Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Add Reply
Blog and Media Roundup - Wednesday, December 16, 2015; News Roundup
Topic Started: Dec 16 2015, 05:08 AM (130 Views)
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.heraldsun.com/


Durham's police chief search process scrutinized

Some 32 people spoke out Monday about what they wanted to see in the city’s new police chief, however at the end of the meeting they found out that two more meetings were being held — one that was open to the public Tuesday, Dec. 15 and another on the same day that wasn’t open to the public.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/12/police-get-federal-guidance-on-gender-bias-in-sexual-assault-cases/420576/

Police Get Federal Guidance On Gender Bias in Sexual Assault Cases

A 26-page guide from the U.S. Justice Department outlines criteria for investigating rape claims—especially when cops are the alleged attackers.

Brentin Mock @brentinmock Dec 15, 2015

On December 10, Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted on 18 counts of rape and assault after over a dozen African-American women reported that he sexually abused them under threat of arrest. Speaking with The Oklahoman newspaper after the verdict, Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty said that his biggest takeaway from the trial was that “the system does work.”

Perhaps he was referencing that particular court trial, but it’s not clear that the criminal justice system works for everyone. There were 18 counts of rape or assault of five of the women that Holtzclaw was cleared of, and attorneys for the women say there were other victims who were afraid to come forward. Almost all of the women had been arrested in the past on drug or prostitution offenses, which prosecutors in the case argued was the reason Holtzclaw preyed on them: No one would believe the words of women with criminal records.

It was, in fact, the testimony of a woman with no criminal history that sparked the investigation into Holtzclaw, which led to his firing earlier this year and the ensuing criminal charges against him. Yet while there has been plenty of focus on this one police officer, there’s evidence of a wider culture of police sexual abuse—through direct attacks by cops and through coverups by fellow officers. An Associated Press investigation found last month that over a thousand police officers were fired between 2009 and 2014 for rape and other sexual misconduct. This is most certainly an under-count, the media outlet acknowledged, for a number of reasons, including police intimidation and fear of retaliation.

"It's so underreported, and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them," Sarasota, Florida, police chief Bernadette DiPino told the Associated Press.

To address that, the U. S. Justice Department just issued new guidelines on identifying and preventing “gender bias” among police officers. The federal agency defines gender bias as a form of discrimination that ends up with women receiving less legal protection than would men when the police estimation of an incident is colored by factors such as ignorance about transgender issues, whether a woman is a sex worker, or whether a woman is intoxicated.

Just 26 pages long, the Justice Department isn’t presenting the guidance as an exhaustive list of steps local law enforcement agencies should take to root out these biases. Instead, it’s a list of principles for local police departments to adopt should they choose to take up addressing gender bias in practices and policies. Much of the guidance builds upon lessons learned from police departments in New Orleans and Missoula, both of which DOJ flagged in recent years for patterns of sexual misconduct.

While most of the document deals with how police should treat women when investigating sex crimes involving intimate partners or unknown civilian assailants, one of the principles does speak directly to sex crimes involving police. Reads the DOJ report:

Law enforcement agencies strive to be seen by their communities as credible and legitimate authorities in enforcing the law and protecting public safety. If a law enforcement agency does not fully investigate reports of sexual assault, sexual misconduct and domestic violence perpetrated by its own officers, or fails to appropriately discipline officers when those allegations are substantiated, the legitimacy of that law enforcement agency may be called into question. This, in turn, may make victims more reluctant to report crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence, which undermines public safety by increasing the risk of future harm from offenders who are not held accountable by the criminal justice system.

To this end, DOJ is recommending that police departments “at a minimum … open an internal investigation whenever an allegation is made that an officer has engaged in sexual abuse, sexual misconduct or domestic violence, irrespective of whether the officer was acting in his or her official capacity at the time,” and also that they refer sexual misconduct claims to local prosecutors.

The underlying problem the guideline aims at addressing, though, is how police officers determine a victim’s credibility when reporting a sexual crime, whether the attacker is wearing a badge or not. As was the case with Holtzclaw’s victims, black women’s accusations are often received under a cloud of skepticism, especially if they’ve had past run-ins with the law. As Treva Lindsey wrote of the Holtzclaw trial for Cosmopolitan:

The racial identities of Holtzclaw's accusers fit within a long history of systemic sexual violence against black women. His role as a police officer gave him a specific kind of power and authority with which to engage his accusers. He could threaten them with arrest or incarceration, or convince them that no one would believe them because of any past encounters they had with law enforcement or with their drug addictions. … Framing these women as liars and as criminally inclined builds upon a tendency not to see black women as victims. In stark contrast to the accusers, the defense attorney described Holtzclaw as an "all-American good guy.”

