“Last week, a South Carolina jury awarded $5.3 million to a wrongfully accused Clemson University student on defamation and civil conspiracy claims,” SAVE, a due-process advocacy group, announced in a news release yesterday. “The decision is believed to represent the largest amount ever awarded to a student falsely accused of sexual misconduct.”
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Thank you for your support and interest in Help Save Our Sons. I am very grateful that you found the information on this website to be helpful, informative, and comforting. Most importantly, you discovered that you were never alone in your fight for due process campus justice, while defending your son’s innocence.
In 2014 when SOS was created there were very few resources educating parents and their college sons about the anti-due process Obama/Biden 2011 DCL. It was difficult to understand the absolute horrific lengths a college would go to in branding our innocent sons guilty before an investigation or Title IX hearing even began. Throughout 2014-2020, SOS worked to get information to the public, and advocated with others for Title IX due process. Court cases that upheld due process, and settlements for innocent accused males were more frequent. And In 2020 Americans saw Betsy DeVos unveil the legally revised new 2020 Title IX guidelines.
With the success of the new 2020 guidelines, Help Save Our Sons reached its goal by advocating for systemic change. Today there are organizations that are very informative and valuable for you.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/ is a great news worthy resource. https://www.dailywire.com/author/ashe-schow reports on this issue.
As for your need to finding help, there are many organizations to help you through a Title IX process.
- https://www.facecampusequality.org/
- https://www.titleixforall.com/
- https://www.ncfmcarolinas.com/
- http://www.saveservices.org/
- https://www.thefire.org/resources/
Now that we have succeeded with the new 2020 Title IX guidelines, https://helpsaveoursons.com/ will remain online as an archival website for information between 2014-2020. Thank you again for your support. There are many times when an email from you helped to pick me up and fight on for the good of our innocent sons. Alice True.
One of the stakes in November’s election is the fate of the Trump Administration’s due-process reforms for campus sexual-assault cases. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s new rule goes into effect Friday, August 14, 2020, and this week it passed its first legal tests.
New York Attorney General Letitia James sued to stop the rule and sought a preliminary injunction. Federal Judge John Koeltl, a Bill Clinton appointee, denied the injunction this week on grounds that the department had followed proper procedure in drafting the rule and would likely prevail on the merits.
“Rather than harming students,” Judge Koeltl wrote, “the Rule has the potential to benefit” both accuser and accused because they “are given greater assurance that if they prevail in the grievance proceeding, that result will not be overturned because the process did not comply with due process.” Meanwhile, federal Judge Carl Nichols ruled on similar grounds against a challenge to the new rule by 17 state attorneys general.
The rulings are vindication for Mrs. DeVos for following the
Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in writing the rule. The Obama
Administration, led on this issue by Vice President Joe Biden,
disregarded the APA by writing “Dear Colleague” guidance to schools
that eschewed public comment. The Trump Administration reviewed
nearly 125,000 comments before making its rule final.
DeVos’s Sexual-Assault Rule Prevails – WSJ –PDF wsj.com-Editorial
Judge Carl J. Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied a motion for preliminary injunction made by the Attorneys General of Pennsylvania, sixteen other states, and D.C. to preliminarily enjoin the U.S. Department of Education’s new Title IX rules.
Feeling some deja vu? That’s because a federal judge in New York did the same thing on Sunday in a similar case brought by the Attorney General of New York State. With the new Title IX regulations set to take effect tomorrow, Judge Nichols’s ruling plays a critical role in ensuring students will be treated fairly in campus disciplinary proceedings going forward.
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and D.C. filed their lawsuit to challenge the regulations.Among other things, the plaintiffs argued that the new regulations are “arbitrary and capricious,” and filed a motion for preliminary injunction.
Judge Nichols cited Sunday’s New York decision multiple times in concluding that the plaintiffs have not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of the case — a key factor in determining whether to grant a preliminary injunction. In assessing whether the regulations are arbitrary and capricious, he stated that “the Court’s role is limited to confirming that the agency has fulfilled its duty to examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action including a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.”
