Washington Examiner article We've discussed these campus kangaroo courts before, where the accused isn't allowed counsel, isn't allowed to confront his accuser, isn't allowed to cross examine witnesses, and often isn't allowed to know what he's charged with. Well, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) doesn't think that goes nearly far enough. Gillibrand on Monday spoke to MSNBC host Chris Matthews about campus sexual assault. And while she mentioned "due process" and "fairness," the concepts appeared to be only buzz words to her. For instance, when Matthews asked about confidentiality in these cases and the fact that rape is a felony, Gillibrand explained why colleges, not the legal system, should be handling accusations. "So the reason why there is a dual system is so that you can have a way to handle this case if the survivor doesn't feel comfortable going through a criminal trial — that could take a year or two or two or three," Gillibrand said. "It will obviously change her life and her time at college." One of the reasons trials take so long is that both the defense and prosecution need time to prepare their cases. But Gillibrand appears to believe that such due process is a hindrance to justice. Kangaroo courts are certainly a faster way to reach a guilty verdict than the ponderous civil legal system where the concepts like "innocent until proven guilty", "right to an attorney", and other quaint relics of the patriarchal misogynistic rape culture hold sway. I've written before about this concept of Gillibrand's: She's basically saying that there's no such thing as an innocent man who has been accused; he's either found guilty or he gets away with a crime. And let's take a step back to look at what Gillibrand is really saying here. She's suggesting that the criminal justice system isn't easy enough for accusers. Police and juries won't throw someone in jail based on nothing but an accusation. Therefore, a kinder, gentler justice system needs to exist to do just that. It is that kind of thinking that has prompted more than 70 male students to sue their universities after being expelled and treated like criminals without evidence — and sometimes with evidence that points to a false accusation. Christina Hoff Summers calls them 'fainting couch feminists'.
Misleading headline unless you forgot to quote the part that was relevant. Where is this legislation?
Gillibrand.senate.gov/campus-sexual-assault has the Campus Accountability and Safety Act (pdf) Every time a college or university fails to drag a student before a kangaroo court, they have to forfeit up to one percent of their annual budget as a civil penalty - per incident. That means each time they let a felony actually be prosecuted as a felony, with real police investigators and lawyers and stuff, they lose millions of dollars.
gtard thread is 'tarded. Perhaps someone should explain to him the differences between college administrative actions, civil actions by a governmental body, and criminal charges, and how different standards of proof, different degrees of procedural protection, and different potential penalties apply to each.
So you can kick a kid out of Harvard, costing him millions of potential earnings and hundreds of thousands in sunk costs, based on a false accusation, and he isn't even allowed to defend himself? Over seventy students have filed lawsuits, including the student accused of being a rapist by 'mattress girl'. Some of the lawsuits are multi-million dollar ones, and the falsely accused students will have an easy time winning in a real courtroom. Back when I was in college, we thought The Crucible was a warning, not a procedural manual.
I missed something here, when did a college become a court of law? In the case of rape it should be handled by law enforcement, not a bunch of college administrators worrying about their school's reputation. It would seem that this law would penalize a college for allowing a case to get to the proper authorities. Perhaps I am reading it wrong.
A public college is a state institution, but not a duly-authorized law enforcement or judicial organization. Even if they were empowered to investigate and punish criminal matters--they aren't--they would have to extend every protection of the law to the accused (right to remain silent, to receive due process, to have a jury of one's peers, to receive a speedy trial, etc.). I shouldn't even have to point out the obvious problem of having the same institution serve both as prosecution and judge/jury...
Oy. Seems like a bunch of other people need the same lesson gtard does. Does no one here remember that OJ lost the civil case?
I am reminded of threads over at city data where conservatives claimed it was some how a violation of free speech rights when a company fired someone as their spokesman because he said something they didn't like on twitter. Free speech only protects you from government actions but your employer can decide you are a dumb ass who they don't want associated with their company.
If only they'd be consistent. When it's a conservative media figure getting the boot for blurting out some bigoted bullshit it's , and but when they get to USE that same principle to fire minorities, then it's sacrosanct. Make up your minds, folks.
We're not talking about firing someone for blurting something out, or expelling a student for some violation of campus policy, such as burning a couch. We're talking about putting students on trial for rape and other serious felonies, in a special court with special rules of evidence, no access to an attorney, etc. When was the last time you heard of a US corporation putting an employee on trial for something like rape or murder? You didn't, because they can't. But apparently universities can, using the rules of evidence from the Salem Witch Trials if they so choose. And along with the inevitable conviction, since the accused are assumed guilty and not allowed to present evidence, comes infamy. That's why we know the names of so many so accused, as if they'd been a defendant in Lance Ito's court room.
No, no one is being put on trial for a felony, dumb ass. All they are doing is writing a student code of conduct and all they can do is find whither or not a student violated the student code of conduct. You really are a fucking idiot.
