GOOD News, Case Dismissed

Charges Dropped, Cleared by TIX, and Legislation supporting due process investigations

SETTLEMENT: UVA and Former Male Student Reach Agreement; Judge Dismisses Federal Case

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SETTLEMENT: UVA and Former Male Student Reach Agreement; Judge Dismisses Federal Case

A lawsuit from a former University of Virginia student who said he was denied his degree due to a pending Title IX sexual misconduct investigation has been dropped, according to court records. A U.S. district court judge dismissed the case on Sept. 11 after both sides reached an agreement, according to court documents.

The male student, John Doe, filed the lawsuit in June against members of UVa’s Board of Visitors, President Jim Ryan and two Title IX officials in June. He alleged that his constitutional rights have been violated during the university’s Title IX investigation.

dailyprogress-Staff

 

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TWO SETTLEMENTS, TWO COLLEGES: Tulane Settles And Yale Expunges Student’s Record.

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TWO SETTLEMENTS, TWO COLLEGES: Tulane Settles And Yale Expunges Student’s Record.

TULANE 

YALE. Following a months long legal battle with Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi ’19, who sued Yale after being disciplined for sexual misconduct, the University expunged his suspension from his academic record.

Although Tenreiro-Braschi and the University agreed to dismiss the lawsuit and bear their own costs in May 2018, the terms of their settlement were not disclosed to the public. Earlier this week, however, Tenreiro-Braschi sent the News a letter written by his residential college dean Nilakshi Parndigamage that reveals what may have been a part of the settlement. According to Tenreiro-Braschi, he received his diploma

yaledailynews-S. Cho & A. Steinkamp

14 Colleges that have settled    35 Documented TitleIX false accusations

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COLLEGE FALSE ACCUSATIONS Are Increasing. Cal State Fullerton and University of Kansas. 2 Schools 2 Females. 1 Arrest

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COLLEGE FALSE ACCUSATIONS Are Increasing. Cal State Fullerton and University of Kansas. 2 Schools 2 Females. 1 Arrest

False Accusation made at University of Kansas. A female student at the University of  Kansas told police that she had been raped the day before. She didn’t remember all the details because, she said, she was drunk. She told the officers she didn’t want to press charges but gave them access to her phone. After looking through her phone, police suspected she was not being truthful about the encounter and continued to investigate. Police allege the female had sex with her ex-boyfriend’s best friend to get back at him, but then feared news of the encounter would spread. Furthermore, the detective said the female student “decided to press charges after speaking with the university’s IOA office because she wanted to punish her on-again, off-again boyfriend for having a relationship with another woman at the same time as her,” The police determined she had lied and arrested her for falsely reporting a felony crime.  dailywire-Ashe Schow

False Accusation made at Cal State Fullerton. A female student who reported being raped in a Cal State Fullerton parking garage elevator was not attacked on campus. Police said the student had been on campus on Tuesday, when the alleged attack was reported to have occurred shortly after midnight, but investigators did not find anything in the surveillance footage consistent with the student’s report that it happened in a university elevator. “After further investigation, it was discovered that the reported incident did not occur at Cal State Fullerton,” Chief Aguirre said. When investigators found inconsistencies in the student’s  report, they interviewed her again and she told them that the rape did not happen on campus. ktla

Read False rape allegations: figuring the figures

 

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THREE COLLEGES SETTLE With Falsely Accused Males. Ohio State, SyracuseU, and UCSB.

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THREE COLLEGES SETTLE With Falsely Accused Males. Ohio State, SyracuseU, and UCSB.

 

As stated previously, colleges prefer to keep settlement agreements out of the news. (Especially if the settlement is with a falsely accused male.)  There are many more settlement agreements with falsely accused males that we will never know about, but here is a list of 14 settlements that we do know about.

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BRIAN BANKS’ MOTHER Talks About The Movie And The Fight To Save Her Son

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BRIAN BANKS’ MOTHER Talks About The Movie And The Fight To Save Her Son

The true story of Brian Banks, an All-American high school football player who spent a decade behind bars  wrongly convicted of rape and eventually exonerated, opened at theaters last month, and is quickly becoming a recommended feel-good film for late-summer moviegoers. Banks and his mother, Leomia Myers, shared their insights.

