How can Brown suspend this chapter for 4 years without proof any fraternity member was involved?
Same fraternity as the one at UVA too.
Some guy off the steet could have provided the roofies. Maybe the girls did it? Maybe the drug test gave a false positive?
An unregistered party too, that can’t be true… Unregistered means there was no party.
What is going on?
http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/2015/01/17/attemptedrape/21909853/
More spiked drinks? Can’t be true. Girls must be lying.
you just love to be snarky don’t you LOL. People lie. It’s not a gender trait. Presuming that women never lie and males always lie or that women always lie and men never lie is the false presumption.
I read here that the rape issue is overblown in college campusus and fraternities. Activists are blowing everything out of proportion.
Closing arguments in Vanderbilt case:
http://news.yahoo.com/vanderbilt-gang-rape-defense-points-campus-culture-122225996.html
"Defense attorneys for the former Vanderbilt University football players whose own cellphones show they participated in a dorm-room sex assault have placed blame on the elite Southern university, saying their clients’ judgment was warped by a campus culture where drunken sex was common.
Defense attorney Worrick Robinson sought on Friday to prove a point he made as the trial opened: that Batey had been a promising young player before he “walked into a culture that changed the rest of his life.”
“Is there anything in their culture that might influence the way they act or the way they think or the way they make decisions?” Robinson asked his expert James Walker, a neuropsychologist who said Batey claimed to have had between 14 and 22 drinks that night.
“Yes, at that age peer pressure is critical,” Walker responded, “because you’re just going out on your own, you’re not fully an adult, you’re not fully a child. … You tend to take on the behavior of people around you.”
Prosecutors objected, and Walker ultimately acknowledged that he had done no scholarly work on Vanderbilt’s campus culture."
There has also been a lot of testimony about the lack of bystander intervention:**
"Cameras showed a crowd gathered around as Vandenburg pulled up to the dorm in a vehicle with his unconscious date. At least five students later became aware of the unconscious woman in obvious distress, but did nothing to report it. Rumors quickly spread around campus, and still no one apparently reported it.
Dillon van der Wal, who just completed football season playing tight end at Vanderbilt, testified that he didn’t tell anyone despite knowing the woman socially and seeing her unconscious in the hallway, with red hand marks on her buttocks.
“You thought well of her, you cared for her welfare,” defense attorney Fletcher Long said. “When you encountered her in the condition you found her with the marks you testified to, you called the police?”
“I did not,” van der Wal, replied.
Vanderbilt officials say school rules go beyond federal requirements on sexual violence responses. The student handbook clearly lists resources available to victims and encourages anyone who witnesses possible sexual misconduct to take action and report it to law enforcement. However, university spokeswoman Princine Lewis said Friday that rulebook is “meant to encourage reporting. It does not require it.”
I find the last part interesting, that witnesses are encouraged to report to law enforcement, not the college. That’s good, I think.
What are the downsides of requiring bystander intervention? I mean, this case is pretty extreme and clear cut; this woman was unconscious and being dragged around, and had obvious injuries/marks on her body. She was seen by multiple people. Why would someone not intervene directly or at the very least make an anonymous phone call to 911? I find it very sad.
Hunt - I was the person who posted the analogy. Thank you for your response, which I think is a very reasonable one. But it sounds like if there were no identical twin or other proof problems in the beating example then you’d be in favor of expulsion? And I suppose similarly if there was a videotape of a rape. To me, this means that you don’t oppose expulsion as a matter of principle.
The reason I threw out the analogy is to sharpen my own thinking about the use of expulsion. IMO, sexual assault is more complicated than the beating example for three reasons. Two legitimate reasons are: (1) because there are often proof problems (2) reasonable people can have different boundaries for determining whether consent was given more especially when alcohol is involved as it so often is in these cases. An illegitimate reason is (3) people often bring strange biases to the table about sex, either due to personal or societal hangups or implicit/explicit sexism (which can go both ways). The only other question is how do you compare the severity of a specific type of sexual assault to a severe beating - to me, both rape and a severe beating are both in the “really really bad but not murder” category, while groping or forcible kissing is much less severe.
The beating example is good because it completely eliminates reasons 2 and 3 and often eliminates 1 because its easier to avoid getting mentally entangled in the proof problems. It also might be something males can relate to easier.
I’d almost envision giving a multiple choice test like this:
When should (private) colleges expel if a severe sexual assault is alleged? (Pick one or two answers)
a) Colleges shouldn’t expel even for rape. An education is a vital commodity that is purchased. This is as silly as asking the water company to do a background check and character reference on all their customers before letting them buy water to drink.
b) Colleges shouldn’t expel until there’s a criminal indictment / conviction as a matter of principle.
c) Colleges shouldn’t expel until there’s a criminal indictment / conviction because they’re not competent at running internal hearings.
d) Colleges shouldn’t expel until there’s a criminal indictment / conviction because expulsion is too severe given the inevitable problems they have in their internal hearings.
e) Colleges should only expel if they can clearly determine that a severe sexual assault was committed.
f) Colleges should only expel if they can be 51% sure that a severe sexual assault was committed.
The defense in the Vanderbilt rape case is the campus culture?
