CALIFORNIA SUPREME Court Refuses To Review Occidental’s 2013 Expulsion of John Doe Whose Accuser Consented To Sex
In California, you can be expelled if your accuser says in writing that she consented to sex but later insists she could not give consent. The California Supreme Court refused to review an appeals court decision that upheld Occidental College’s expulsion of “John Doe” for having sex with an incapacitated “Jane Roe.” Barack Obama’s alma mater had to explain away Jane’s own text messages and her decision to return to John’s room after sending them. An adjudicator cited them as “conduct and statements that would indicate that she consented to sexual intercourse” with John, yet determined she was incapacitated when she wrote them and returned to his room.
The case drew national attention because an Occidental professor told a wavering Jane that John “fits the profile” of a campus rapist because of his good grades and good family. Sociologist Danielle Dirks left Occidental a year after John sued. Occidental also publicly posted a trove of documents that put itself in a bad light and didn’t realize they were public for months after. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education published them to show the “inadequacy of the current system” for adjudicating campus sexual misconduct. A judge refused to seal them.
Esquire published a feature on the case, saying the sexual encounter between two drunk students “quickly became a disaster” when it “collided with a panicked and pressured academic bureaucracy.”
Yet a California appeals court sided with the college in an August ruling, saying Jane’s texts and behavior with John were not necessarily exculpatory… John filed a petition for a writ of mandate under California law to overturn his expulsion. He argued the evidence didn’t back the finding, the proceeding lacked impartiality, the adjudicator “purposefully” failed to ask questions he deemed “critical” to his defense, and the hearing coordinator denied him “reasonable access to evidence.”
The appeals court determined the hearing was fair, as Occidental’s policy “complied with all the procedural requirements identified by California cases dealing with sexual misconduct disciplinary proceedings.” It dismissed John’s claim that the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute him was withheld from the hearing, saying it would not have changed the hearing result. The appeals judges said it was not “insufficient or unfair” to withhold information from John until five days before the hearing, and that it was irrelevant his counsel could not represent him at the hearing. The college’s refusal to ask 29 of John’s 38 questions for Jane was also considered proper by the court, saying the adjudicator has the discretion to leave out questions “that were inappropriate, irrelevant, or cumulative.” The appeals judges were not concerned about Jane’s texts showing she agreed to come back to John’s room, provided he had a condom, and that she made a plan with him to distract the friend guarding her door.
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