Dubious rape trial takes place at Vassar
Via changes to Title IX, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has mandated a lower threshold of certainty in sexual harassment and assault cases.
Subsequently, Minding the Campus contributor KC Johnson projects a probable growth area for litigation: Suits against colleges for rigging sexual misconduct hearings against male without any semblance of due process. He uses a Vassar case as an example:
Peter Yu and Mary Claire Walker were Vassar students and members of the college’s rowing team. Yu and his parents are Chinese citizens, though he went to prep school in the United States. Walker’s father is a long-time professor at Vassar–a pertinent fact in a case judged by three members of the Vassar faculty.
The two students consumed alcohol at a team party in February 2012; one of Walker’s friends seems to have thought she was very drunk. After the party ended, Walker accompanied Yu back to his room. They started to have intercourse, but Yu’s roommate entered the room and interrupted them; Walker then said she didn’t want to go any further, and she left. The complaint quotes numerous, seemingly cordial Facebook exchanges between Walker and Yu over the next year, before Walker–on last day she could under Vassar procedures, a fact that is critical in retrospect–made a campus claim of sexual assault. She never filed a criminal complaint, nor did she, it seems, obtain a medical exam after her evening with Yu.
The rough outline of the next stages of the story will be familiar to anyone who follows campus judicial proceedings. Though Walker waited a year to file her charges, Vassar gave Yu almost no time to mount a defense: he was found guilty and expelled from the college two-and-a-half weeks after the complaint was filed.
Vassar–which explicitly affirms that its disciplinary panels do not use “formal rules of process, procedure, and/or technical rules of evidence, such as are applied in criminal or civil court”–denied Yu the right to an attorney and limited his ability to introduce exculpatory evidence at the hearing; the complaint also alleges that he did not receive an opportunity to cross-examine Walker fully. (This claim is impossible to verify, since the hearing was private.) Yu was found guilty, on the preponderance of evidence threshold, by a three-person faculty committee; his request that a student serve on the committee was denied.
Johnson chillingly concludes:
If, in the OCR’s interpretation of the law, too much due process constitutes gender discrimination against women, surely at some point too little due process constitutes gender discrimination against men. That is: unless the OCR sides with the likes of Wendy Murphy and believes that the mere filing of a sexual assault claim, even absent a criminal or medical investigation, transforms an accuser into a “survivor.”
Neither the OCR nor anyone else in the Obama administration has ever spelled out how far is too far for colleges to go to deny due process to accused students. In light of the Harris and Yu cases, perhaps now would be an appropriate time for the agency to explore that question.
Comments
Show Trial finds Yu Guilty as Charged.
Isn’t it amazing how liberals eschew due process when it interferes with their social engineering?
I would think this would be an excellent opportunity for Yu to sue Walker for harassment, false accusations etc. and go after the school for lack of due process. I defer to the lawyers on that.
A taste of a real courtroom might wake them up to real “fairness”…
I agree Dimsdale. He should counter-sue their whole pants off. Leave nothing behind. His civil rights and due-process rights were abrogated.
[…] Dubious rape trial takes place at Vassar […]
I originally wrote this response to another case on another blog, and hope you don’t mind I cut and paste as it is relevant.
I have been through this process – as the accused. It was the 90’s and things were not as bad, but it was already a foregone conclusion what the outcome would be.
I’m chiming in here to point out somethings that never seems to get mentioned, and they are of vital importance.
The accused is required to show up to the hearing. You may (depending on the college) be allowed to have a “buddy” – and I brought my lawyer. He was not allowed to ask anything, speak for me, or in anyway interact.
This is critical: You are required to be there, and while you may or may not be required to speak in your own defense, you are certainly screwed if you don’t. So, now you have made statements that are COURT ADMISSABLE in a CRIMINAL case while simultaneously being stripped of the protection of counsel.
And this is by design.
Look at how they pick those who will judge you on the Hearing Board. Those picked have almost certainly gone through extensive training in sexual harassment and assault – but entirely from the PC feminist perspective. All the false stats, the one-sided arguments, the echo-chamber knowledge and “common sense” is coming from rape advocates, campus feminists, and those that will back up that point of view. I challenge (and I did during my own hearing board) anyone to find a hearing board member who has heard from an advocate for the falsely accused. When I asked they said “it was covered” by their training – but when I asked deeper they admitted (and were a bit ticked I pointed out) that all of their training was from only one perspective : that women don’t lie about rape, false accusations are statistically miniscule, and all evidence is judged through that lens. They were fine with that – and actually annoyed that I questioned the fairness of such a starting point. I was accused of victim blaming, having no empathy for victims, and not wanting victims to get justice. They said this to me – the accused – and I am sitting there thinking “have you even HEARD of innocent until proven guilty?!” – but they were fine with the frame of reference they held.
