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Townhall...
Crying Rape
By Mike Adams
People often assume that self-described liberals are more supportive of
due process than self-described conservatives. That certainly isn’t the
case when we talk about the illiberal bureaucrats who run the United
States Department of Education.
The notion that an adult charged with a felony should be put on trial
using the same standard of evidence used for someone who has been
issued a parking ticket is absurd. In fact, it is more than absurd. It
is offensive to well-established principles of due process and
fundamental fairness.
Recently, however, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil
Rights (OCR) has announced new guidelines that will force due process
to take a back seat to political correctness. These guidelines will
apply to sexual harassment and felony sexual assault cases.
The OCR has decided to teach universities something they already know;
namely, that sexual assault and sexual harassment are serious offenses.
In the process, however, they are putting innocent students at risk of
being wrongly convicted of offenses that could potentially destroy
their careers and reputations.
According to the new OCR guidelines, any college that accepts federal
funding or federal student loans (close to 100% of our nation’s
colleges) must now employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard of
proof in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. This lowered
standard replaces the traditionally accepted standard of proof beyond a
reasonable doubt, which, according to most triers of fact, is close to
100% confidence of guilt. In contrast, “preponderance of evidence”
means the campus judiciary only needs to be 50.01% confident that a
person is guilty of a given offense – even if that offense is rape,
which, regardless of degree, is always a serious felony.
This mandate from the federal government will have profound real-life
costs for real students. If we learned anything from the infamous Duke
Lacrosse case it is this: Academia is quick to blame people for
creating a “rape culture” on campus and slow to take responsibility for
false accusations.
Unfortunately, Duke was not an isolated case. At Stanford, student
jurors in sexual misconduct cases are actually given “training
materials” that say things like, “Everyone should be very, very
cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of
abuse or violence” and “An abuser almost never ‘seems like the type.’”
In other words, even highly respected universities like Stanford try to
create unfair and partial juries prior to rape adjudications – in clear
violation of the spirit of the 6th Amendment (Do you remember when
liberals cared about the “spirit of the law”?).
Adding a mere “preponderance” standard to such a toxic environment
would be a recipe for disaster – disaster in the form of wrongful
felony convictions.
The OCR mandates are not merely confined to actions. They apply to
students’ speech, too. Columbia University already lists “love letters”
as a form of sexual harassment. The University of California, Santa
Cruz, classifies using “terms of endearment” as sexual harassment. (Who
could have ever imagined that one could be endeared and harassed at the
same time?). At Yale, “unspoken sexual innuendo such as voice
inflection” is considered sexual harassment. The absurdities are
seemingly endless in 21st Century “hire” education.
Shortly after the evidence revealed that the accuser in the infamous
Duke Lacrosse case was lying, I wrote a letter to Duke Professor K.
Holloway. She was the ringleader of the “Duke 88” – a bunch of
professors who publicly accused the Duke Lacrosse players of both rape
and racism before they had their day in court. In my letter, I urged
her to take responsibility for damaging the reputations of innocent
students at her own university. Her response is printed below in its
entirety:
“Mr. [sic] Adams: You have made the error of anticipating that I have
some interest in what you have to say. I do not. K. Holloway.”
Professor Holloway may not be a rapist. But she is clearly a racist.
Nonetheless, she has inspired me to write to the OCR with a modest
proposal for handling sexual assault cases on college campuses.
Under my plan, any time a collegiate man is charged with rape his
accuser is automatically charged with criminal libel. If she fails to
prove her case then she is automatically convicted and expelled.
I plan to write to Professor Holloway because I anticipate that she has
some interest in what I have to say. My anticipation might be in error.
But, unlike sanctimonious feminists, I’m prepared to face the
consequences if I’m wrong.
Read it at Townhall
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