“As African-American parents and a mother, we’re always told to keep your child involved in something. All their lives they were involved in sports, church, sports, school…summer school,” Myers said. “And, I did that, and he had never been in trouble. So, I did all the right things, and then this happened. And, I was ill-prepared for it. I did not know what to do.” “I did not know, as a mother, to say to Brian when the police arrested him, ‘Just wait…don’t say anything, don’t say anything to anybody,’” she stated. “But I also told him to always tell the truth and that’s exactly what he did.  He told the truth to the police officer, and they in turn told him, ‘Oh, just tell us the truth and you will go home’ which was farthest from the truth.”

The trial revealed a broken justice system.

“What I knew to do was I loved my son, and I was willing to do anything to help him,” she asserted. “Whatever it took, I was going to help him because I knew he was innocent…and he should not be going through what he was going through. It’s a painful experience, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through it.”

thevillagecelebration

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“GOD IS GOOD!” Quintez Cephus Tweets. Cleared By NCAA To Return To Wisconsin Badgers

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“GOD IS GOOD!” Quintez Cephus Tweets. Cleared By NCAA To Return To Wisconsin Badgers

Quintez Cephus began the week unsure of whether he’d be able to continue his career with the University of Wisconsin football team. Now, it appears it’s only a matter of time before the talented wide receiver gets back on the field for the Badgers. Cephus broke the news himself Friday that he had been cleared by the NCAA, the second major hurdle he’s crossed in a span of five days.

“God is good!” he tweeted. “So thankful to be eligible to play with my teammates! Thank you to everyone who helped me get to this point.”

“I’m ready to win football games and start getting my education and I expect to do it at a very high level,” Cephus said during a news conference with his lawyers.

Coach Paul Chryst and UW players voiced their support of Cephus earlier this month. “Q’s like one of my brothers,” UW junior wide receiver Kendric Pryor said. “I just want the best for him. I want him to have the opportunity to play football again, no matter if it’s here or wherever he decides to go.” “Obviously, for Quintez to get through such a difficult time in his life and for him to have the opportunity that he wants,” UW junior running back Garrett Groshek said, “you just couldn’t be more happy for him.”

fox28spokane-Jim Polzin

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ATIXA Issues a Stunning Rebuke To The Religion of Trauma Informed Title IX Investigations

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ATIXA Issues a Stunning Rebuke To The Religion of Trauma Informed Title IX Investigations

On Thursday, the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) -not usually a friend of due process- released a position statement on so-called trauma-informed investigations and the neurobiological claims of trauma. The group has trained thousands of Title IX administrators across the country to investigate alleged sexual assault on college campuses, and cautioned colleges and universities in its press release“to avoid the use of information on the neurobiology of trauma to substitute for evidence.”

In 2017, The Atlantic’s Emily Yoffe wrote a seminal  article on the alleged science behind trauma-informed investigations. In it, she interviewed Elizabeth Loftus, perhaps the most trusted expert on trauma and memory in the United States. She likened the current dogma surrounding “trauma-informed” to the Satanic Daycare panic from decades ago, suggesting it sounded a lot like the “recovered memory” theory of the era. At that time, people were convinced that their problems were caused by repressed memories. Today, students who don’t fully remember a sexual encounter due to alcohol, or who come to regret the encounter for a variety of factors, are led to fill in the gaps in their memory with the belief that they were sexually assaulted… As Loftus told Yoffe, those trying to reconstruct an encounter after drinking alcohol were “very vulnerable to post-event suggestion.”… A common example for college campuses: A woman has a drunken hookup with a male acquaintance and the next day doesn’t fully remember what happened. She talks to her friends or a Resident Assistant (trained to report incidents of sexual assault under a broad definition that includes having sex after drinking) and they suggest she couldn’t consent due to her alcohol intake. She now starts filling in the gaps and viewing the encounter as sexual assault, and suddenly she is “traumatized” by a consensual encounter.

ATIXA credited Yoffe’s article with bringing to light some of the issues regarding the going theories on trauma. ATIXA stated, “Yoffe leads with the thesis that ‘Neurobiology of Trauma’ is junk science. ATIXA does not fully agree, but we do worry that application of the knowledge obtained by practitioners in our field has gotten way ahead of the actual science, that the body of knowledge is being misapplied, and that some purveyors of this knowledge are politically motivated to extrapolate well beyond any reasonable empirical conclusions currently supported by the science.”  ATIXA continued, “everyone in the field is on the trauma learning curve and needs to be cautious about making premature conclusions. “Perhaps the effective tools of truly understanding what causes trauma and what its effects are have not been invented yet. ATIXA goes on to state that trauma-informed is not necessarily bad, but running an investigation starting with the assumption someone is traumatized and then fitting the evidence to support their claim – as Title IX trauma-informed investigations do – is not right.

dailywire– Ashe Schow The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sex Assault Emily Yoffe

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SETTLEMENT: GRINNELL COLLEGE Settles Anti-Male Bias Lawsuit Rather Than Face a Jury

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SETTLEMENT: GRINNELL COLLEGE Settles Anti-Male Bias Lawsuit Rather Than Face a Jury

One of the longest-running Title IX lawsuits stemming from the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” sexual-misconduct guidance has settled. A federal judge ruled last month that a jury would decide whether Grinnell College violated an accused male student’s Title IX rights and breached his contract by treating him differently than his female accusers. That apparently prompted the Iowa liberal arts college to settle with “John Doe.”