Black women in the sex work industry who’ve leveled rape charges that turned out to be unfounded—the woman at the center of the 2006 Duke lacrosse players scandal, for example—often are held up as the standard by which all black women’s rape accusations are held. Other tales of the sexual abuse of black women are immediately tagged as pure fantasy, as was the case with Aziah "Zola" Wells, who posted a Twitter saga about two exotic dancers who were essentially kidnapped for sex work—though many of the more violent elements turned out to be true.

But these few cases obscure the history of state-sanctioned rape of black women, often by deputies of the law, that Lindsey pointed to in Cosmpolitan. Wrote law professor Jeffrey Povorak in a 2006 article for the Nevada Law Journal:

For most of this nation's history, raping a Black woman was simply not a crime. First, laws prevented the prosecution of any offender for the rape of a slave woman. At the same time, the rape of a White woman by a Black man was treated with especial violence. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were proposed and ratified as vehicles to ensure the equal protection of the laws. After their enactment, although the de jure prohibition on prosecuting the rape of Black women ended, de facto barriers to prosecution remained.

The potent rape meta-narrative of a stranger who is a Black man violently assaulting a White woman continues to infect prosecutorial decisions. This influence is in part the product of prosecutors relying on system outcome bias regarding assessments of "convictability. " Such "down streaming " is the practice of considering at charging what prejudices and biases hypothetical jurors will employ when judging whether a rape victim is credible.

Such biases have stopped many women from coming forward when sexually abused by professionals in positions of authority, as recently reported in the case of housing tenants fearing eviction. The DOJ guidance doesn’t address gender biases as practiced by prosecutors, judges and juries, but says addressing it at this level is “critical to ensuring that justice is served.”

Many people who were following the Holtzclaw trial thought that justice would not be served, given that the jury was all white and all of the victims were black with checkered pasts. Oklahoma City Artists for Justice co-founder Grace Franklin told The Oklahoman, “There was a huge concern in the African-American community about a jury being able to really see the evidence and be able to look past what the defense was presenting about the women.”

The jury pulled through for the women, but there are still outstanding questions about how Holtzclaw was able to get to victim number two, let alone victim number 13. A system can’t be considered “working” if the focus is only on
“a few bad apples” as opposed to the entirety of police culture, as Kimberlé Crenshaw, author of the #SayHerName report on black women and police violence, recently told CityLab.

Robert Muhammad raised questions about this when speaking with The New York Times about the Holtzclaw trial. “What about his supervisors? … Where are the checks and balances, the audit system that shows accountability for our police and for our tax dollars?”
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.dailyprogress.com/starexponent/bill-co-authored-by-kaine-will-fund-k--education/article_5ca0ea98-a11a-11e5-a0d6-a74334445964.html

Bill co-authored by Kaine will fund K-12 education on safe relationships

Posted: Saturday, December 12, 2015 4:50 pm

Provisions of U.S. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine’s Teach Safe Relationships Act were signed into law this week as a rider on the Every Student Succeeds Act, making public funds available for elementary and secondary school instruction about sexual assault and safe relationships.

Packaged within the bill that replaces the No Child Left Behind Act, the provisions open Title IV funds for grants that encourage instruction and training on safe relationship behavior among teenagers and young adults. The former Virginia governor’s bill was first introduced in February with Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.

“I believe it will help prevent sexual assault, not just on college campuses, but for anybody in the 16 to 24 age range, who are most vulnerable,” Kaine said.

Kaine said he met with University of Virginia students after Rolling Stone published a 9,000-word article about sexual assaults at universities across the country, primarily using UVa as an example of “rape culture” that exists on college campuses.

Although the story was later discredited by authorities and a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism report, Kaine said Wednesday that many of the story’s “statistics were correct.”

Earlier this year, Kaine said the Justice Department estimated 290,000 Americans each year are victims of rape or sexual assault. Advocates suggest the number of victimizations is higher because many incidents go unreported.

According to the FBI, 116,645 rapes were reported to police in 2014. The Bureau of Justice Statistics in August said the rate of intimate partner violence — which includes crimes committed by current or former spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends — was 2.4 per 1,000 people in 2014.

Last December, Kaine met with about 30 members of One Less, an all-female UVa student group dedicated to sexual assault prevention, shortly after Rolling Stone published its story. Kaine said the meeting was private and excluded media and university administrators and faculty.

“These students didn't all agree with each other about various points, but the goal was to get a sense from them about what we in Congress could do that would be helpful and what were things we might want to do that would make us feel good but wouldn't be helpful,” Kaine said.

“Many great ideas came out of that discussion, but there was one in particular that grabbed my attention,” he said, alluding to what became the basis for the bill.

Even though brief announcements regarding public safety — including sexual assault and harassment — are given to first-year students during orientation, advocates who met with Kaine last year said those lessons often get buried in the excitement and overwhelming amount of information that’s disseminated at the start of the academic year to newly arrived students.

