand Down So Many 'Guilty' Verdicts
But not in the news today....
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It's a long read.
Some highlights showing a highly prejudicial process....
In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault.
Both parties in the case had credibility issues; he had violated a no-contact order, she had withheld from the university the bulk of their text messages. But the accused student possessed strong exculpatory evidence. He produced the full record of their communications, which included texts from the accuser to him discussing the encounter in a highly positive fashion and referencing a “plan” to have sex again. Further, a friend of the accuser, who saw her shortly after the incident, recalled her raving about her “really hot” experience.
Nonetheless, Brown’s disciplinary panel returned a guilty finding by 2-to-1. The decisive vote came from Besenia Rodriguez, the university’s associate dean for curriculum.
In subsequent court testimony after the accused sued Brown, Rodriguez admitted that she had not considered the accuser’s text messages or other post-incident behavior as having any bearing on the case. The reason, she said, was the hours of training that Brown had provided to prepare her to adjudicate the complaint—training required by the federal government. Rodriguez was specifically told that the impact of trauma on sexual-assault victims often causes them to behave in counterintuitive ways, such as not being able to recount a consistent set of facts or choosing to communicate with (rather than to avoid) the alleged assailant. “I felt like it couldn’t—I couldn’t really put myself in her shoes to understand why she was representing it that way,” explained Rodriguez, “so best not to attempt to judge her behavior.”
:
Since 2011, the federal government has required all universities that receive federal money to provide “training or experience in handling complaints of sexual harassment and sexual violence” to adjudicators and investigators. Since nothing in the experience of most academics prepares them to competently investigate an offense that’s a felony in all 50 states, it makes sense to train those who are assigned to investigate campus sexual-assault allegations. But the ideological regimes used on many campuses are designed more to stack the deck against accused students than to ensure a fair inquiry. The risk of injustice is enhanced by the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no school discloses the contents of its training materials to accused students before commencing the disciplinary process. The contrast between this training regime and the instructions given by judges to jurors in criminal trials—most obviously, that they should presume defendants innocent until proven guilty—is stark.
Why Campus Rape Tribunals Hand Down So Many 'Guilty' Verdicts
But not in the news today....
https://statics.sportskeeda.com/wp-...e-rock-wrestlemania-32-ftr-1478707229-800.jpg
It's a long read.
Some highlights showing a highly prejudicial process....
In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault.
Both parties in the case had credibility issues; he had violated a no-contact order, she had withheld from the university the bulk of their text messages. But the accused student possessed strong exculpatory evidence. He produced the full record of their communications, which included texts from the accuser to him discussing the encounter in a highly positive fashion and referencing a “plan” to have sex again. Further, a friend of the accuser, who saw her shortly after the incident, recalled her raving about her “really hot” experience.
Nonetheless, Brown’s disciplinary panel returned a guilty finding by 2-to-1. The decisive vote came from Besenia Rodriguez, the university’s associate dean for curriculum.
In subsequent court testimony after the accused sued Brown, Rodriguez admitted that she had not considered the accuser’s text messages or other post-incident behavior as having any bearing on the case. The reason, she said, was the hours of training that Brown had provided to prepare her to adjudicate the complaint—training required by the federal government. Rodriguez was specifically told that the impact of trauma on sexual-assault victims often causes them to behave in counterintuitive ways, such as not being able to recount a consistent set of facts or choosing to communicate with (rather than to avoid) the alleged assailant. “I felt like it couldn’t—I couldn’t really put myself in her shoes to understand why she was representing it that way,” explained Rodriguez, “so best not to attempt to judge her behavior.”
:
Since 2011, the federal government has required all universities that receive federal money to provide “training or experience in handling complaints of sexual harassment and sexual violence” to adjudicators and investigators. Since nothing in the experience of most academics prepares them to competently investigate an offense that’s a felony in all 50 states, it makes sense to train those who are assigned to investigate campus sexual-assault allegations. But the ideological regimes used on many campuses are designed more to stack the deck against accused students than to ensure a fair inquiry. The risk of injustice is enhanced by the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no school discloses the contents of its training materials to accused students before commencing the disciplinary process. The contrast between this training regime and the instructions given by judges to jurors in criminal trials—most obviously, that they should presume defendants innocent until proven guilty—is stark.
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