A joint notice of settlement published Friday says they plan to file a stipulation of dismissal next week, preempting the jury trial scheduled to start Sept. 16. The actions of Grinnell officials were called into question by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger in the July ruling. One of them is former chief justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, Marsha Ternus, now a lawyer in private practice who specializes in student conduct adjudications. She apparently refused to consider evidence that one of Doe’s female accusers consented to sexual activity with him. Ternus also may have relied on gender stereotypes about women and birth control to determine that Doe lacked consent, and appeared to go easier on a female student found responsible for sexual misconduct in a different case.

thecollegefix-Greg Piper Discrimination Case Against Grinnell Settles

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BIG WIN For Due Process. American Bar Assoc. Voted Against Affirmative Consent

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BIG WIN For Due Process. American Bar Assoc. Voted Against Affirmative Consent

The American Bar Association wanted to change the definition of consent in criminal sexual assault cases that closely mirrors the definition used by college and universities — but criticism from due process advocates blocked the move. The ABA’s House of Delegates rejected a resolution to endorse the affirmative consent standard, which holds that an encounter should be considered assault unless each participant obtained a clear yes before every sexual act. The ABA voted 256-165 against endorsing affirmative consent as a standard in cases involving sexual accusations.

On college campuses that have moved toward an affirmative consent standard, the de facto burden of proof has shifted to the accused—often male athletes of color—who face expulsion and lifelong pariah status unless they can provide evidence that each and every stage of a late-night, drunken sexual escapade that neither party remembers very well had garnered an inarguable affirmation before it began. “The idea that we’re essentially taking what colleges define as consent and try to import it into criminal court is not appropriate,” said Lara Bazelon, a member of the Criminal Justice Section’s governing board, and a professor of law at the University of San Francisco.

Affirmative consent, as Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson, explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on the ABA’s resolution would “redefine sexual consent and convict innocent men of assault.”..It’s a relief that this illiberal standard did not make the jump from Title IX star chambers to ABA policy.

reason.com-Soave insidehighered.com-Bauer-Wolf iwf.org-Hays

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“THANK YOU For Giving His Life Back” Ex-Badgers Quintez Cephus Is Cleared To Return To UW-Madison.

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“THANK YOU For Giving His Life Back” Ex-Badgers Quintez Cephus Is Cleared To Return To UW-Madison.

Former Wisconsin receiver Quintez Cephus has been cleared to return to school after a jury acquitted him of sexual assault charges. Wisconsin coach Paul Chryst has said he would welcome Cephus back.  The school announced Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s decision in a statement that said the university had obtained information that wasn’t provided during a student conduct review. The statement said sanctions against Cephus have been “reduced” and his expulsion has been lifted, though some conduct violations were upheld.

Cephus 21, of Macon, Georgia, was suspended from the team in August 2018 because of two female’s accusations. Cephus countered that the sex was consensual and was arranged by one of his accusers. The school expelled him earlier this year. A jury acquitted him Aug. 6 after deliberating for less than an hour. Since Cephus’ acquittal, black community leaders, members of the football team and many Badgers fans have rallied around him, urging the university to accept his petition for reinstatement. His attorneys accused UW-Madison last week of dragging its feet when the university requested more documents to review…UW-Madison said it received information from the criminal trial that it did not have during its student conduct proceeding, which requires a lower burden of proof than in criminal cases.

Marcus Allen, president of the African-American Council of Churches Madison and pastor at the Mount Zion Baptist Church that Cephus attends, said he was grateful Blank decided to allow Cephus to go on with his life. “If he was found innocent why shouldn’t he be allowed to return to his normal way of life?” Allen said. “We stand on the side of justice and justice said he was innocent.” Cephus’ attorney, Stephen Meyer, issued a statement thanking Blank for giving Cephus “his life back in time to pursue his academic and athletic dreams.”

madison.com– K. Meyerhofer espn.com– AP

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