If they find that John did indeed assault Jane then they have forever changed the concept of equality of men and women and have said if all things are equal…the male is the responsible party in a relationship. Blech. That’s a heck of a blow for women.
That’s bs. There are witnesses. For some reasons, the fact there ere are witness doesn’t compute.
Whatever…
dstark, I don’t think your comments directed at @Consolation are pointful because I don’t see a disagreement about the facts of the Oxy case. At least, I see no daylight between what I say happened and what @Consolation says happened. Our disagreement centers around the proper sanctions, if any, that Occidental should have imposed once they had determined the facts.
@dstark, I’ve read the report. It is very clear that everyone knew that both of them were very, very drunk and that they were both hot to trot. It is also clear that despite her friends’ best efforts to extract her from his room and take her back to her own room, she chose to evade them and make her way back to his room with the very clear intention of having sex. Was this a well-considered decision? Of course not.
She knew she had behaved in a way that she subsequently regretted while drunk. He knew the same thing about himself. But only SHE had an administrator with a political agenda meeting with her repeatedly to convince her that she was raped.
It is also true, btw, that John Doe’s roommate said that HE stayed in the room to take care of John Doe because he was so drunk. (Her friends could at least remove her from his room. What was his roommate supposed to do? The guy was in his own room. Throw them all out? Too bad he didn’t.) But somehow that doesn’t count? Because a female bears no responsibility for her own actions, but a guy does?
Hogwash. I agree with @momofthreboys:
Jane performed oral sex on John. John was too drunk to consent. My understanding is that this piece is one of the claims in John’s Title IX complaint against Jane and the university.
It would appear that the college’s investigation was hampered by the reluctance of John Doe’s lawyer to let him fully cooperate. Not surprising, since anything he said could and would be used against him in court, and the fact that the charge was even being brought showed that they were out to get him.
Nevertheless, it is my opinion that the information presented in the report make it clear that no rape occurred. Neither John nor Jane was raped.
I can certainly understand why his complaint includes that claim, though. It goes to the very heart of the gender discrimination practiced by Oxy.
Was he prevented from advancing this accusation while he was at Occidental?
What should a college in an Oxy-like case, except that the accused was sober? A was very very drunk, B was sober, B had not encouraged A to drink, both were active participants?
What if this is the second time B was accused (by different, independent people)? What if it was the third time?
What is so hard to understand that if two drunk kids have sex it might not be criminal. Oxy goofed, screwed up, call it whatever you want but what they did was as insulting to women as it was to men. A few other colleges have done the same thing. Shame on them. I think you’re reaching Fang and Stark…sometimes if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…it is a duck.
@CardinalFang, I’m a bit confused by your post #307
What John did was against the rules at OXY and probably against the law in Calif. Nobody filed charges in Calif.
The case was reported to OXY. OXY hired investigators. Investigators Interviewed students who said They thought Jane was unable to consent. OXY weighed the situation and rules against John. People don’t have to like the rules but that is a different issue.
Nobody filed against Jane so nothing happened to Jane except she now suffers from PTSD.
When people write Jane was just as guilty as John and therefore John should not have been expelled…
Does Oxy have a rule that if both participants are too drunk to consent nobody is punished? lf so, I would love to read the rule.
If OXY does have such a ruie, I will reconsider my thinking.
Unlike some posters, I am not interested in the politics.
Page 2.
That’s game over…
On a similar note…
Stanford is going to have a very aggressive zero tolerance sexual assault policy.
I hope students are going to be informed. There are going to be a lot more expulsions.
@“Cardinal Fang” Those are good questions and ones that I think it is hard to give a blanket answer to. On the one hand you can say “so what if the accused was sober and the accuser was not; the accuser still consented”. If I were judge it would depend on how drunk the person was. I would look at all the facts in totality and judge things like ability to text without errors as proof of mental capacity versus something like throwing up, which might mean nothing at all. They might have been sick, or they could have been drinking on an empty stomach. Even when someone isn’t sick and they are throwing up because they have been drinking it doesn’t always mean that they are so drunk that they are bordering on incapacitation.
On the other hand I can see how a person who stays sober and purposely gets someone drunk has some culpability. It is a bit different from slipping a date rape drug into a drink because the person is knowingly consuming the drink, but I am not sure how I feel about it. It seems at best to be ungentlemanly and at worst to be potentially criminal.
I also don’t like that colleges are taking matters into their own hands and finding fault when the police and prosecutors have determined that either nothing illegal happened, or that there isn’t enough evidence. Yet if it were my kid I would absolutely want the college to do something about it if the police couldn’t. This is one that I am unsure of but I lean toward allowing colleges to do something, I just think they need to fine tune the system. I do know that I might be more lenient for a first offense versus a 2nd or 3rd like your other question.
One of the things I don’t like about these statutes is that they leave too much room for interpretation and too many grey areas. Let’s take the example of a guy who doesn’t drink but has a very longtime girlfriend who he loves but who is a bit of a temper and is not the most stable person in the world. She generally likes sex but loves it when she is drunk. One night they go out and people see her slurring her words and weaving while walking. They go home and have sex like they always do when she gets drunk and super horny.
The next day she finds a text on his phone from another woman and misinterprets it as him having a fling behind her back. They get in a fight and she flips out and files a rape claim saying that she was too drunk to consent. There should be no way that it should even be possible that he could be found guilty of rape but with some of these statutes make me think a guy like that would be skating on this ice.
If it were even close to being against the law don’t you think the police or prosecutor would have filed charges. She filed with the police and they found that no crime had been committed. That should be the first clue that Oxy/the lawyer erred, since Oxy’s policy is based on CA law (it may even be identical).