This past semester, all UVa students were required to complete two new online training modules about sexual assault and alcohol abuse. According to UVa, the two-part “Not on Our Grounds: Sexual Assault Education Module” fulfills federal requirements for colleges and universities. The module includes “key definitions, statistics and suggested strategies for bystander intervention.”

“It is important to provide education early on because these are issues that can affect students before they even enter college,” said Clare Driggs, a member of One Less.

“Hearing the message before college will help students be prepared when they enter the new environment and might give them an opportunity to intervene or offer support to survivors even before college,” Driggs said. “We are excited to see the issue being addressed on a national level, and we feel honored to have gotten the opportunity to talk to Sen. Kaine about it.”

Driggs said that both One Less and One in Four, an all-male sexual assault prevention student organization, have been meeting with first-year students in their dorms to create a “comfortable peer-to-peer environment to foster discussion on the difficult topics and establish norms” about appropriate relationship behavior.

Earlier this year, the Teach Safe Relationships Act received endorsements from a number of advocacy groups, including the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.

The Sexual Assault Resource Agency, a Charlottesville-based education and advocacy group that is accredited by the alliance, applauded the passage of the provisions from Kaine’s bill.

“A lot of work is being done on college campuses to lessen the amount of sexual violence. Unfortunately, by that time in a young adult’s life, their values and beliefs related to sexual violence may already be solidified,” said Rebecca Weybright, executive director for SARA.

Serving Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Nelson, Louisa, Fluvanna and Greene, SARA says it reaches approximately 550 survivors and 1,100 students each year through its advocacy programs and support services.

“Expanding this work to students in K-12 provides the opportunity to talk with children — with age-appropriate topics and language — about protective factors, consent, identifying trusted people, the impact of gender norms and more,” Weybright said. “This education gives us a chance to send young people forward with better skills for identifying inappropriate behavior and knowing what to do when they see this.”

Other provisions that Kaine authored in the Every Student Succeeds Act are expected to strengthen career and technical education and preschool programs in schools nationwide.

According to Kaine’s press office, the bill adds career and technical education as a core academic subject and allows states to apply for a grant to develop such education with academic studies and support professional development for teachers of such programs.

The bill also authorizes the Preschool Development Grant, which states can use to bolster early childhood programs. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will administer the program in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education.

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/protesters-demand-an-investigation-into-the-durham-county-jail/Content?oid=4946426


Protesters demand an investigation into the Durham County jail
By Billy Ball
@billy_k_ball
12/16/15

The top bunk is ideal for stretching out your orange, jail-issued jumper to dry in the fleeting sunlight after you wash the garment in the toilet. Given that prisoners at the Durham County Detention Center don't have washing facilities for the two outfits they're given when jailed, this humiliating ritual is sometimes the only option.

"It was hell," says Rick Alston, 36, who spent more than a month behind bars this year for a probation violation. "I wouldn't put anyone through that."

His stay in the county jail—which mostly houses prisoners awaiting trial—came during the facility's controversial seven-month "lockback," a crackdown ordered by Sheriff Mike Andrews in early March that, at its worst, confined detainees to their cells for all but two hours a day, every other day.

Andrews said he was responding to gang threats and increased violence in the jail, which housed 487 prisoners as of last week. It was a necessary measure, he argued.

Perhaps, but Alston remembers the sheer humiliation of the toilet scrubs, and how he was forced to use a small sink to bathe himself when he was confined to his cell. He says he spent each day lying on the top bunk, gazing out the window. The guards, he says, mocked prisoners and ignored detainees with mental illness.

"f*ck them Confederate bastards down there at the jailhouse," he says. "They treat you like slaves."

The allegedly unsanitary conditions are just one of many complaints lobbed these days at the detention center, a draconian frown of a building that, for the past year, has been beset weekly by protesters demanding reform.

When the protests began this spring, at the onset of the lockback, only a handful were in attendance. But last Thursday, the movement seemed to be gaining momentum.

More than three dozen gathered, holding handmade signs and banging drums. One sign read, "We believe the prisoners." Above, on multiple floors of the spare, stone building, orange-clad detainees huddled at clouded, barred windows, waving down at protesters.

One of the protesters, Rafiq Zaidi of Durham, waved back, then urged on a pair of activists clattering on homemade drums. Bang loud enough to be heard at the opulent Durham Performing Arts Center across the street, he told them. "Let it affect sales for The Lion King. They'll jump then."

This protest came just three days after two Durham detention officers were accused of pinning down a handcuffed prisoner and beating her in the head with closed fists.

Although the prisoner acknowledged starting the scuffle, officers Anita Louise Alston (no relation to Rick) and Rachel L. Smith were both fired and charged with assault and misdemeanor obstruction of justice, according to the Durham County Sheriff's Office, which oversees the facility.

