Are Colleges Capable of Trying Sexual Assault Cases Fairly?
Some college attorneys think not — colleges not only lack the power to retrieve the necessary evidence for a trial, but also have been robbed of the ability to decide which cases are even worth trying.
The full story is from KC Johnson at Minding the Campus.
College Attorneys Face the War on Due Process
The Chronicle has a revealing piece on a group largely overlooked in the war on due process—college attorneys, who since 2011 have been aggressively pressured to establish systems to investigate one of the most serious offenses in the criminal justices system (sexual assault) with few, and in some cases none, of the tools available to law enforcement.
Reporter Eric Kelderman writes, “In conversations with lawyers here at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Attorneys, . . . [they] expressed frustration that their institutions were being held to a different standard than even law-enforcement agencies and were being given increasingly complex rules that sometimes go well beyond their capacity.”
According to Kelderman, the college attorneys raised two separate issues. The first focused on the differences between the capabilities of the college disciplinary process and a criminal investigation. It’s hard to imagine investigating a sexual assault without, at minimum: (1) access to the contemporaneous e-mails/text messages of the accuser and accused; (2) access to the post-incident medical examination of the accused; and (3) access to physical evidence (for instance, DNA samples or surveillance video outside the scene of the alleged incident). Yet since colleges and universities lack subpoena power, they can’t obtain any of this information, except perhaps surveillance video from campus dorms that have such equipment. To the best of my knowledge, neither the OCR nor anti-due process “activists” have never explained why they believe colleges are capable of effectively investigating sexual assault claims without the tools provided by subpoena power.
Comments
Rape is a crime.
Anyone accused of ANY crime, certainly any crime that is so violent and horrific, deserves to be reported to the police. Then, should the evidence merit it, the person should be tried in a court of law.
This nonsense about using college systems to handle crimes is a ruse – a method of harrassment; it is a way to persecute and abuse the rights of someone (usually a white male, but always a male) who is, in essence, guilty until proven innocent because of the idiotic DoJ “preponderance of the evidence” vs “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold for “guilt” and the push by the O regime to “handle” this “crisis.”
If there is merit in the accusation, the colleges should BY LAW be compelled to report the alleged crime to the police.
That is probably enough of a serious process to eliminate most, if not all, of these erroneous accusations that are ruining young men’s lives when they are later found to have done NOTHING at all.