@mom2twogirls post #64
“Eramo decided to initiate action with Charlottesville Police and the prosecutor’s office on September 15th.”
“One very useful thing that I learned from a quick search: If you are uncertain about whether someone is experiencing blackout, a good test is to ask them about something that happened 15 minutes ago. If they are experiencing blackout, they generally won’t be able to answer.”
@awcntdb My quote that you referenced in post #231 was in response to the above quote which offered “a good test” to assess is someone is experiencing a blackout. My point being to expect someone to assess it ( especially a young adult) is impossible at the time of the blackout.
I think mom2twogirls has intentionally or inadvertently made the point why yes means yes is a sketchy burden to try and prove on surface and why I’m much more in favor of no means no. Hopefully we’re still teaching no means no…even if on some wing and a prayer we’re trying to “define” how consent can be proved on a legal level.
Does anyone know if the man will return for his sophomore year or if he transferred elsewhere?
Ha @MaterS that shows my memory filled in missing info too! I missed the dates the first time and remembered reading her say something about “over time” and my memory filled in the rest, must be.
I am the source of the quotation about the test for blackout, based on my internet reading and an NPR interview (in May or June 2106) with a woman who had experienced multiple black-outs, and had recently written an autobiography. To appearances, she was functioning while she was actually in black-out.
I am not ready to write-off the possibility of detecting black-out while the person is still in the black-out state. I agree that the characteristic is that long-term memories are not being made.
If a person walks into a diagnostician’s office in a state of black-out, I would think that ipso facto it is not detectable right away. The diagnostician does not know what has happened an appropriate long-term-memory interval ago.
However, long-term memory does not necessarily refer to events that happened 24 hours or more ago. A shift from short-term memory to long-term memory can happen more quickly than that.
Realizing that the internet is not the most reliable source of information (cough), I still think that it is worth examining whether black-out can be detected in an interval between (say) 15 minutes and one hour, based on loss of memory of the preceding period.
As people seem to be figuring out, consent can be dicey business, especially when people are impaired. One of the problems with these kinds of cases is there is often no way to know what happened, it comes down to what one person says versus another, and with things like alcohol there is no legal standard to be able to consent or not. With driving, there is a standard that is based on studies showing at what level alcohol impairs driving to the point of being unsafe. With sex, we have standards (though not particularly scientific) on what age someone can consent to sex…but with this? It often comes down to the word of the accuser that they were too drunk to say yes, and the accused (usually a boy) is assumed to have taken advantage. Others make a good point, if two people are drunk and have sex, which one is the aggrieved party if both are drunk? Couldn’t in this case the girl have been the one who was the agressor?
Given what I have posted on these topics, that doesn’t mean I think that there isn’t an issue or that I don’t think some or more than a few of these cases are real, and speaking from personal experience, there are a lot of men , young or otherwise, who are like Brock Turner, who assume it is their right to have sex with a woman and if she is blotto, well, doesn’t matter, that arrogance is still out there, and I think that sadly is why young men often get caught up in a situation they shouldn’t, like this one. Too, the university procedures often don’t have the same standard they do in a court of law, in university settings they can decide someone is guilty on a level of evidence that boils down to simply the accused was drunk, the alleged victim was drunk, so of course it must be date rape.
I wish the justice department would come up with guidelines on this that need to be met, so these things aren’t kangaroo courts (or worse, the opposite, like University of Florida and other sports programs suborning any kind of process with big time jocks). I heard one suggestion that kind of gave me a chuckle, someone suggested that when it comes ot sex that if a person has been drinking, consider them to be like an underage person, not able to consent…if they used that as the basis for rape, they would need to rent out a country the size of France to house all the inmates…not to mention, of course, getting back to another of the ideas in this thread, if both are drunk,. who raped who? Is the boy (since these cases are overwhelmingly men being accused) automatically the one who was responsible? Is it that we have these medieval notions out there that women are automatically the victim in situations like these and the boy a sexual predator?
There aren’t easy questions. No, the Brock Turner case is not the same, in that he had sex with her when she was passed out, there is no question there that consent was not there. But when it is in a gray area like this, the university should be applying the standards used in the law, and if there is conflicting testimony, if it appears that it is pretty much totally he said she said, then it should come down to the same standards as in the law, if there isn’t enough evidence to charge someone, then drop it.
There is another side to this, too, that I wonder if it would work. Given that the drinking age is 21, and a lot of these incidents involve students under the age of 21, how about enforcing underage drinking rules, and punish both sides in a case like this where they cannot determine if sexual assault happened. I realize that there would be a downside to this, that the university would be afraid that victims would be afraid to press charges if they faced penalties for drinking if they don’t charge the alleged perpetrator because there isn’t enough evidence, but maybe universities have to put some teeth into drinking restrictions to stop these kinds of things. i understand schools don’t want to be in loco parentis or be in the positition of being Carrie Nation, but given how often sexual assault accusations revolve around alcohol, maybe they should go after the supply side, in the sense that alcohol provides a supply of these kinds of incidents. If kids know that they face consequences for underage drinking, maybe it will help prevent incidents like this…when these things come down to one persons word against another, when because of the pressure out there schools have a lot of reasons to find the accused guilty, you end up with more than a few innocent people caught up in this.