(The INDY has requested a report of the incident from the sheriff's office, but spokeswoman Tamara Gibbs said this week that her office would not be able to turn over any information, as the case was being investigated by the District Attorney's office.)

"Detention Officers work in a very difficult and complex environment," Andrews said in a statement. "Many times they work in a Pod and supervise 50 or more persons, some of whom are hostile and suffer from mental difficulties. It is important that detention officers follow Sheriff's Office guidelines when interacting with the inmate population."

This altercation, which took place in September, was an isolated, momentary lapse, the sheriff's office says. But for the protesters, it was affirmation that something is awry at Durham's county jail.

"Folks in Durham are required to treat their pets better than we treat folks here," says newly elected Durham City Councilwoman Jillian Johnson, who joined last week's protest.

For months, prisoners' rights advocates have complained about conditions within the county jail, the alleged abuse by guards and the long hours prisoners were sequestered in their cold cells, all in a facility that primarily houses pre-trial defendants who haven't been convicted of anything.

Andrews, citing improving conditions, ended the lockback in October.

But protesters say it's not enough. Last week, they announced the formation of a "jail investigation team," made up of prisoners' rights advocates and past inmates and their family members. The group is demanding a full inspection of the jail, including its medical care, dining facilities, cells and showers, as well as in-person visits with at least 100 inmates to administer a survey.

Protesters are also calling for monthly revenue reports from the jail's contracted medical, phone and food vendors—whom they've accused of bilking prisoners with unfair prices, such as $11 for a care-package cheeseburger—and all guard-inmate grievance reports filed in the jail. (The INDY requested those reports, too. The sheriff's office was unable to produce them by press time).

The group says county-contracted services at the jail, provided by companies like the Pennsylvania-based food distributor Aramark, take advantage of the detainees, relying on unpaid prisoners working in the cafeteria without pay.

Additionally, prisoners in need of medical or mental health services say their requests for assistance often go unanswered. If a response does come, protesters say, inmates receive a short visit from a doctor, which typically ends with the doctor offering a $20 tablet of Tylenol. Prisoners who can't pay are offered nothing.

In addition, activists point out, this year county officials agreed to a $2 million budget increase for the facility at Andrews' request, in part to help make jail cells "suicide-resistant," although no additional funds were allotted for mental health treatment.

The sheriff's office points out that prisoners' mental health is governed by the Durham County Department of Public Health, not the DCSO.

Protesters counter that mental health was especially important during the lockback, and that is the DCSO's responsibility. Although county jail inmates typically share cells and state law only mandates that prisoners be allowed out of their cells for one hour at a time at least three days a week, activists likened the lockback to solitary confinement, a controversial practice often associated with deteriorating mental health.

Prisoners, including Alston, say they witnessed multiple suicide attempts in the jail, with detainees leaping from a second-floor railing. Jail officials reported 12 suicide attempts at the detention center this year. None were successful.

Councilwoman Johnson says the allegations at the jail, if true, are a fundamental violation of the principle of "innocent until proven guilty."

On Friday, Durham County Board of Commissioners Chairman Michael Page told the INDY he would propose an investigation of the jail to his board in the coming weeks, although he declined to say who would lead such a probe.

"We have not been able to determine any wrongdoing," Page says. "But we have to talk seriously about an independent investigation."

Still, Page stops short of openly criticizing Andrews' office. "I have no reason to believe [the sheriff's office is] not telling us what is going on over there," he says. "And this is not a Hilton. It's not an Embassy Suite hotel. This is a jail."

Andrews' office, however, has been relatively quiet. The sheriff would not agree to an interview last week, but in a statement, Andrews pointed out the facility is subject to multiple scheduled inspections each year by state and federal officials.

Andrews also said he has requested a "thorough inspection" of the jail early next year by the National Institute of Corrections, a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Justice. He added that the Department of Public Health will also investigate the nutritional value of jail meals.

"This is a difficult season for our community as it works to address violent crime," Andrews said in a statement. "The incarcerated are my responsibility. I would encourage the community to join me and other law enforcement agencies in our fight to prevent such crime and to eliminate the need for detention facilities."

Andrews' office did not say, however, whether it would allow protesters and activists to inspect the detention center.

Umar Muhammad, a community organizer for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, says Durham residents are right to be concerned about the jail.

"There are brothers and sisters here who need us," Muhammad says. "People take a plea bargain so they can hurry up and get to the state pen, just so they can get some salt and pepper."

Durham resident Cynthia Fox, whose son spent more than a year in the jail on robbery charges for which he was later convicted, says her son told her of filthy, unkempt cells, unwashed showers and verbally abusive guards.

Fox chides local leaders and law enforcement for failing to take any action despite months of public protests. "The sheriff and county commissioners have shown that they don't believe prisoners," Fox says. "We do."

