Student Acquitted of Rape Claims University Won’t Give Him His Degree
The war on college men continues apace.
The College Fix reports.
Student-athlete acquitted of rape says university won’t give him his degree
A former University of Alaska Fairbanks hockey player who was charged with and then acquitted of rape claims in a recently filed lawsuit that his university will not hand over his degree.
Allegations lodged by the former student-athlete in the suit, which also seeks $100,000 in damages, paint campus officials as somewhat vindictive in their effort to deny Nolan Youngmun his petroleum engineering bachelor’s degree even though the young man has completed all the requirements for graduation, Alaska Dispatch News reports.
The controversy stems from a school under investigation and under pressure by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to do more to prosecute sexual assault complaints.
Youngmun was set to graduate in the spring of 2015 when he was accused of rape by a female peer. He was arrested — and banned from campus — in a case in which he claimed the sex was consensual while she did not. In February of this year, he was cleared of all charges after a trial by jury.
In April of this year, a judge also dismissed a grand jury indictment against Youngmun regarding a related case in which a woman, having heard of the 2015 case against Youngmun, then claimed that she, too, had been raped by him back in 2013, KTVF Fairbanks reported.
After that decision, Youngmun’s attorney had said he hoped his client could finally move on with his life. Apparently not.
University of Alaska Fairbanks is holding on to his degree over the unresolved campus Title IX investigation related to the now-debunked rape claim, the lawsuit filed last week claims.
The university’s Title IX coordinator, Mae Marsh, is quoted as saying as part of the original probe against Youngmun that the “alleged perp graduates in three weeks, we need to get the administrative investigation concluded so we can make a preponderance call and expel prior to graduation,” Alaska Dispatch News reports.
Student-athlete acquitted of rape says university won’t give him his degree (The College Fix)
Comments
Reading the original newsminer.com story, it suggests a poorly-chosen use of the word “cleared.” “Cleared” is a term that should be reserved for cases in which there is clear and convincing proof of innocence. It should not be used where the prosecution merely failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
In Youngmun’s criminal case, it appears the trial court believed there was enough evidence of guilt to send it to the jury. Being acquitted is not the same as being innocent, and the burden of proof in civil cases is lower than in criminal cases. This was seen in the OJ Simpson case, where he was acquitted in the criminal trial and found liable in the wrongful death suit. If Youngmun was acquitted rather than cleared, there’s nothing wrong with UAF applying a lower standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence) for the purpose of holding up his diploma.
Any evidentiary standard presumes that both the accused and the accuser are treated fairly, and that the investigation is thorough and done by investigators with sufficient training and experience.
From what I’ve read about many of these college sexual assault cases, the deck is stacked against the accused, and the “investigation” is done by people who have neither the training nor the experience to do investigations. In some cases it appears that university administrators don’t even understand what constitutes “preponderance of the evidence.”
In this case apparently the “investigation” has gone on for fifteen months and is not yet finished. . . . .
The traditional aphorism asserts that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; thus, not being found guilty is not evidence of innocence.
Nonetheless, any reasonable system of justice will demand that accusers bear the burden of proof, because it’s often impossible to prove something didn’t happen (if I slept alone in a motel room last night, how can you disprove my assertion that I was visited by extraterrestrials?) and because it’s always easier to make accusations than to disprove them, and therefore accusers can simply bury an accused with endless accusations.
Which is to say, perhaps this use of “cleared” is shorthand for the above?