Amy Coney Barrett Condemns Purdue University's 'Fundamentally Unfair' Adjudication of Sexual Assault Claims.

Reason ^ | September 27, 2020 | Jacob Sullum

[karpov]

John and Jane, two students in Purdue University's Navy ROTC program, began dating in the fall of 2015 and had consensual sex 15 to 20 times. According to John, Jane's behavior became increasingly erratic, culminating in a suicide attempt he witnessed that December. They broke up in January 2016, after John tried to get Jane help by reporting her suicide attempt to two resident assistants and an adviser.

Three months later, in the midst of the university's s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Jane alleged that John had sexually assaulted her on two occasions. Those charges ultimately led Purdue, a state university in West Lafayette, Indiana, to suspend John for a year, forcing him to resign from ROTC and ending his plans for a career in the Navy. The process that led to those results, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett concluded in a 2019 opinion for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, "fell short of what even a high school must provide to a student facing a days-long suspension."

The case, which Ben McDonald covered here last year, illustrates the extent to which universities, responding to a 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter from the U.S. Department of Education, created procedures that effectively presumed the guilt of students charged with sexual assault. That letter warned university officials that their handling of such cases would be scrutinized under Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. The department broadened the definition of "sexual harassment," required schools to assess charges based on a "preponderance of the evidence" (meaning they are more likely than not to be true) rather than a stricter standard, and encouraged other short cuts by universities keen to maintain federal funding.

[Trillian]

Leftist women give businesses a ton of reasons not to hire them after all the crap they pull at schools.

[lepton]

And yet every week there are articles expressing shock that the current young males are reluctant to tie the marriage knot.

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For groups like BLM, that is part of the goal.

[Labyrinthos]

Back in the 1990’s, I defended a male student who was expelled from a college for allegedly having non-consensual sex with an intoxicated female. This was clearly a case of “buyer’s remorse,” and the undisputed evidence was that both the male and female were intoxicated. We argued that if both parties were intoxicated then they both had to be expelled or neither should be expelled. We lost the case before the college disciplinary board, but when I gave the college’s attorney a copy of the federal complaint alleging gender discrimination that I intended to file the next day, my client was suddenly un-expelled. Unfortunately, due to his “scarlet letter,” he ended up transferring out of the college and back to his home country, where he became a civil engineer.