I have said the accused should win 50/50 cases. The Amherst case is the flip side of this. The accused was so out of it, he didn 't have a defense.
I think the Amherst guy is going to get lucky with the text messages. If the text messages didn’t exist, the accused would be screwed.
The guys can’t be drinking themselves into a stupor. When I was in my 20’s, I saw guys drink themselves into a state that wasn’t consciousness. I wasn’t impressed with that behavior then and I am not now. Guys, you are setting yourself for bad things to happen with this excessive drinking. There aren’t always going to be text messages to bail you out.
I don’t know what Amherst was doing. Makes me wonder how poor the investigations and conclusions were in other cases.
How the colleges attempt to define intoxication is a pivotal point in many of the cases in which the accused claims that he was unfairly found responsible.
I think in many cases judging whether the accuser was too drunk (or incapacitated or intoxicated or impaired) to consent to sexual activity would be difficult for an experienced investigator/prosecutor/judge and impossibly tricky for untrained adjudicators. Again, I’m not talking about victims who were passed out, unconscious, but rather accusers who were walking, talking and functioning, but later claim to have been too drunk to consent.
The adjudicators not only need to determine that in their own opinion the accuser was “too drunk”. They must also determine whether a reasonable person present at the time of the incident would have discerned that the accuser was too drunk to consent. Thus it is not the state of mind of the accused that is in question, but rather the state of mind of the accuser at point in time some weeks, months – or even years – past, a state of mind which is transitory, undefined and unquantifiable.
The adjudicators wouldn’t have been present and barring hard evidence like videos, they must rely on testimony in the form of the observations and communications of people who interacted with the accuser over a period of several hours, before and after the alleged assault.
Witnesses who observed the accuser may themselves have been drinking and are therefore not reliable. They may be strangers with no frame of reference of what would be normal behavior for the accused. They may friends, relatives or advocates who are biased. Texts and emails may be abbreviated, slang-ridden or coded and therefore open to interpretation. In the James Madison case cited below, evidence of incapacitation included a test message sent 24 hours BEFORE the incident!
The after-effects of heavy drinking may play a significant role in regret or remorse driven accusations. Morning after guilt, depression, self-loathing is a common symptom of alcohol abuse, more intense even than the physical misery. Whether women or men feel this more strongly, I couldn’t say having only experienced the female version, but I think the impact of an emotional hangover shouldn’t be underestimated. Young people who simultaneously experiment with sex and experiment with alcohol suffer a double hit of emotional vulnerability and may be unable to separate the emotional impact of casual sex from the emotional impact of heavy drinking. The two are co-dependent.
Unlike courts of law where policies and procedure concerning allowable testimony and evidence are transparent and consistent, colleges may make variable and often capricious decisions on what the adjudicators are allowed to consider. Witnesses may be ignored; messages disallowed.
From the Cornell complaint:
These are a few of the pending cases in which the accused disputes his college’s finding that the accuser was intoxicated to the point of being unable to consent. I think these are somewhat more nuanced than the Occidental or Amherst cases because the accused men, though they may have, like their accusers, consumed alcohol over the course of the evening, were not themselves intoxicated.
I am starting to feel pretty good about the issue of the falsely accused getting screwed. Doesn’t seem like there are that many cases because the same cases are dredged up over and over.
And this idea about going to civil court is laughable. The Duke case is not going to be heard until 2016. Talk about quick justice.
There are probably over 100,000 college women assaulted a year. (Based on college surveys, the number of assaults is larger. I don’t want to exaggerate. I will leave the exaggerating to the a voice for males website). And how many cases are there with the accused suing in civil court? 24? And the accused don’t all win their cases.
Some people like to use the DOJ rape numbers. 2 out of 1,000 college women are raped to say this sexual assault issue is over blown.
That is 1 out of 500 college women are raped. If we are using 6300000 full time women students as the denominator… 12600 women students are raped a year.
There are 24 civil cases going on right now with the accused suing?
24 cases compared to 12600 rapes? 24 compared to over 100,000 sexual assaults.
24 cases?
