ESSAY BY STANFORD Law Alum. Choices Have Consequences: Chanel Miller & Brock Turner
The Ultimate Question
What really happened between Brock Turner and Chanel Miller during and after a fraternity party at the Kappa Alpha fraternity house on the Stanford University campus the weekend of January 17-18, 2015? Anyone who has children in college or destined for college, whether sons or daughters, should be terrified of the contradictions on college campuses and in the legal system. This analysis begins with the thoughtful, fair and balanced discussion of the Miller/Turner matter contained in Malcolm Gladwell’s recently published book, Talking to Strangers.
“[Miller] has no memory of meeting Brock Turner, no memory of whether she did or didn’t dance with him, no memory of whether she did or didn’t kiss him, did or didn’t agree to go back to his dorm, and no memory of whether she was a willing or unwilling participant in their sexual activity. Did she resist when they left the party? Did she struggle? Did she flirt with him? Did she just stumble, blindly, after him? We’ll never know. After the fact, when she was sober, Doe was adamant that she would never have willingly left the party with another man. She was in a committed relationship. But it wasn’t the real [Miller] who met Brock Turner. It was drunk and blacked-out [Miller], and our drunken, blacked-out selves are not the same as our sober selves.” [Talking to Strangers, emphasis added].
The catastrophic outcome of the evening for Miller and Turner was agonizingly predictable considering the circumstances and context:
“Brock Turner was asked to do something of crucial importance that night – to make sense of a stranger’s desires and motivations. That is a hard task for all of us under the best circumstances, because the assumption of transparency we rely on in those encounters is so flawed. Asking a drunk and immature nineteen-year-old to do that, in the hypersexualized chaos of a frat party, is an invitation to disaster.” [Talking to Strangers, emphasis added]
Choices and Consequences
A responsible, proactive parent teaches her or his children that choices have consequences. A necessary corollary is that all of us are accountable for our decisions.
The subject matter of this essay is an analysis of the consequences for the choices made by Miller and Turner the evening the two of them voluntarily got together at the KA party and afterward.