The students are being accused of RAPE. Rape is a felony. Remember mattress girl running around accusing a student of raping her? He's now suing the university for I think $10 million. Read the text of the bill. Gillibrand says that actual trials in a criminal court are too burdensome for the rape victim, so they should be tried in a special campus court where the "victim" isn't stressed out by cross-examination or doubts about her story.
Well, I think the judicial system does treat rape victims poorly but I don't see a way around it. Most of the problem is simply the nature of the crime.
So once convicted, do the rapists go into the state penal system, or will universities have to provide their own prison facilities?
The rapists are forever regarded as rapists. Their home town newspapers print the fictional details, and no other college will accept them (that would be a major gender crime), and nobody will hire them. Many have been mercilessly hounded. And yet their not allowed to present evidence, confront their accuser, nor do they have a defense attorney, nor does that non-existent defense attorney get access to even anything the kangaroo court prosecutors have as evidence. In a recent case, a student was accused of rape, found guilty, etc, all while the accuser's own text messages detail how she had raped him when he was passed out. Afraid that someone would tell her boyfriend that she raped his roommate, she made up a story that he had raped her. The court was aware of this, and found the man guilty anyway.
So they're letting serial rapists go free - because instead of charging them with actual RAPE, they're just destroying their lives, all in the name of non-discrimination in campus athletics. Do you think the people who wrote Title IX in 1972 so women could play sports thought it would lead to secret campus rape courts that operate under the rules of the Salem Witch Trials?
You seem to be reading it right! And sooner or later some kid will be falsely accused, his educational aspirations ruined, but will be financially able to hire the mother-of-all take no prisoners Johnny Cochran of a lawyer who sues the ever loving dog shit out of the school and the person(s) falsely accusing them - to the point of being able to successfully bring criminal charges against the accusers that stick like fucking crazy glue. Rape is not cheating on a test or something that a school might very well be able to handle. It's a fucking criminal act. Thus the burden of proof better be really, really high and handled by the experts.
Such falsely accused students are already suing the pants off universities. Both the student and the university are in a no-win situation. If the student is accused then the university has to find him guilty or they'll face an endless storm of shrill campus protests by the perpetually outraged fainting couch feminists, followed up by severe civil sanctions amounting to one percent of their total income per incident. But then they get sued for tens of millions by the students who were wrongly found guilty.
Maybe I'm off track here! The school has the right to say "you're a rapist, hit the bricks" and ruin the accused's reputation and most likely cause an insurmountable setback in their educations, but because the rape was not handled through the actual legal process their record can never be officially cleared because there was never a "not guilty" verdict or even any record of an actual crime. Yep, suing the dog shit out of any school that does this and the actual accusers too sounds pretty good to me!
By the same people who are pushing to make it even worse, in the name of protecting women from micro-aggression. It's no longer okay to challenge women's preconceived notions or hold them to the same standards as men, or to even question their world view in any way. The feds have been pushing this disaster since Obama was elected. The results on education are in many cases abysmal. Vox story I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me ....snip.... I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed's current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience. And if the students complain, the feds intervene with high visibility investigations and sanctions, while the university sees its name dragged through the mud.
Dumb. We are talking about a private club having a process for expelling members. How does your crazed and feeble mind turn that in to a criminal trial?
If that is the case, and it does seem to be, that is a pretty fucking bad law. It both hurts the victim and the accused while giving school administrators the power of law and also seems to involve the college student council. If that is the case it is pretty damned fucked up. Yet another reason I do not like US colleges. It is like they are saying come here girls and you can get an education while we let our steroid riddled sports bots, and drunk frat boys have their way with you. And if any of you start to complain about it we simply expel the boy and drive the girl out or to suicide and pretend nothing happened. American college experience, brought to you by the APA. Setting everyone up for a lifetime of therapy.
Expelled for RAPE, which is a felony. Why would a university even let people charged but not yet convicted of rape onto campus? But they not only do that, they require them to stay there and go through the Kafkaesque legal process whose only possible finding is "guilty", because otherwise they'd face a storm of protest and have the university's federal funding slashed.
And then he blamed Obama for it and he lost all credibility. Like this wasn't going on all along. Seriously, this college rape bullshit was going on long before Obama was even an imagined idea in anyone's head. Taking out Obama will not correct this problem. It has roots in college sports, pro sports, gambling, fraternities, sororities, and college administration. Obama is just johnny come latyely to the scene. It existed before him and will continue without him. You really don't seem to care much about it unless you can use it against obama. If mittens romnifeller were president right now you would not give two shits about any of this.
It is his appointees who are pressuring all universities to be as batty as Berkeley. The feds hadn't been doing that before. Note that there are now major investigations into colleges that weren't going nuts over false rape statistics, with threats of Title IX sanctions.
I agree the university should simply pass on all of this and let real law enforcement handle criminal charges. They have no business getting involved in the rape cases at all. Unless they are somehow encouraging rape or complacent in it happening when they could prevent it.