Durham resident Deborah Chapman says she had a similar experience in the detention center in 2006, when she was held for seven months on assault charges. Detention officers, she says, scoffed at prisoners and were overly aggressive during altercations.

"They come in ready to attack like they're attacking animals," Chapman says.

Chapman recalls the unwashed prison jumpers, too. "I remember women walking around with bloodstains on their clothes."

But what Alston remembers most is the feeling. He says the Durham County Detention Center changed him, and not for the better.

"It makes you feel like a pit bull being trained to kill," he says. "People talk to you. I don't care if it's your mother, a guard or the president of the United States. I don't care what the f*ck someone's saying. You just want to attack them."
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-search-for-durhams-next-police-chief-gets-off-to-a-rocky-start/Content?oid=4946432


The search for Durham’s next police chief gets off to a rocky start
By David Hudnall
12/16/15

Given the Durham Police Department's scandal-plagued recent history—accusations of racial profiling, the mysterious shooting of a teenager in the back of a squad car, the forced resignation of Police Chief Jose Lopez in September—you'd think the first public forum seeking input on Lopez's replacement would be teeming with fire-breathing protesters.

Nope. Instead, about 30-odd citizens—a third of them either local media or politicians—turned up Monday night at the Holton Resource Center in East Durham. A representative from Developmental Associates, the firm tapped to manage the selection process, had to ask the crowd to move to the front of the auditorium, like a lead singer on a weeknight in Duluth.

Developmental Associates president Steve Straus opened things up by explaining, in fairly satisfying detail, how things will move forward between now and April, when Lopez's successor is expected to be named. There will be a multi-stage screening process that will include government officials, police chiefs from other cities in the region and even regular citizens, he promised. It all sounded rigorous and logical.

Next, former N.C. Central police chief Willie Williams, now a senior consultant with Developmental Associates, roamed the room with a microphone, allowing those who wished to speak three minutes to say their peace.

Most simply voiced displeasure with the current state of the DPD—implicit bias, rumors of checkpoints aimed at Hispanics, marijuana enforcement and other strains of overzealous policing. Others spoke of the necessary characteristics of a new chief: emotional intelligence, communication skills, a proven track record of changing good-ol'-boy police cultures.

So far, so good. But then, toward the end of the forum, Straus revealed that a closed-door meeting was planned at City Hall the following day with some "associates" from the community. No, he wouldn't say who. Just some "folks" who had worked with the DPD. And some business "folks." He assured the crowd that their input would count just the same as the input gathered Tuesday with these unnamed folks.

Even so, it became clear that several grassroots organizations that have been active in police-reform efforts—FADE, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, SpiritHouse and others—weren't on the invite list. And that didn't go over well.

SpritiHouse executive director Nia Wilson told the INDY Tuesday that she's worried about the lack of transparency. "It's not just that we were left out," she says. "It's the way the information came out, like we weren't supposed to know about it."

At the forum Monday, new City Council member Jillian Johnson echoed Wilson's unease.

"I'm concerned that you guys are not asking all the right questions," she said. "I think the community should have been involved in shaping what the questions were tonight, rather than just being asked to answer your questions."
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/04/ten-campus-rapes-or-were-they/

TEN CAMPUS RAPES—OR WERE THEY?
April 8, 2015
How Accusers Play the Drinking Game at Washington and Lee

As you’ll see from the this list of stories, the male students who have the resources to challenge the illegal bullying of their constitutional rights do so by filing a due process lawsuit, like the one facing Washington and Lee. The facts, by this point, are depressingly familiar.

Two students had a sexual encounter after attending a party, during which both consumed alcohol. The next morning, the accused student drove the accuser back to her dorm. The next day, the accuser told a friend that she had a good time the previous evening, and made no mention of any assault; and the accuser hooked up with the accused student a month later. Many months later, and after working over the summer at a women’s clinic, the accuser indicated that she’d had an “evolution” in how she felt about the incident, which she now concluded was a sexual assault.

Part of this evolution was seeing the name of the accused student—who she had also discovered now had a girlfriend—on the acceptance list for a college program in Nepal.
Originally posted January 26, 2015. Read more about the Washington and Lee case here.
Railroading at Vassar

Peter Yu and a fellow member of the crew team attended a party, had quite a bit to drink, and then returned to his room to have sexual relations. Yu’s roommate interrupted them, the accuser said she didn’t want to go any further, and she left—following this up with several Facebook messages, over many weeks, in which she expressed regret for how the evening had wound up. Then, on the last day allowed under Vassar procedures, Walker (whose father is a Vassar professor) filed a sexual assault complaint at the school; the timing precluded Yu’s filing a counter-claim…

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the Yu case was the sense that the accuser—whose father, after all, is a Vassar professor—gamed the system. Her waiting until the very last moment to file charges robbed Yu of a chance to file counter-charges—that is, to claim that since both parties were drunk, the accuser was as guilty of sexual assault as was he. And her pushing the case to the IVP ensured that she would be judged solely by colleagues of her father, rather than by a mixture of students and faculty members.

