Rape and sexual assault are crimes, unless they occur on college campuses.
Then, the federal government believes untrained college administrators only need to be 50.01 percent sure that an accuser is more believable than the accused to brand a student as a rapist for life.
In a federal probe of Princeton University, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights faulted the Ivy League university for violating the federally recommended standard of proof for cases of rape and sexual assault. Read that again: the “recommended” standard of proof, not an actual law.
Princeton was using the “clear and convincing evidence” standard for its proceedings, which is a higher burden of proof than the federally recommended “preponderance of evidence” but not as high as the criminal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That’s not the only way Princeton supposedly violated the rights of the accuser (forget the rights of the accused).
“OCR determined that the higher burden of proof was one of a number of examples in which Princeton tilted the scales in favor of the accused,” Tyler Kingkade wrote in the Huffington Post. “For example, accused students at Princeton could appeal a decision made by the university committee investigating sexual assault cases, but students who reported an incident could not.” In the U.S. court system, retrials for exonerated defendants are forbidden as “double jeopardy.”
Also, Princeton let accused students know what the charges were against them – an apparent “no-no” to OCR. Accused students were also told the names of the committee members who would decide their fate, were allowed to call witnesses and have an adviser at the hearing.
Accusers had these same rights, but OCR claimed they were not as obvious as the rights of the accused. A Frequently Asked Questions document laid out the rights of accusers and accused, and was referenced in the school’s sexual misconduct policy, but that was apparently not enough for OCR.
OCR also faulted Princeton for not finding men guilty in three cases.
Because remember, these sexual assault hearings aren’t about the truth, they’re about branding people as rapists.