I can’t go so far as to use the word “overblown” because not all of this is rape in a commonly accepted term and there are no statistics yet that are reliable, but I absolutely believe that the elephant in the room is being ignored by society - alcohol consumption and I do believe there are pockets of students prone to be involved in sexual misconduct - members of frats and sororities, students with mental health issues, young freshman. athletes and some of those groups obviously could have more than one characteristic.
dstart, i have to agree with you there but then again we have the Twinkie defense, the “I didn’t know my coffee was hot” defense, the entitlement defense… oh my.
Yeah…I remember the Twinkie defense too. That was nonsense.
The McDonald’s case is trickier. The coffee was too hot.
We have a drinking problem.
This story occurred in 2010. I don’t know what happened to the 12 people who were roofied. There was talk of suspending them because of drinking. The twelve drinkers said they only had one or two drinks. Should the twelve drinkers be suspended?
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Central-Wash-U-Some-overdose-party-goers-may-be-886258.php
Momofthreeboys, do you disagree with Mitch Daniels? Are you ok with suspensions if somebody is arrested?
I say (e). I say further that colleges should expel if they can clearly determine the person committed any sexual assault involving penetration, because any sexual assault that involves penetration is a severe assault.
The story gets more horrible the more you read about it. The rape victim testified that she had been the girlfriend of one of the rapists. The morning after her assault, when she woke up in different clothing, her “boyfriend” told her that she’d gotten very drunk and was vomiting, and he had to spend the evening cleaning her up. She didn’t realize she had been raped until days later, when she was shown the videos of her “boyfriend” urging other athletes to rape her and proudly taking pictures of the event.
So in partial defense for the bystanders seeing the rapists carrying her, they may have known that she was the girlfriend of one of the guys, and thought that the rapists were just helping her.
This gang rape only came to light because the authorities were looking at the security videos to find out who did some unrelated vandalism. How many other gang rapes go unexposed?
It really is the Twinkie defense again. Let’s hope the jury isn’t as gullible (or homophobic) as the jury was in the case of Harvey Milk’s murder.
I would say the “campus culture” defense should not get the rapists off, but it could give grounds for the victim to pursue a civil case against all involved in that culture at Vanderbuilt.
I still don’t understand how the legal system can compel a private institution to grant a degree. The only weakness I see in Duke’s case is that they adopted a new policy and it wasn’t widely known (in its details) in the student handbook.
Still, Georgetown U kept DC in court for 10 years trying to prove that they had the right to discriminate against gay students. It took them 10 years to lose!
Homophobic? huh? The Vanderbilt case is complicated by who exactly is the bad guy but I don’t see a not-guilty verdict coming for any of the defendants in this one because of campus culture or alcohol. That is a crazy reach defense strategy.
Homophobic for the Twinkie defense, I think greenwitch meant.
The defense attorneys for the Vanderbilt case have to throw up any defense they can think of. They blamed the victim for being drunk, they blame the campus culture for making the rapists rape, they say the rapists aren’t responsible because if someone drinks a lot they’re allowed to rape a student and pee on her and take videos which they send to their friends-- apparently these are just cute hijinks that those wacky students do these days, ha ha.
greenwitch - I am not a lawyer but I have dealt with some of this in my professional life. Duke entered into a contract with the guy to let him attend school and graduate if he did X, Y, and Z. One reason civil courts exist is to enforce contracts. Like every party to a contract, Duke also has an obligation of good faith and fair dealing.
Even though the contract did include terms that the guy could be kicked out for sexual assault, the guy claims that Duke violated their own procedures and didn’t deal fairly and in good faith with him. One allegation is that Duke didn’t update their handbook, which would be unfair dealing. I’m sure the guy is also alleging a whole host of other irregularities during the investigation and hearing, etc.
I really wouldn’t read too much into the judge granting a preliminary injunction forbidding expulsion. There’s precise legal criteria, but roughly, I would think of it as judge just saying (i) there’s no real harm to Duke in having the guy take his finals while this is all sorted out at trial (ii) it would be impossible to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again if the guy won his suit and he was stopped from taking his finals since he would fail all his classes and might not ever get his degree without upending his life for a year (iii) the guy’s suit isn’t a completely crock - he’s got a chance of winning. Preliminary injunctions aren’t that easy to obtain but this is the type of case they were made for.
The judge didn’t think the other public policy concerns, such as having a guy who wasn’t criminally charged attend classes for a few extra days and take finals and possibly see the victim, were that significant. For the same reason, the judge didn’t order Duke to give him his degree since they could always do that later if they lost (the possible job loss and deportation didn’t seem to matter; to be honest I’m not exactly sure what the judge’s reasoning was but it “feels” right to me).
@ ivvsf How do you feel about the fact that the name and photo of the accused has been published in the paper before any determination of guilt has been made, but not only the name but even the institution of the accuser is kept confidential? What if he is, in fact, innocent? What is going to show up every single time someone googles his name?
@marie1234, yes I meant homophobia in the Harvey Milk case probably allowed the jurors to let themselves get convinced by the Twinkie defense.
The same way people don’t want to believe football players, priests, policemen, or any other sympathetic defendant, might be guilty - so they latch onto whatever ridiculous but slightly plausible, argument they might hear.