I would disagree. I would say it was decided because the lawyer who made the decision took the testimony of a couple of witnesses over the testimony of a couple of others.
Same comment as above re the witnesses, but what in the world does page 2 have to do with anything?
I only remember 1 other witness who said anything like that and even they said they they “were worried she would do something that she might regret”. That is different than not being able to give consent. Worlds apart.
After reading that investigative report I am even more astounded at the ruling. You have people saying the she was drunk but no more than anyone else, and not extremely so. You have people giving different versions of the same event. In one case there were 3 witnesses to an event. One witness remembers it in a way that would help Jane’s case. One says they don’t remember the details. The 3rd person remembers it in a way that would be beneficial to John’s case.
I will state unequivocally that based on the testimony of everyone involved that I would never have found him guilty.
I will also say that the fact that he was more drunk than she was and that she was the aggressor in many instances makes me wonder why she wasn’t found at fault and not him. And don’t give me the line about “he didn’t press charges”. College tribunals hear cases where no specific person has made a complaint.
Finally, my biggest reason for saying that she was not incapacitated is the fact that some witnesses put her at simply drunk at the time of the sexual encounter and her texts prove to me that she was not utterly wasted. However, all the witnesses clearly put her as very, very drunk 1-2 hours later at a time when physical evidence like text messages confirm that she had less coordination than in her texts around the time of the sexual act.
Had they had sex when she was at the point of intoxication that she was at around 3 am I might be inclined to agree. I certainly would if a guy was sober or even just drunk.
In #307, I meant this situation: Chris is sober. Jordan is very very drunk, extremely drunk, slurring, stumbling, doesn’t put spaces between words when texting, puking drunk. They have sex, with both of them actively involved. Then Jordan says Jordan was incapacitated, and accuses Chris of sexual misconduct in having this sex. What do you do?
What if Jordan accuses Chris, and three months later Lee accuses Chris of the same thing, and the next fall, first week of freshman year, freshman Casey accuses Chris of the same thing? (Assume that you don’t think these accusations are linked in any way.)
TV4, you interpreted the questions as I meant them.
Of the rapes and attempted rapes reported to LAPD from 2005-2009, 4.8% resulted in any jail or prison time for a perpetrator. Of the rapes and attempted rapes reported to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in that same period, 8.9% resulted in any jail or prison time for a perpetrator. The sheriffs, the police and the prosecutors all say that in some cases, they believed the accuser, but they did not proceed because they didn’t think they could get a conviction. These crimes are, in aggregate, much more violent than the typical cases reported to a college- more than half the attackers beat up their victims, and a substantial percentage used a gun, a knife or another weapon, and yet still, the vast majority don’t culminate in a conviction.
Going to the police is unlikely to result in swift justice for a true accuser. If you’re running a college, do you really want to keep someone on campus if even the police believe he raped another student?
@Cardinal Fang No I don’t. I certainly don’t want Chris around. I also don’t want a kid on campus who police tell administration that they think committed rape but that they just can’t prove it. I do want a kid like John around who I think did nothing wrong. I am not sure how you differentiate between the two other than letting me decide all cases 
In general though, even though I said I was conflicted, I think I lean toward throwing them out if there is good evidence but not “reasonable doubt” standard.
I am also not surprised that too many guys get off in he said/she said cases because of the way our system is set up (that’s the downfall of a system that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt). I am surprised that if more than half of the attacker beat up their victims that there isn’t a higher conviction rate. Any guy that was on trial and evidence showed that the woman was injured would be in jail if I was on the jury because there would be no way a he said/she said defense would be possible.
I should also add that if I was a policeman I would believe the accuser and work hard to prove her case since so few women make up rape allegations. If the evidence led me in the other direction then so be it. I would judge each case on its merits (as CF likes to say) but I would go in with the assumption of the victim telling the truth.
@dstark, in my view you find injustice astonishingly easy to justify. If Jane Doe has PTSD, it is most likely because of the aftermath of the event in which a college administrator talked her into thinking she had been raped and then she was unnecessarily put through the subsequent investigation and adjudication. Imagine her feelings (and his) when a routine drunken encounter which everyone else would have forgotten about within a week was turned into the big campus scandal, their friends and dorm mates were being questioned, her texts were being collected, her behavior on the night recounted over and over, etc, etc. I’m willing to bet that she is suffering from hideous embarrassment.
I know PLENTY of young women who had drunk sex back in the day–including myself–including people for whom it was their first sexual experience, who certainly weren’t suffering from PTSD. If the young woman was in fact that troubled by her decision to get drunk and have sex, she would have benefited a hell of a lot more from counselling, and possibly mediation, than she did from that charade. The college did neither of them any favors, but the administrator who caused the whole mess had the satisfaction of seeing her political goals fulfilled. Until he filed suit…
If I were judge and jury, I’d suspend John and Jane for a semester (presuming that John was demonstrated to be as drunk as Jane)-- I told them it was an offense to have sex with really drunk fellow students, and they did it anyway, and I’d give them a semester to think about it. Chris would be gone.
I don’t think police get to say such things. That’s why colleges do their own investigations.
I’ve come to believe that preponderance of the evidence is too strict, though it is the standard for civil cases. But “clear and convincing” evidence is enough for me.
No I don’t, and neither should you. Your estimate of how frequently the police file charges based on rape reports is way off. LAPD, years 2005-2009, 5031 rapes and attempted rapes reported, charges filed in 486 of them.