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Blog and Media Roundup - Wednesday, December 23, 2015; News Roundup
Topic Started: Dec 23 2015, 05:27 AM (82 Views)
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http://patch.com/new-jersey/wayne/former-wpu-students-file-lawsuit-over-arrests-alleged-rape-case-report-0


Former WPU Students File Lawsuit Over Arrests In Alleged Rape Case: Report
Four individuals allege they were falsely arrested and that their reputations are permanently tarnished.

Wayne, NJ
By Daniel Hubbard (Patch Staff) December 23, 2015

Four former Williams Paterson University students who were accused of raping a student on campus last year have filed a lawsuit against the school, The Record reported.

The four people allege that they were falsely arrested, maliciously prosecuted, and that their civil rights were violated, which permanently tarnished their reputations and ruined their educational futures, the report said.

The students were arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault and several other offenses and suspended from the school in November 2014.

Noah Williams, Tremaine Scott, Darius Singleton, Jahmel Latimer, and Garrett Collick, who were all 18 when they were charged. They were accused of blocking the doorway of the Overlook South dormitory, holding the victim down, and ordering her to have sex with all of them during the Nov. 25 assault, according to published reports.

A grand jury decided not to indict the students and the charges were dismissed against them.

In the lawsuit, an attorney for Collick and Williams said the accuser initiated consensual sex with the five men and that all of them were on good terms afterward only to go to campus police later that day and report the incident as a sexual assault, the report states. Collick, Williams, Singleton, and Latimer are seeking compensatory and punitive damages. Scot has not filed a lawsuit.

The defendants named in the suit include the university, school President Kathleen Waldron, the campus police department, University Police Detective Sgt. Ellen DeSimone, and Robert Fulleman, director of Public Safety and University Police, according to the report.
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http://www.northjersey.com/news/former-wpu-students-file-suit-over-arrests-in-alleged-rape-1.1478296

Former WPU students file suit over arrests in alleged rape
December 22, 2015, 6:21 PM Last updated: Tuesday, December 22, 2015, 10:39 PM
By MARY JO LAYTON and KIBRET MARKOS

Four former students of William Paterson University who were accused of raping a student on campus last year have filed a lawsuit against the school, alleging that they were falsely arrested, maliciously prosecuted and subjected to civil-rights violations that left them with ruined educational futures and permanently tarnished reputations.

The students, who were arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault and numerous other offenses, were suspended from the school in November 2014. University President Kathleen Waldron at the time issued a statement in which she sympathized with the accuser and said she was “angry and dismayed that this crime was committed on our campus and allegedly by students.”

A few months later, however, a Passaic County grand jury refused to indict and all charges were dismissed against all five defendants: Noah Williams of Camden, Garrett Collick of Paterson, Darius Singleton of Jersey City, Termaine Scott of Vineland and Jahmel Latimer of Hoboken.

Neither Waldron nor Marybeth Zeman, a spokeswoman for the university, could be reached for comment Tuesday.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in state Superior Court in Paterson, an attorney for Collick and Williams said the accuser initiated consensual sex with the five defendants on Nov. 25, 2014, at the Overlook South dorm building. All of them were on good terms afterward, but the accuser went to the campus police later that day and reported the incident as a sexual assault, said Michael Epstein, the attorney.

“Without conducting any investigation and based on the accuser’s report alone,” campus police arrested the men within the next few days and charged them with numerous offenses, including aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, conspiracy to commit sexual assault and criminal restraint.

Campus police did not interview any other witnesses, did not obtain cell­phone records or surveillance video, and did not conduct a sexual assault examination — known as a rape kit — on the accuser, Epstein said.

“The officers who did the reported investigation were untrained, did not know how to conduct a sexual assault investigation,” Epstein said Tuesday.

Had they conducted a proper investigation, they would have found out that the accuser had called Collick 33 times that day with hopes of luring him into intercourse, Epstein said in the lawsuit.

“Interviews with other students would have revealed that the accuser was very sexually active at William Paterson, had many sexual partners, engaged in sexual activities with more than one partner on multiple occasions, had to change dormitory rooms because her roommate was uncomfortable with the level of the accuser’s sexual activity,” Epstein said in the lawsuit. Epstein also said the accuser had previous relations with Collick and Williams.

Ron Ricci, an attorney representing Singleton and Latimer, said he has filed a similar lawsuit in Superior Court in Jersey City against Waldron and the accuser. He said he will file an amended complaint within the next few weeks to include the campus police officers who were involved in the investigation.

That lawsuit accuses Waldron of defamation and libel and includes allegations of false arrest, false imprisonment and violation of civil rights, Ricci said.

Epstein said in his lawsuit that Collick and Williams — who were both 18 at the time — were extremely scared when they spent nine days at the Passaic County Jail after their arrest, and that they slept in shifts to protect each other. Their families were forced to spend money to post their bails, which were set at $25,000 each, he said.

Despite lack of evidence to pursue the criminal charges, both were expelled from the school for allegedly violating a student code of conduct, Epstein said. Collick and Williams secured admission to the school through a special loan for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, he said. Reenrolling will be difficult for them because those funds will not be available again, Epstein said.

“They can’t pay for school so they can’t reapply,” he said.

Because of the highly publicized arrest, Collick and Williams suffered irreparable damage to their reputations, and their “names and photographs will forever be synonymously linked to rape, sexual assault and kidnapping,” Epstein said in the lawsuit.

He said Collick is now working as a busboy, and that he was not aware of the status of Williams.