Originally posted April 5, 2015. Read the entire story here.
After an Alleged Rape at Columbia, “I Love You Paul. Where Are You?”

Alleged victim Emma Sulkowicz continued to have chatty and playful Facebook exchanges with alleged rapist Paul Nungesser for weeks after she says he brutally violated her and choked her within an inch of her life. After the alleged rape On Oct. 3, Sulkowicz’s birthday, Nungesser sent her an effusive greeting; she responded the next morning with, “I love you Paul. Where are you?!?!?!?!”
Originally posted February 10, 2015. Read about Columbia’s “mattress girl” here.
How Drunk Can You Get at Cornell?

Two students had intimate relations after a night of drinking. Sixty-six days later, the accuser filed a complaint with Cornell, arguing that she was too drunk to have given consent. As at DePauw (see below), the university gave more weight to students who corroborated the accuser’s story than to apparently identically situated students who backed the accused’s version of events, seemingly to shoehorn a finding that would edge past the preponderance-of-evidence threshold. Apart from the accuser, Cornell’s main witness appears not to have been any of the students with whom the accused and accuser partied, but instead a close friend of the accuser with whom she breakfasted around 30 hours or so after the alleged encounter. Because Cornell now employs the single-investigator model, the accused student (and his representative) had no opportunity even to see the accuser testify, much less to cross-examine her.
Originally posted March 23, 2015. Read more about the lawsuit here.
Basketball Star Accused at Xavier

After what he claimed was an incident of consensual sexual intercourse, Xavier basketball star Dez Wells was accused of sexual assault. In a mere 27 days from accusation to judgment,
Dez Wells
Dez Wells, Baltimore Sun

the university concluded that Wells was “responsible for rape” after a process in which Wells couldn’t cross-examine his accuser and was deemed a rapist based on a preponderance-of-evidence threshold. All this occurred while Cincinnati authorities determined that there was no basis to pursue criminal charges; prosecutor Joseph Deters deemed the Xavier process “fundamentally unfair.”

In the Wells case, “justice” was swift–and unjust. So Wells filed a federal lawsuit, claiming gender discrimination and libel, and urging the court to overturn the result of Xavier’s disciplinary tribunal, called the UCB. On Wells’ Title IX claims, the order held that Wells’ allegations plausibly showed that Xavier was “reacting against him as a male to demonstrate to the OCR that [university officials] would take action, as they had failed to in the past, against males accused of sexual assault.” The judge noted that the university, which ignored warnings from the prosecutor that the sexual assault claim was unfounded, deemed Wells a rapist anyway.
Originally posted March 13, 2014. Read more about this case here.
Why ‘Yes’ Means No at Occidental

Occidental is the California college whose rules allow branding a male student a rapist even if his female partner says “yes” to sexual intercourse. Moreover, the school includes what seems to be a disproportionate number of anti-due process “activists,” professors inclined toward delusional claims against their administration even as they suggest that outsiders should trust their credibility that the campus is awash in rape. The Occidental case is, if anything, more extreme than the typical due process case because of the involvement of an anti-due process member of the Occidental faculty, Danielle Dirks.

Dirks counseled the accuser to file a sexual assault claim against a male student, according to a confidential report prepared by Occidental and obtained by FIRE, because the accused student “fit the profile of other rapists on campus in that he had a high GPA in high school, was his class valedictorian, was on [a sports] team, and was ‘from a good family.’” (Imagine the howling from the Occidental faculty if the school more generally used profiling on criminal matters.) Moreover, the accuser went to police, who, along with prosecutors, concluded that both parties had too much to drink, but no rape occurred, since both were “willing participants.”

Yet Occidental branded the accused student a rapist anyway.
Originally posted June 6, 2014. Read more about Occidental here.
Yale and The NY Times Smear a Quarterback

Patrick Witt was a quarterback, and a very good one, at Yale. He was also a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship. It turned out that his interview for the Rhodes coincided with the day of the Harvard-Yale game. After some thought, he decided to withdraw his Rhodes candidacy and play in the game on November 13, 2011, which, alas, Yale lost. Two months later, a New York Times’ reporter, Richard Perez-Pena, swooped in with a nearly 2,000-word article splashed over the front page of The Times sports section announcing that the Rhodes Trust had suspended Witt’s candidacy, because it had learned that he had faced an allegation of sexual assault.
Patrick Witt
Patrick Witt

The story left everything else to insinuation, but any reader would have come away with the following conclusions: One, that Yale and Witt had conspired together to present a false explanation of why he had chosen to withdraw. Second, that Witt was something of a habitual criminal. And third, that he likely had done it. Nearly one-tenth of the article was devoted to two extraneous and minor alcohol-related arrests of Witt, the inclusion of which in the piece seemed to have the sole purpose of smearing his character.

