She’s a Boston lawyer who represents college students accused of sexual assault and denied due process. And she is not your typical lawyer in these cases.
“In college I would have been one of the women attending the rallies, holding the signs, and celebrating the wave of expulsions and suspensions of men accused of sexual assault,” wrote attorney Naomi Shatz in the Huffington Post.
In her first job as a lawyer, she sued an “upstate New York school district” for not protecting a student from gender-based harassment. Shatz then joined a firm that represents students accused of sexual assault.
That is when she “realized what an insane, Kafkaesque world these student disciplinary proceedings are.”
Shatz describes what some of us already know: That school disciplinary panels handling sexual assault cases are throwing out due process in order to appease the Obama administration, which has demanded that college administrators crack down on the offense.
“[A]s those of us who work with students embroiled in these university sexual assault cases know, the appearance that the problem is finally being addressed is just that: appearance,” Shatz wrote.
She goes on to describe how a “single investigator” serves as the prosecutor, judge and the jury in a case. She explains that the accused usually cannot cross-examine their accuser or witnesses and are denied legal representation. She notes that at some schools, the accused aren’t even allowed to see the evidence against them.
A system that once was stacked against the accuser has now become stacked against the accused.
“[J]ust as in the case of the system it replaced, it is designed to protect the school from risk,” Shatz wrote. “The recent policy changes have amplified an environment in which once a student is accused of sexual assault a finding of guilt is nearly guaranteed.”
Shatz concluded that feminists cheering the increased expulsions of students accused of sexual assault have already lost the battle.
“As feminists, we should demand better than knee-jerk reactions from the government intended to appease anti-sexual assault activists without truly addressing their demands, and poorly designed university policies intended merely to protect the school’s federal funding at the expense of our core democratic values of fairness, due process, and the presumption of innocence,” Shatz wrote.