In other words, the court isn’t supposed to decide whether agency rules are the best rules or even particularly good rules — just whether the Department of Education has put forth a justification for them that makes sense. FIRE is glad to see the court acknowledge that ED has done so.
thefire.org-Samantha Harris
A judge in Washington, D.C., has denied an attempt by 17 Blue State Attorneys General as well as the District of Columbia to delay implementation of new Education Department rules requiring colleges and universities provide students accused of sexual misconduct with basic due process rights.
Judge Carl J. Nichols, a President Donald Trump appointee, denied the AGs motion to block the new Title IX regulations. The AGs made numerous arguments against the new regulations, including the fact that the new regulations provide due process to accused students.
Judge Nichols denied these claims and others in his ruling. At various points in Nichols’ ruling, he scolds the AGs for attempting to supplant their views with that of the Education Department. For example, the AGs argued schools should be responsible for adjudicating sexual assaults that occurred off-campus, such as at apartment buildings. The Education Department, however, adopted a more narrow view of what situations fall under the purview of the college, explaining that the assault was under the school’s discretion if it occurred at a place or event where “the recipient exercised substantial control over both the respondent and the context in which the sexual harassment occurs.”
As Nichols ruled, “the Final Rule is rooted in the text of Title IX itself, and the Court cannot supplant the Department’s view of its own authority with Plaintiffs’ preference for a broader one.”
As author and professor K.C. Johnson noted, Nichols dismissed “blue-states’ lengthy complaints about fair grievance procedures in one paragraph, implies they weren’t serious,” and suggests it was “Hard to imagine any court arguing that x-examination is some sort of unfair or gender-biased procedure.”
Nichols pointed to several concerns he had with the regulations, but ultimately said he could not rule simply on his own beliefs that differed from the Education Department. Further, Nichols was less enthusiastic about the new Title IX guidelines in his ruling that U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl was in his ruling last week. Koeltl was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
dailywire.com– Ashe Schow
As soon as the U.S. Department of Education revealed its final guidelines on how colleges and universities should adjudicate allegations of sexual assault, Democrats kicked into high gear to try and stop the rules from going into effect.
At issue is the fact that the new rules require schools to provide accused students some basic due process rights – like the specific allegations against them, the ability to cross-examine the evidence and witnesses against them, and access to the evidence against them prior to the hearing – which modern activists claim hurt victims. These same activists, including prominent Democrats such as presumptive 2020 nominee Joe Biden, claim we must “believe women” – except those who accuse Democrats.
When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos revealed the final rules in May, the attorneys general in numerous Blue States filed a lawsuit against the Department in an attempt to block the new rules from being implemented in the hopes that Biden wins the election and will stop the rules altogether. Should this happen, colleges and universities will continue to deny accused students constitutional due process rights, destroying futures and inviting hundreds more lawsuits.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Red State attorneys general filed their own brief defending the new regulations. The new rule, the AGs wrote, “requires educational institutions to investigate and, where proved, punish allegations of sufficiently severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive sexual harassment. It also provides a needed framework, consistent with long-standing Supreme Court precedent, that protects the foundational constitutional rights of due process and speech.”
Last week, a federal judge in New York denied a move by state school boards who tried to block the new rules. U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl wrote that the new rules don’t harm accusers.
“Rather than harming students, the Rule has the potential to benefit both complainants and respondents by providing procedural guidance for grievance procedures,” Koeltl wrote. “This process helps not only respondents but also complainants who are given greater assurance that if they prevail in the grievance proceeding, that result will not be overturned because the process did not comply with due process.”
dailywire.com-Ashe Schow
A federal judge allowed the Education Department to move forward with new rules governing how schools and universities respond to complaints of sexual assault. In a suit challenging the rules, attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia argued that the policy would block schools from investigating certain sexual abuse complaints and would discourage students from reporting assaults.