On a side note, years later, I checked into what procedures there are for STAFF who are accused of ANYTHING: they get full protection, can have a union rep, a lawyer, etc etc. Apparently that’s their idea of “fair”.
So, the hearing board members are all vetted and certified in feminist Kool-Aid drinking and not impartial at all.
The “investigator” is not there to find the truth, but is often on a “holy quest” to find evidence to “convict”. Any exculpatory evidence is often seen as “victim blaming”, which is unholy taboo.
Any actions you (the accused) take, or attitudes or mannerisms you display are only going to display guilt. What I mean is :
If you are angry (a normal reaction to such an accusation) it shows you’re guilty.
If you’re sad is shows guilt.
If you’re nervous is shows guilt.
If you’re calm (my demeanor) it shows cold calculating thought and shows guilt (what the hearing board said in my case).
Etc etc
Meanwhile the accuser’s attitude, mannerisms, and actions afterwards ALWAYS shows she was telling the truth.
In my case I had the police show up at my dorm room, **6** weeks after this gal and I had sex, and give me 3 documents:
a notice I had been accused of sexual assault
a restraining order barring me from going near her, and, importantly, barring me from entering certain buildings on campus. Buildings, say, in which I might need to speak to potential witnesses.
A notice from housing that I had **1 HOUR** to clear out of my dorm room.
I had, up to that point, an excellent rapport with the police on campus. The officers, save 1, were professional and polite. The one who was not was clearly a man hating individual. Much to their surprise, as I was an older student, and clearly understood the law and ramifications, I volunteered to waive my rights and make a full statement on the spot.
I mention all the above about the police for a very salient point. During my hearing I wanted to call the very police who were there that night I was removed from my dorm. Why? Because in all my statements, to them, later to the school, and later to an ADA that **I** called for help, none of my statement s changed one bit. I wanted the police who had interviewed me that night to tell the hearing board what I had said, to show my story had not changed. My accusers story changed (in greater and lesser degrees, to be fair) every freaking time she told it.
The police officer declined to show up to do so – and the school told me they would not (and I could not) compel the officer to do so. Oh, yea, and in this bizarre world I was dealing with the cop actually DID show up, and testified as to what the alleged victim said, WHILE HOLDING HER HAND, and when I heard the officer’s voice on the tape, I asked them to hold her over so I could question her, and they told me they could not compel her to do so. Under the school rules, with their blessing, and with them defending it, the cop showed up, only testified to what she wanted to, refused to simply repeat what I had said, and held the alleged victim’s hand during her testimony, and then refused to repeat what I had told her or to be questioned by me. The Hearing Board Members saw no problem with this – and later on appeal the school didn’t either.
There are a ton of other details that would blow your mind – and I’m not using hyperbole here – but this isn’t about me: it’s about the process that has been set up.
I can go on – but my main points are:
Before you even show up the investigator and hearing board members are already primed to find you guilty. All the people involved have been given pure indoctrination in PC feminist talking points on sexual assault. They are vetted to be “right thinking” – and these are the folk who are judging you.
You are required to make statements in order to have even the slimmest chance of staying in school, and those statements are to be given without the protection of counsel, and can be used against you in a court of law in civil and criminal proceedings.
The police and witnesses can be compelled by the school to show up, out of threat of sanction, but YOU, the accused, cannot compel anyone to show up to make a statement.
Lastly – if you interview witnesses and try to get them to speak in statements that can be damaging to the accuser, you can (and probably will) be threatened with having tampered with the witness and having interfered in the school’s investigation. Yes, seriously.
THAT is the once-over-the-world, without a lot of details, situation any man faces when he’s facing a sexual harassment or sexual assault accusation on a college campus.
Granted : each school is different – but I read too many articles on the FIRE.org website, from Christina Hoff Summers, and from news reports that makes me think that while the window dressing is different, that this is the template on many college campuses today.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I hope I have added to the discussion
Steven