Are you kidding me?
If there were only 24 college rapes a year, I would agree college rape is not a problem.
This falsely accused issue may not be much of a problem.
It’s certainly a problem for the lets say, 20 individuals who were falsely accused.
And since we can acknowledge we still live in a society that is dominated by men & their interests, who’s to say that 20 men getting justice isn’t more important than thousands of young women who no longer feel safe at their school.
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No system is perfect. There are always going to be a certain percentage of cases that go terribly wrong and the innocent suffer. We often read news stories where people have been incarcerated for years and some new evidence or DNA test absolves them. It’s a horrible scenario but inevitable.
In the past year and a half about 50 complaints have been filed against 40+ colleges. 10 have been settled out of court or found in favor of the plaintiff. 5 were dismissed or found in favor of the college. 30 something are still pending. More are being filed every month.
No, no adjudication system is ever going to be perfect; however, our legal system has established rules and procedures about allowable evidence, how witnesses are questioned, the right to counsel etc. plus a separate body for the convicted to appeal to.
Denying accused students their due process rights is not going to resolve the problem of sexual assault on campus. It just creates another different, but equally serious, problem.
Right and despite all those things we still routinely read about people being wrongly incarcerated for years. If you need confirmation of how terribly wrong things can go for a young male in our criminal justice system take a look at the Kalief Browder thread recently started. A 16 year old boy who spent 3 years on Rikers Island for allegedly stealing a backpack. It is one of the saddest stories I have ever read.
Here are 25 of the men who were wrongly incarcerated for rape or murder by our criminal justice system. All were exonerated through advances in DNA testing.
I lost custody of my kids due to an untrue statement my mother told the police in hopes they would get me psychiatric care( they didn’t), and it took months to get cleared up and my kids still have not forgiven me, fifteen years later.
I didn’t turn to crime, despite being unable to afford bail.
I didn’t even try to post it anyway, because I would have been unable to go home, since I was told I couldn’t see my kids until the court case was done.
I don’t understand how criminal behavior would have helped.
@emeraldkity4: I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m a bit confused by what you wrote though. You don’t have to post bail when children are removed, you have to post bail as a surety to get out of jail pending trial. Plus, if you can’t afford bail you’ll be in jail, so how would you even have the opportunity to turn to crime?
Also, how did this thread turn into a discussion of excessive bail?
I agree that the goal should be justice. But let’s not pretend that the criminal justice system is any less “deeply faulty” and is serving anyone well either. And that is especially true with rape cases.
Many of you do realize that some (not all) of the problems the criminal justice system has with rape cases are the result of evolving societal understanding of what rape (or sexual assault) is, right? The system is designed, quite intentionally, to move slowly because of the serious consequences involved with wrongful convictions. As many of you pointed out, even with a very conservative criminal justice system designed to give every benefit of the doubt to the accused, the system still fails far more than we would all like.
However, the logic of why we should become less conservative and remove many of these protections because of this same evolving understanding of the definition of sexual assault escapes me. Doesn’t it seem rational that if examples of DNA testing showing false convictions in a system that includes the presumption of innocence, the right to discovery and cross examination, and the reasonable doubt standard can be used to show the failure of the system, then it must follow that examples of similarly erroneous decisions reached in a process containing none of those protections shows at least equal problems with the current campus tribunal system?
Now if the argument is that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and that kicking some small number of guys off of campus when they may not have done anything which could be considered criminal, is just a price you are willing to pay so that college girls can feel “safe”, then I can at least understand it. I don’t agree with it, but I can understand it.
That we now have DNA evidence exonerating convicted murders has not made us decide to stop prosecuting murder. Similarly, that we have reason to believe some guys are unjustly expelled should not make us decide to stop expelling rapists. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
@“Cardinal Fang”: It’s a pretty good reason not to keep expelling people with such shoddy investigative and adjudicative work though. Perfection may be the enemy of the good, but shouldn’t we at least try for adequacy?
If you’re saying we should improve the campus sexual assault adjudications, I’m on board. But many here are saying that we should eliminate them. I disagree.
