Monthly Archives: August 2018

GREAT NEWS. Second Chances DO Exist for Title IX Accused College Males

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GREAT NEWS. Second Chances DO Exist for Title IX Accused College Males

Ray Buford the former Gophers cornerback, was merely TIX accused -never charged- but then expelled from the University of Minnesota in 2016. The County Attorney’s Office twice declined to press charges against Gophers players related to the Sept. 2 incident, once after a police investigation and then again after the school’s Title IX investigation.  Today, Ray Bulford is set to play for New Mexico State in the U’s season opener… After UMinnesota expelled Buford, he landed at Independence Community College where he played in all 12 games of the 2017 season. He also made brief appearances in the most-recent season of “Last Chance U,” a Netflix documentary that chronicled two junior colleges filled with players seeking second chances from major college programs. New Mexico State gave Buford that second chance after a lengthy vetting process. Buford was accepted and enrolled after the school’s Office of Institutional Equity and Aggies athletics director Mario Moccia looked into his past.  Moccia said he spoke with former Minnesota coaches. “When the discussion about recruiting this prospective student-athlete occurred, I asked myself, ‘What is my due diligence?’ And it was (talking to) people I knew and people I trusted.” This week, Bulford tweeted: Psalms 40:2- ‘He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and the mire, he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.’..SOS wishes great success and a healthy life to Ray Bulford and his family.

twincities.com By Andy Greder

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LIES, DAMNED LIES. Campus Sexual Assault Stats Debunked by Ashe in One Place.

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LIES, DAMNED LIES. Campus Sexual Assault Stats Debunked by Ashe in One Place.

A potential draft of new federal campus sexual assault policies was leaked this week, so expect a new round of false and misleading statistics to be shared by those who claim due process “protects rapists” and “hurts victims.”  I’ve taken down every one of these statistics before – sometimes many, many times – but it’s time to debunk them all in one place. So here we go…1-in-5 (or 1-in-4 or 1-in-3) Women Will Be Sexually Assaulted During College These studies are often not nationally representative, are often produced by women’s organizations determined to find women as oppressed victims in America, and are self-reported – a notoriously unreliable form of data. The Majority Of Campus Rapes Are Committed By A Small Number Of Men. This ‘study’ by David Lisak was debunked. It claims that “90%” of rapes on campus are perpetrated by a few men. For starters, Lisak didn’t conduct the study himself, but used data from studies conducted by former grad students, who didn’t limit their data to college students. False Accusations Are Rare.  That statistic is wildly misleading, as it only applies to accusations made to police that are proven false. Proving a negative is often impossible, especially in a “we had sex but it was consensual” situation. On college campuses, there is no punishment for a false accusation, and thus no fear, as there is with lying to the police.

dailywire.com By Ashe Schow

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PRELIMINARY DoED Rules on Campus Sexual Misconduct Include Due Process Protections

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PRELIMINARY DoED Rules on Campus Sexual Misconduct Include Due Process Protections

Late yesterday, The New York Times reported that it acquired a copy of new regulations the Department of Education will soon propose to replace the now-rescinded 2011 Dear Colleague letter and other guidance from past administrations regarding how to respond to sexual misconduct allegations on campus. Judging solely by the Times’ reporting on the document (the actual draft guidance has not been made public), it sounds as though the proposed rules will go a long way towards restoring meaningful due process protections to the campus justice system, to the ultimate benefit of students — both accuser and accused.

thefire.org By Robert Shibley

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GOOD NEWS: Judge Reverses Decision in Doe’s Due Process Lawsuit against Ohio State.

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GOOD NEWS: Judge Reverses Decision in Doe’s Due Process Lawsuit against Ohio State.

OPINION and ORDER granting in part and denying in part Plaintiff’s Motion for Reconsideration of the Court’s 3/10/17 Opinion and Order in that Plaintiffs equal protection claim that was previously dismissed is reinstated against Defendants Ohio State University, Kelly Smith, and Matthew Page. All other claims that were dismissed remain so. Signed by Judge George C. Smith on Aug. 20, 2018

Judge Smith’s Opinion and Order 

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WHERE TITLE IX Went Wrong: The Equal Opportunity Law That Ran Amok

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WHERE TITLE IX Went Wrong: The Equal Opportunity Law That Ran Amok

Title IX, the 1972 legislation banning sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal financial support, was a reasonable equality-of-opportunity law in its original form.  So what explains the scorched-earth campaign against men’s sports carried out in its name? Why has it been used to deny students and professors due process and free speech in sexual harassment cases? For the activists, Title IX was not an equal opportunity law; it was a mandate to change conventional understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman. When a Massachusetts district court judge reviewed Brandeis University’s Title IX–inspired harassment proceedings, he declared them “closer to Salem 1692, than Boston 2015.” How did we get here?