This story received a good deal of public criticism, including from me. In response, The Times sort of doubled down on the story–exactly what they did in the Duke lacrosse case. They did not reassign Perez-Pena, as they had not reassigned Duff Wilson, their lead reporter in the lacrosse case. But they did authorize the public editor, Arthur Brisbane, to do his own reporting. This is a very odd journalistic strategy: a public editor reporting what the paper’s own reporter had chosen not to do.

The public editor conceded, in paragraph 24 of a 26-paragraph piece, that the original article never should have been published. The best reporting on the case was actually done not by The Times but by the Yale Daily News. And the best analysis of the case was done not by The Times, but by the sports website, Deadspin. Both showed that Witt likely withdrew for the exact reasons that he said, that he wanted to play in The Game, and he felt an obligation to his team.

How did an accusation of rape with no evidence, no legal recourse for the accused come to pass at a school renowned for its law school? Yale, in late 2010, decided that its sexual assault procedures were not sufficiently tilted in favor of the accuser. And so they set up a separate, informal complaint procedure for sexual assault. And it is this procedure to which Witt was subjected. Under this procedure, an accuser can file an allegation of sexual assault against a fellow classmate if he or she determines that that classmate has caused him or her to worry.

Generally, worrying does not rise to the level of sexual assault. Once this procedure is initiated, and this is a direct quote from the Yale guidelines, “the goal is to achieve a resolution that is desired by the [accuser].” In blunt language, this means that the accused student, Witt in this case, does not have the right within the Yale procedure to cross-examine his accuser. He does not even have the right to present evidence of his innocence. The accusation is accepted at face value, and the purpose of the process is to resolve it in a way that the accusing student feels comfortable.

It is on the basis of this sort of complaint, filed under this procedure, that the Rhodes Trust decided that it needed to suspend Witt’s candidacy. That’s nothing short of extraordinary.
Originally posted on April 2, 2012.
J’Accuse at DePauw

By now, the specifics of the DePauw case will sound familiar. Last December, Ben King attended a party with around 30 students; most (including the accuser and the accused) appeared to have had a lot to drink. The two went back to King’s room, where some type of sexual contact (but not intercourse) occurred. King says he asked the accuser if she consented to sexual activity, and she said yes. (The accuser says that she doesn’t remember one way or the other.) Two days later, the accuser spoke to DePauw’s Title IX coordinator, claiming the sexual contact was non-voluntary. The coordinator interviewed King. After no action, nearly five weeks later the accuser said she wanted to pursue charges.

The university’s “investigation” consisted of interviews with the accuser and party witnesses recommended by the accuser (several of her sorority sisters). Reflecting what it termed its “even-handed approach” to campus claims of sexual assault, DePauw defended its decision to confine its inquiry in this manner, since interviewing all the people at the party, including neutral students, would not have been “an efficient use of limited resources.”’

The hearing occurred 12 days after the investigation ended. At the hearing, consistent with DePauw’s policies, King was denied the right to an attorney—so as to avoid “undue judicialization” of university affairs. Meanwhile, the accuser’s hearing “advocate” was married to the school’s Title IX coordinator—a figure who supplied a supposedly neutral summary of the case at the hearing, but instead appears to have impeached King. DePauw deemed the relationship between the accuser’s advocate and a supposedly neutral key factual witness “immaterial” to the outcome of the case.

In an unintentional commentary on why academics should not conduct criminal investigations, the hearing appears to have consisted mostly of DePauw’s panel asking witnesses how drunk they were (on a scale of 1 to 10) and how drunk the accuser was (on a scale of 1 to 10). Three of the four key witnesses were consistent with their written testimony, but the fourth (the accuser’s roommate who had said she sounded “fine” and “did not sound too drunk”) now rated the accuser as an 8-level of intoxication. “But,” she added, “Because I was intoxicated as well, I might have not known for sure.” The record gives no indication of the hearing panel questioning this student on why her panel testimony differed from her written statement.

King did testify during the hearing. Demonstrating the impossibility of proving “affirmative consent,” he said that the accuser verbally consented—repeatedly—to having sexual contact. He nonetheless was found guilty and expelled on grounds that the accuser was intoxicated and could not have given consent. On appeal, the university reduced the penalty to a two-semester suspension with possible re-admission, provided King demonstrated an “understanding of the issues raised by his interaction with” the accuser.

