It’s good to know so many people still believe in the rule of law.

Robert Shibley reports at the FIRE blog.

Nationwide Survey Shows Overwhelming Support for FIRE’s Position on Due Process, Right to Counsel

With sexual assault on campus so much in the news lately, and with FIRE’s concerns about campus due process increasingly being recognized as real problems that need to be addressed as part of the reform process, it has so far been hard to know where the average American voter stands on the issues.

That’s why FIRE was pleased to see the results of a newly released poll on the topic of campus due process. The poll, conducted by the firm of Penn Schoen Berland (founded by Bill and Hillary Clinton pollster and adviser Mark Penn), was commissioned by the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Fund. The entire agenda of key findings is available online, but we’d like to point out some of the more interesting findings of this poll of 1,021 likely voters. (The margin of error is +/- 3.07 percent.)

The poll’s headline finding was that 91 percent of likely voters believed that local law enforcement, not college administrators, “should be primarily in charge of investigating alleged sexual assaults on college campuses.” While FIRE has been criticized for taking this position (including by opposing advocates at a Congressional hearing today), we had a feeling—and a great deal of anecdotal evidence—that most people agreed with us that when it comes to sexual crimes, law enforcement should be taking the lead.