Stanford football and the non-criminal rape "trial"

[LongTimeListener]

A Majority Agreed She Was Raped by a Stanford Football Player. That Wasn’t Enough.

NYT wrote it up yesterday. Woman says she was raped in 2015, player says it was consensual. Twice, a panel voted 3-2 that it was rape. Because Stanford required four votes for suspension/dismissal, the guy is still there and will play today in the Sun Bowl. (Story doesn't identify him.)

This is written up as a travesty of justice. But she didn't go to the police. She went straight to the school, where who knows what evidentiary standards apply. And their investigation (which I don't believe involved any physical exam or detective work of any kind) clearly turned up little if any conclusive proof.

Stanford has since changed to a three-person panel requiring unanimity. It's one of only two schools that's so strict.

So is that where we are headed? At other schools if it's 2-1 from a non-expert panel that does no investigation, the expulsions commence?

 

[dixiehack]

Oh good. I'm sure one or more prominent poster(s) will have Many Important Thoughts about this.

That said, if it was only a 3-2 vote on preponderance of evidence, the chances of a jury conviction were exceedingly slim.

 

[YankeeFan]

And it's only going to get "worse" with Trump as President:

Some of OCR’s highest-profile investigations have scrutinized how colleges and universities respond to sexual violence.

The Obama administration in 2011 advised colleges in a guidance letter that sexual violence is a form of sexual harassment prohibited under Title IX. The letter also said that schools must respond promptly and equitably to reports of sexual violence and use a standard common in civil law, known as “preponderance of the evidence,” when deciding whether a student broke rules against sexual misconduct. That is a lower standard of proof than the “clear and convincing evidence” benchmark some schools had used.

A woman carries a sign in solidarity with a Stanford University rape victim during graduation at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., in June. Stanford students were protesting the university’s handling of rape cases, alleging that campus officials do not disclose the names of students found to be responsible for sexual assault and misconduct.

 

[YankeeFan]

 

[Dick Whitman]

Oh good. I'm sure one or more prominent poster(s) will have Many Important Thoughts about this.

That said, if it was only a 3-2 vote on preponderance of evidence, the chances of a jury conviction were exceedingly slim.

Cute.

I was right about Jackie. I believed Patrick Kane's accuser - just not enough for you, I guess.

I've challenged you previously for evidence on your assertion that I'm a rape sympathizer. You never answered.

But cute.

 

[dixiehack]

Some trains are never late.

 

[Donny in his element]

Some trains are never late.

A Minnesota assault reference?

 

[Dick Whitman]

Some trains are never late.

Still waiting, Doc boy.

 

[hondo]

The lesson here is to go to the police first. College officials are not trained in criminal investigations.

 

[YankeeFan]

Help the rapists!

 

[Elliotte Friedman]

It is very clear that when it comes to self-policing, many colleges are not properly serving the accused or the accusers.

 

[RickStain]

I mean what the hell are you supposed to do?

If anyone has a procedure that will safeguard and respect the rights of all involved in all cases, I'd be open to hear it.

 

[Smash Williams]

You can't, if you consider a "right" the ability to feel satisfied with the outcome of a particular case. There will be times that the interpretations of what happened come into conflict with no way of knowing what actually happened.

But we decided that a very long time ago that the principle of justice this country is founded on is the presumption of innocence, and for federally-guided investigations (which these are since they're now being pursued under Title IX auspices), that seems like something we should maintain no matter how horrified we are by the nature of the alleged crime.

 

[britwrit]

Eh. Is rape the sort of crime that a panel "drawn from a pool of administrators, faculty members and students" should be handling anyway? I know they can legally, but is it really a good idea?

If the guy had -allegedly- tried to murder her or rob her, they wouldn't have tossed it to the student council treasurer and the vice-chair of the Botany department to deal with. This won't help this woman but better to work with the local police department to encourage victims to come forward.

 

[Alma]

Eh. Is rape the sort of crime that a panel "drawn from a pool of administrators, faculty members and students" should be handling anyway? I know they can legally, but is it really a good idea?

No. But they have no choice, lest they get sued by unnamed victims whose lawyers tend to plead their case through the media, which is more than OK with going along with it.

The law's gonna change. Title IX, that is. It's coming.

 

[dixiehack]

he law's gonna change. Title IX, that is. It's coming.

Make ***** Grabbable Again

I fear you're right.

 

[Alma]

Make ***** Grabbable Again

I fear you're right.

Nah, it has to happen. It needs to be adjusted somehow. Achieving "justice" through a university panel is no kind of progress; you have women avoiding the police and using hearings as a means of avenging what may be serious felonies.

 

[User 11148]

At my university all such conduct hearings -- whether they're for academic dishonesty or for sexual assault -- are decided by a single hearing officer. The hearing process is fairly robust -- the accused can have outside counsel and receives notice of the evidence that will be presented, for example -- but in the end you still wind up with a single person having to decide which side made the slightly better case, and my experience makes me very skeptical about the wisdom of that setup.

I had an academic dishonesty case a couple of years back involving two graduate students cheating on an exam. I had 'em dead to rights, but somehow they convinced the hearing officer that it was entirely innocent. They produced notes they'd supposedly taken in class that exactly matched the question(s) at issue, and as it was an open-book/open-notes test, the hearing officer concluded that the striking similarities in their exam responses reflected these notes. Only trouble was there was no way in hell they took such notes in class, seeing as how we'd not done a problem quite like that; to get the answers, you had to integrate material from separate sections of the course. To have such notes you either: A) anticipated that I'd ask such a question (which was highly unlikely seeing as how I'd done so before); or B) got together and created them ex post because you knew your ass was in a crack. That they were the only two students among the 60 or so in the section to have taken that approach was pretty damning evidence. Had the hearing officer bothered to invite me to participate in the hearing, I could have easily rebutted their ridiculous assertion. But no, this dude had it all figured out.

Who, you might ask, would be the kind of a person who volunteers for that role*? It could be a faculty member (hopefully a senior one). It could be an administrator (hopefully a senior one). Or it could be ... the assistant director of intramural sports. Now before anyone gets his/her panties in a wad, let me be clear that I don't look down on assistant directors of intramural sports. Perhaps in some types of cases they'd be as qualified as any. But universities don't need to be having bottom-echelon employees making such consequential decisions. Suppose you had some graduate student in mathematics get hauled before such a guy, and suppose the guy upheld the charge. Can you imagine the PR nightmare that would follow it getting out that we let assistant directors of intramural sports decide whether so-and-so's work on real algebraic varieties was plagiarized?

Further, think about this with regard to concerns about how expertise is being routinely dismissed in this day and age. To properly weigh such a case -- one involving sexual assault -- requires a lot of expertise about the evidence you'll hear and how you'll process it. It's highly unlikely that anyone on campus has that expertise, yet we empower these hearing officers to proceed as if they do, and we only provide opportunities for them to reach beyond their ignorance ... when they believe it might be a good idea to do so!


*I thought about signing up for the pool but chose not to. You have to go through some training about procedures and the like (all with the intent to protect the university, I'm sure), but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I absolutely am not interested in being the sole and final arbiter on a case of possible sexual assault ... and I don't think anybody else should be, either.