Williams’ mother, Nancy Williams, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. The defendants include the university, Waldron, the campus police department, University Police Detective Sgt. Ellen DeSimone, and Robert Fulleman, director of Public Safety and University Police.

Collick, Williams, Singleton and Latimer are seeking unspecified amounts in compensatory and punitive damages. Scott has not filed suit in the case.

Email: layton@northjersey.com and markos@northjersey.com
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http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25598/

Black women face bias when they accuse black men of rape on campus, Harvard Law group says
College Fix Staff •December 21, 2015
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black-accused-rape.Andrey_Popov.Shutterstock

Harvard Law School students are organizing against the 19 professors who criticized the campus rape documentary The Hunting Ground for misleading audiences on one of the cases, involving accused student Brandon Winston and accusing student Kamilah Willingham.

Writing in the Harvard Law Record under the group name “Harassment/Assault Legal Team” – with no evident website or social media presence, much less a list of members – they urge faculty to “break the silence” and “support women of color” and all “survivors.”

The anonymous group takes on the 19 professors’ criticism that men of color are disproportionately accused of sexual misconduct, saying women of color face a double whammy:

Women of color are at the greatest risk for sexual violence … According to the results of the recent Harvard campus survey, women of color are victims of nonconsensual sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation at the highest rates: 7% of American Indian & Alaska Native graduate-school women, 6.7% of Asian graduate-school women, and 5.7% of Black graduate-school women, compared with 5.1% of white graduate-school women.

RELATED: Black and feminist Harvard law professors call ‘The Hunting Ground’ a piece of ‘propaganda’

Ignoring these realities and implying that support for sexual assault survivors conflicts with support for racial justice is problematic on many levels, including that it dangerously excludeswomen of color from dialogue on either issue. Black men certainly face bias in adjudicative systems, and there is a strong legacy of Black men falsely accused of—and severely punished for—assaulting white women. Yet trying to weaken campus sexual assault responses does not fix that problem. Instead, it both further marginalizes women of color—whose histories are also full violence—and increases their vulnerability.

While acknowledging that the most common reason given by self-described victims in the Harvard survey for not reporting their victimization was “I did not think it was serious enough to report,” the group inexplicably blames the 19 professors:

Messages perpetuating victim-blaming tropes, like a faculty-­signed press release that references a Black survivor’s inebriation, reinforce for sexual assault survivors the fear that powerful members of their institution might be biased against them. This, too, must impact their willingness to report assault.

RELATED: Counsel for accused student in ‘The Hunting Ground’ launches website to challenge the documentary

One commenter on the open letter faults the group for ignoring the very statistics it claims to be citing, noting that other options in the survey asked about bias-related fears.

The letter does not explicitly accuse the professors of creating a “hostile educational environment” – code for violating Title IX – as the makers of The Hunting Ground have done.
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Despite lack of evidence to pursue the criminal charges, both were expelled from the school for allegedly violating a student code of conduct, Epstein said. Collick and Williams secured admission to the school through a special loan for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, he said. Reenrolling will be difficult for them because those funds will not be available again, Epstein said.

“They can’t pay for school so they can’t reapply,” he said.

Because of the highly publicized arrest, Collick and Williams suffered irreparable damage to their reputations, and their “names and photographs will forever be synonymously linked to rape, sexual assault and kidnapping,” Epstein said in the lawsuit.

He said Collick is now working as a busboy, and that he was not aware of the status of Williams.


Fortunately nothing of the sort could happen in North Carolina, or to students of Duke University (which would surely afford its
own a full process before taking action against them).

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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/middlebury-college-settles-with-student-accused-of-sexual-assault/article/2578999?custom_click=rss

Middlebury College settles with student accused of sexual assault
By Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) • 12/23/15 11:26 AM

Middlebury College in Vermont has settled with a student who was suing the school after being expelled for sexual assault.

The student, referred to as John Doe in his lawsuit, alleged that the school breached its contract with him and discriminated against his gender when it investigated an accusation that he sexually assaulted another student. In September, a judge halted the student's expulsion, believing the student had a "likelihood of success on the merits" of the case and that irreparable harm would be done if the expulsion went forward.

Middlebury at the time argued that the student needed to show a "clear or substantial likelihood of success on the merits," rather than a simple "likelihood." This was notable because the standard of proof required by Middlebury in its determination of sexual assault cases was the lower "preponderance of evidence" standard.

This meant that a student accused of sexual assault could be labeled a rapist based on just 50.01 percent certainty, but a college accused of unfairness demanded a much higher certainty. One can see the double standard.

Middlebury appealed the judge's decision to reinstate the student, but the appeal was withdrawn in November. Now the student and the college have reached an undisclosed settlement.

"The lawsuit has been resolved by the parties and they have agreed that the Plaintiff will complete his education elsewhere," said Middlebury College Vice President for Communications Bill Burger in an email to the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. "Middlebury will make no further statements about the case."

The accused student in this case was found "not responsible" by his study abroad program, which he was in when the accusation was reported. The accuser was not a Middlebury student. When the accused returned from his study abroad program, the accuser threatened to report the school to the Department of Education. Middlebury then launched another investigation into the matter and found the student responsible.

The details of the settlement are likely to remain unknown. Based on Burger's statement, we know the student will transfer to another school and that both parties will cover their own court costs. But whether that student received compensation or anything else is a mystery. Students in similar situations have received little compensation for the kangaroo courts and trauma they were put through by their schools, but at least this student will be able to continue his education.

The same cannot be said for many other students in this situation.
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