King then sued. Incredibly, DePauw cited “academic freedom” as justification for both its actions and as a reason for the court not to make an “unwarranted imposition” into university affairs. Pointing to the White House task force report, the university also argued that it was appropriate to give the accuser “some control” over the investigation (ostensibly for privacy reasons). The judge rejected King’s Title IX claim, arguing that DePauw didn’t discriminate against King on basis of his gender, but nonetheless granted a preliminary injunction, arguing that DePauw violated its contract with King.
Originally posted Dec. 17, 2014.
The Donor Influence at Brown
Brown University
Brown University

Marcella (Beth) Dresdale was the former Brown student who accused a classmate of sexual harassment and then changed the accusation to rape. The classmate, William McCormick quickly left Brown but eventually sued both Dresdale and her father, Richard Dresdale, a wealthy Brown donor. Before the Dresdales agreed to an out-of-court settlement (reportedly after McCormick had been offered $1.05 million), the lawsuit brought to light Richard Dresdale’s aggressive involvement in the Brown procedure that minimally investigated his daughter’s claims.

The lawsuit documents and subsequent press coverage also focused on the role in the case played by Dresdale’s and McCormick’s residential counselor, Shane Reil. (Reil at the time was a Brown undergraduate; he’s now a student at BC Law School.) A few days after Dresdale filed her claim of sexual harassment, but before she alleged she was raped, Reil dined privately with the Dresdales at the home of another wealthy Brown donor.

Following the dinner, Richard Dresdale said he’d be willing to mentor Reil, who was attending Brown on a need-based scholarship. A few days later, Reil filed his report on the case, which offered a negative portrayal of McCormick. If the case had gone forward, Reil would have been an important witness, given both his position in the dorm and the apparent lack of any physical evidence to corroborate Beth Dresdale’s allegation of sexual assault.

The statements of at least two student witnesses–Julie Siwicki and Spencer Brody–evolved from slightly negative remarks about McCormick to damning portrayals. (In Siwicki’s instance, the evolution was transparent, since she inserted a highly negative paragraph into a previously-submitted, and basically neutral, e-mail.) The evolution in the two students’ statements occurred at about the same time Richard Dresdale was offering career assistance to Reil. Did similar offers to Siwicki and Brody help explain their “evolution,” or did Dresdale encourage deans to reach out to the two students for amplification? There’s no way to know.

Knowing that Richard Dresdale had made a mentorship offer to Reil would have opened up avenues for McCormick’s advocate to question Brody and especially Siwicki, to see if any improper contact had occurred between Dresdale and these witnesses. Yet according to Brown, the university’s procedure is set up so that no witness must divulge an offer of career assistance from an accuser’s wealthy father. This Catch-22 approach all but insures that improper contact between an accuser’s family and witnesses will remain secret.

Even if it was wholly innocent, the Dresdale-Reil contact illuminates yet again the limited due process protections available to accused students in campus tribunals. If McCormick had been criminally charged, the discovery process doubtless would have turned up the Dresdale e-mails, and Dresdale could have been cross-examined on the witness stand as to whether he was seeking to influence potential witnesses.
Originally posted June 12, 2012. Read more about the Brown case here.
Wesleyan and Swarthmore

There are two certainties from the current crusade against due process for students accused of sexual assault. First, in coming years, there will be a higher percentage of convictions, since colleges must use the preponderance-of-evidence and are strongly discouraged from allowing accused students from cross-examining their accusers. Second, because so few due process protections exist in campus tribunals, more of these convictions will involve innocent students—who in turn will pursue legal actions to redeem their reputations and salvage hopes of a post-college career. Several recent developments illustrate both points. First: as FIRE reported, Swarthmore has reached a settlement with an anonymous student who sued the school, alleging due process violations in his case. (I wrote about the lawsuit earlier; Swarthmore’s new special master on sexual assault cases conceded that the school uses a “very low bar” to deem its students rapists.) Most of the settlement terms were confidential, but one item was public. Swarthmore has now agreed that unspecified “new information raises sufficient questions about the fairness of the hearing to warrant vacating the Panel’s finding and sanction.”

Swarthmore has admitted that it falsely branded a student a rapist, and the reason it did so was the weakness of the school’s procedures, which prevented the student from presenting evidence of his innocence. Also, a new lawsuit against Wesleyan has prompted even the biased Katie Baker to notice the due process problem on campus. The lawsuit, filed by an anonymous student who the school contended committed sexual assault for what the filing terms “non-consensual kissing,” portrays a college facing enormous pressure—both from the OCR, which wants colleges to more aggressively prosecute sexual assault cases; and from on-campus activists demanding the end to single-sex fraternities as a way to end “rape culture” at the college. (The accused student was a frat member who had opposed the policy change.)
Originally posted November 23, 2014.

All ten accounts here are excerpted from original stories by KC Johnson and Cathy Young.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

https://kcjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/ga-tech-prelim-injunction-denial.pdf

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Join the millions that use us for their forum communities. Create your own forum today.
« Previous Topic · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers · Next Topic »
Add Reply