From the article:
At least one person evidently tried the handle or knocked on the door. The investigators would have tried to find that person or persons. If you believe that the freshman was making it up, how did it come to the attention of the student who climbed out on the roof and knocked on the window? Clearly, because people were trying to get into the bathroom and couldn’t. I simply do not believe that he would have taken such a step if only one person couldn’t get in when they wanted to.
Not on the same point, but another witness statement that she was not only consenting, but inviting:
Sure, she could have changed her mind. But that means the guy on the roof is also a liar, as well as the freshman. And of course since she has no memory, she isn’t even claiming that she changed her mind. On the other hand, there is witness evidence that she was not only consenting, but actively initiating:
As I said earlier, I am very sorry for her. But I think that trying to pin it all on him is, frankly, dishonorable.
Well it’s a tad difficult to investigate an accusation without the first question being “tell me what happened”…and it’s a tad difficult to use the 50.01% standard of college jurisdiction without assigning some percent of negligence to each side since you have to somehow get to 50.01%. So here we sit. I believe the outcome in this case was correct.
It didn’t say anyone knocked. It just didn’t say that. He believed he heard someone try to enter. We don’t know if the tried a handle or if someone bumped against the door or if someone knocked. We don’t know why the other student climbed onto a roof to knock on a window. This story didn’t say. I would hope they asked him. I would hope they asked him how much he had been drinking, to ascertain his own drunkenness and reliability. I would hope they asked him if he saw this couple in the bathroom or if he only heard a voice say something. To speculate is fine but it doesn’t make it evidence.
She could have said she wasn’t feeling well and asked him to help her back to her apartment. The person who over heard may have only overheard part of it. The guy could have been on the roof because he was a drunk guy who wanted to scare someone in the bathroom. See how speculation works?
wrong thread sorry.
At least I didn’t call anybody a slut. 
@mom2twogirls Yes we see how speculation works. The ruling reflects that they saw this also because the WHOLE accusation is speculation. It would make perfect sense that the girl consented with the guy and they went to the bathroom where they had a normal sexual encounter. It would also make perfect sense that she lost her ability to consent after getting too drunk. The thing is, we will never know. And if we will never know then it makes zero sense to convict the guy of rape when she doesn’t even know. And in response to you saying
“We don’t know why the other student climbed onto a roof to knock on a window. This story didn’t say.”
I think it is pretty obvious. At a party like this one, people will definitely want to go to the bathroom, and when the door is locked and people are inside, others will most certainly investigate. Which is also why his story of people tried to open the door and later went onto the roof makes sense in a logical way.
It is very much a cautionary tale. Maybe 2 or 3 years ago but there are been just too many lawsuits lately, and UVa has had their share, for the university to anymore do less than a thorough job before assigning blame and punishment for college sexual encounters without verifiable facts. There are still many more lawsuits to settle including the Jack Montague Yale suit and the FIRE suit before we see the full affect, but I’m feeling alot better about things now than I was 3 years ago. I’m actually even close to letting colleges participate with police in these types of situations…still not there with colleges acting alone and not in tandem.
There are still several hours left in the day, @dstark. 
Well when he did do that the other day all I could think of was Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin on SNL and I could not get that visual or sound bite out of my head…now it’s back but I’m sure it’s meant with affection
Who is he?
“However, long-term memory does not necessarily refer to events that happened 24 hours or more ago. A shift from short-term memory to long-term memory can happen more quickly than that.”
The window on “short” term memory is about two minutes. Which is enough window so that the blacked out person can respond to questions and carry on a conversation. So the blacked out person appears (and in fact is) is fully conscious and functional (but somewhat drunk). They just have their archiving function disabled.
But since they are operating with drunken impairment and disinhibition, they often choose to do stupid or unwise things – crazy dancing, bad karaoke, drunk dialing and texting, brawling, drunk driving, sketchy sex. Most/all of which they won’t remember in the morning.
Based on my years of bar tending, the most telling sign that someone is blacked out is that they keep repeating themselves. “Hey barkeep, did I tell you the one about XYZ?” Yeah you did; several times actually.
@northwesty, did you see guys pick up women who were unable to give consent?
Did you see customers with vacant eyes or did you stop serving before they got that way?
@mom2girls, your speculation is simply silly in this case.
The article presents a very careful narrative in an orderly, logical manner. It says that the older student FIRST became aware that people were in the bathroom and THEN climbed out on the roof in order to access the window. Once there, he looked in, saw people having sex, and banged on it, telling them to break it up. He says she said “give us a minute.” (I may not be quoting precisely.)
You are making up some wacko story in which a random drunken guy spends the party climbing around on the roof for no reason, other than looking for people to scare. Give me a break. Most likely the reason he climbed out to look through the window was because, getting no response at the door, he was checking to make sure someone wasn’t passed out inside. This was a small house. It may have been the only bathroom. There were a LOT of people at the party. Let’s be sensible.
The article already quoted a guy whose job it was to keep an eye on what was going on, make sure people weren’t throwing up all over the place, passing out on the lawn, etc, etc.
Eventually the report may become available, and then these details may be clearer. In the meantime, there is no need to distort the vetted facts that are known
How do you know this was a small house?