In his new book, The Transformation of Title IX, Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick provides the answer: the transformation happened slowly and incrementally and involved a strange symbiosis between government officials, federal judges, and activists.  Melnick shows, how OCR officials found a way to rewrite the rules while sidestepping the required “notice-and-comment” process, simply by labeling a modification not as a formal rule change but as a “clarification” or “guidance.” Such changes were then announced as faits accomplis through friendly-but-firm “Dear Colleague” letters. When someone protested, OCR administrators would dig in their heels and insist they had merely clarified what was already in the law.

educationnext.org By Christina Hoff Sommers

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FALSE ACCUSATIONS Happen. Ohio Cop Says 20% of Sex Assault Reports are False

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FALSE ACCUSATIONS Happen. Ohio Cop Says 20% of Sex Assault Reports are False

While we are often told to “believe women” – and are assured no one would lie about being raped, false reports do happen. In Port Clinton, Ohio, some 20% of sexual assault reports are classified as false. That’s nearly twice as many as the highest (misleading) claim that just 2% to 10% are false. As I’ve explained previously, that number comes from claims that are proven false, which may be just as difficult to prove as cases that are true. While some cases may not yield enough evidence, or the accuser does not want to pursue charges, Carpenter said good police work will snuff out a false claim. “If you do the investigation the right way you should have collected enough information to find the truth.”  The bottom line is we must be honest about statistics and the realities of this crime. People lie about the worst things imaginable, mostly because no one wants to disbelieve them. But that means that sometimes the real victim is the person being falsely accused.

dailywire.com By Ashe Schow COP Says Ohio Player Wrongly Accused

 

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DUE PROCESS Legal Update: UC Santa Barbara Found in Contempt of Court

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DUE PROCESS Legal Update: UC Santa Barbara Found in Contempt of Court

In a remarkable step, a judge in the Santa Barbara County Superior Court has found the University of California, Santa Barbara in contempt of court for failing to comply with a court decision regarding the rights of an accused student in a campus sexual misconduct proceeding. As is all too common in these cases, UCSB rendered its decision without granting Doe a hearing or an opportunity to confront his accuser… Finding that UCSB had not complied with its own policies, Judge Geck ordered UCSB to reinstate Doe and to reconsider his appeal using not only the investigator’s report, but all the evidence presented at the appeal hearing. In February 2018, the appeals panel convened again to reconsider its decision in Doe’s case. The panel once again rejected Doe’s appeal and dismissed him from the university. The revised appeal decision included introductory language stating that the panel had now considered all the evidence from the appeal hearing. But the actual decision itself was “identical in every respect to the original Appeal Decision,” according to an August 2018 court order finding UCSB in contempt of the court’s December 2017 ruling. According to the court, the new language indicated “that the panel did not genuinely reconsider the case, but simply added language that would make the original decision look like a truly reconsidered decision.” This time around, Judge Geck made clear that she did not trust the appeals panel to once again reconsider Doe’s case, since that panel “does not appear to be inclined” to “independently review the evidence” and make its own decision. As a result, she ordered UCSB to vacate entirely the finding of responsibility against Doe and to re-admit him as a student effective Fall 2018.

thefire.org By Samantha Harris UCSB dailynexus.UC Regents Found in Contempt

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COMMON APP No Longer Asks Your Criminal History. But Will Ask About Anti-Due Process TIX Disciplinary History

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COMMON APP No Longer Asks Your Criminal History. But Will Ask About Anti-Due Process TIX Disciplinary History

The Common Application decided to “ban the box” starting next year — so the million-plus students who use the online form to apply to some 800 colleges nationwide won’t have to disclose whether they have ever been convicted of a crime. But something was missing from the ‘ban the box’ debate: The question that the Common App is leaving on the application. All schools will still learn whether an applicant has ever been previously disciplined by another school — including, but not limited to, expulsion, suspension and probation. Some of these cases center on allegations of sexual misconduct and get decided behind closed doors on a far lower standard of proof than the high bar required for conviction in criminal court. Think about that. The people who run the Common App are saying they don’t think it’s appropriate to ask about your criminal history — when you have had all of the rights of a criminal defendant, including the right to cross-examination, the power to subpoena evidence and witnesses in your favor and the presumption of innocence unless guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But they do think it’s important to ask whether some other school, without giving you any of those rights, has found you responsible for something based on a mere preponderance of the evidence. This makes no sense. If bad things that people are accused of doing in the past shouldn’t be relevant to a school’s evaluation of that student, then shouldn’t that apply with even more force when that finding is made without any due process rights and with the lowest burden of proof used to find facts in law?

washingtonpost.com By Justin Dillon, Scott Bernstein

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