But US District Judge Carl. J. Nichols rejected those arguments, and wrote:
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia filed this suit challenging the U.S.Department of Education’s final rule addressing Title IX obligations, which was published in the Federal Register on May 19, 2020, and is scheduled to take effect on August 14, 2020. See Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal
Financial Assistance, 85 Fed. Reg. 30,026 (May 19, 2020) (to be codified at 34 C.F.R pt. 106) (the “Final Rule” or “Rule”). Plaintiffs later moved for a preliminary injunction enjoining implementation of the Rule or, in the alternative, for a stay of its effective date pending judicial review. Although Plaintiffs have raised serious arguments about certain aspects of the Rule, they have not established a likelihood of success on their claims, nor have they established that they are likely to suffer substantial irreparable harm pending further litigation. For those reasons, discussed below, the Court denies Plaintiffs’ Motion.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the ruling is “yet another victory for students and reaffirms that students’ rights under Title IX go hand in hand with basic American principles of fairness and due process.”
nypost.com-AP
If you’re going to challenge an agency regulation, you’d better show how it violates legal precedents. New York City’s board of education and the state of New York failed miserably in that regard, not even coming close to persuading a federal judge to either halt or push back the Friday effective date of the Department of Education’s Title IX regulation on campus sexual misconduct proceedings.
In a 46-page opinion Sunday, Judge John Koeltl said the plaintiffs overreached in arguing the regulation was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs federal rulemakings.
The judge notes it took until the Trump administration for the federal government to actually define sexual harassment as “unlawful sex discrimination under Title IX” in regulation, as opposed to facially nonbinding guidance. That was the format chosen by the Obama administration, and as a result, easily junked by its successor. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos gave educational institutions nearly three times longer to prepare than the APA requires – 87 days, putting the effective date in late summer and considering competing burdens from COVID-19, Koeltl notes.
Criticism that accused students get preferential treatment in the regulation is contradicted by the department’s confirmation that it lets “either party equally” challenge a finding “on the basis of procedural irregularity,” the judge said. He noted the department received public comments relaying “personal experiences” with discriminatory application of grievance procedures toward both accusers and accused.
thecollegefix.com– Greg Piper
A federal judge cited potential anti-male bias in the University of Iowa’s Title IX training, and its omission of exculpatory evidence in a Title IX proceeding, in refusing to dismiss a lawsuit by an expelled student.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, who has ruled against other Iowa universities in two similar lawsuits, also said defendant officials have no right to “quasi-judicial immunity” for their actions in the proceeding.
The university provided “no support” for its claim that Title IX officials in higher education need such immunity because they are “frequently sued” by participants in sexual misconduct proceedings. It also did not explain how such suits prevent officials from doing their jobs “in a forthright manner,” she wrote in an order last month.
According to John’s account, university officials went beyond simply finding him responsible for sexual assault after a Title IX proceeding. Compliance officer Constance Schriver Cervantes in the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity banned him from campus before he even got a hearing, an interim sanction that was “discriminatory, objectively unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious.” Tiffini Stevenson Earl, another compliance officer, “discounted and withheld” exculpatory evidence.
Judge Ebinger was particularly dismissive of the university’s argument that its officials deserve “absolute immunity,” a shield against accountability that not even “high school administrators” enjoy under a 45-year-old Supreme Court precedent. Title IX proceedings are nothing like those overseen by “federal administrative law judges” and more like those overseen by a “federal prison’s discipline committee,” where the members are prison employees and the proceedings lack common procedural safeguards, the judge wrote.
Ebinger allowed Title IX and due process claims by “John Doe” to continue while dismissing other claims, including racial discrimination. The lawsuit describes him as a “citizen of a predominantly Muslim South-Asian country” who was born and raised in Kuwait. His two accusers are white women.
thecollegefix.com-Greg Piper
According to the Office for Civil Rights Blog, the new Title IX rules that will go into effect on 8/14/2020, will not be retroactive. I know that this is very disappointing, as many of America’s sons and daughters, (…really, it’s mostly sons) endured horrific mental trauma in being falsely accused, while denied due process, and the opportunity to defend oneself against an accusation, which was often anonymous.
I certainly wish the new 2020 Title IX guidelines were retroactive. It would be nice if our sons who were denied Title IX due process could at last, be heard. It would be nice if our loving kind sons, who endured unreasonable, unethical and hateful/bias Title IX hearings might actually be allowed retroactively to do something that many have been denied, by their University. And that is to defend their reputation, to defend their decent nature, to defend their good name, to defend their innocence. But the Office for Civil Rights has decided this is not to be.
While I am grateful that Trump’s Dept of Education put an end to the unjust and illegal 2011 Dear Colleague Letter under Obama/Biden, I am frustrated with OCR on this specific issue. -Alice True
Read OCR’s blog post about this subject: 2.ed.gov/ocr/blog