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2/3/2025 - Trump Orders Schools to Ease Sex Assault Rules
(www.thedailybeast.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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I don't disagree there but that is an extreme case rather then the common trial.
It is not a public court. It is about the right to face the accuser and cross examine them (ask them questions). The only parties required to be present is the panel, the accuser, the accused and their lawyers if they have them.
Yeah, I admitted as much in the first post. But large corporations routinely loose to small guys with cheap lawyers. The quality of lawyers only matter when the case is close (unclear evidence). Which again isn't perfect but better than any of the alternative.
Again, what is the alternative? Just fuck it, judge people based on vibes? The lives being ruined is not hypothetical, it happened multiple times.
And again, maybe I would be more sympathetic if the original Title IX included harsh penalties for false accusations to deter them. But it was the opposite. Prosecutors refused to even apply the light penalties that exist for perjury.
Yeah, liars should be punished. There is however irony in that statement considering the current president…
Given that the single greatest hurdle to gaining convictions in rape cases are the lack of witnesses, usually limited to the accuser and the accused, I imagine a good many rape cases, Title IX or otherwise, are largely decided by the relative quality of the lawyers involved.
I am not convinced that is true but let's say it is. How much worse would that be, if lawyers were not involved? At least the difference between how convincing an expensive and cheap lawyers are is not really that big. Being convincing is a job requirement. Remove them and you decide guilt in these cases entirely based on how sympathetic and outspoken the accuser and accused are.
You clearly have no idea how harrowing a rape trial is for the victim, how few convictions there are proportionately and how underreported realise crimes are because of how awful and unsuccessful bringing a case to trial is for victims, or you wouldn't be claiming that bringing that into the principal's office of your local K12 school and your local college is somehow a good thing.
For every 100 reported to police, about 13 get sent to a prosecutor (the rest being dropped due to lack of evidence, strong contradictory evidence, inability to identify a culprit, that sort of thing) about 10 of which result in a charge and 7 in a conviction, prosecution and conviction rates not radically out of line with other crimes. Prosecutors only try cases they think have a good chance of being successful (meaning they don't think the evidence is good enough in about a quarter of cases sent to them), and the standard for criminal trials is beyond a reasonable doubt. That 13 is a bit lower than other crimes, but not radically so. Most stats you see implying it's much worse (like an order of magnitude worse) are essentially using a fudge factor for unreported rapes as though the criminal justice system can even hypothetically do anything about an unreported rape.
Considering that the standard for a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt" while the standard for a Title IX hearing is at strictest "clear and convincing" and is often "a preponderance of the evidence" (aka slightly more likely than not), the rate of being found liable in a Title IX hearing is much higher, though not as high as it was when some schools used training said that women never lie but men will say whatever they have to to get their way, the accused didn't need to be told exactly what they were being accused of or what evidence they needed a defense for and an accuser's testimony could not be questioned.
EDIT: Just to point out how ridiculous accounting for "unreported" rapes is, if every time a rape was reported to law enforcement the accused was summarily executed without any process of any kind, just accusation->death, the "conviction rate" would still be at most ten percent.
Me: reporting, prosecution and conviction rates are disastrously low.
You: that's because they don't come forward much, cases aren't taken to court and men are found not guilty, therefore none of those men are guilty.
You need a higher standard of proof to put someone in jail, but this is just chucking them out of the same institution as their rape victim, and kids get chucked out of school for just punching someone, without lawyers being involved. Just move the guy on. That's all.
Your accusation->death line is hyperbole.
So, you want to end someone's college career on someone else's word alone, unless they can provide absolute proof that person is lying (and if we're following Obama/Biden era rules they aren't required to be told what they're trying to prove beforehand) they should be expelled from college in a way that will make it much harder to get admitted to another one, right?
Sounds fair /s
I'd note that the Devos guidelines Trump brought back call for things to be done to make it easier for the alleged victim prior to any finding, so long as those actions aren't punitive - examples given back in 2018 were things like changing housing arrangements or switching classes for one or both as necessary to separate them. The key point being not punishing the accused before any finding and establishing a process that is as fair as could be managed for making that finding.
It is hyperbole, but it's hyperbole to demonstrate a point - when you talk about how abysmally low conviction rates are, even if we went as far in the other direction as possible and simply executed everyone accused on the spot, you'd still be able to complain that the conviction rate was painfully low at ten percent because the bullshit about including "unreported cases" in a way we don't treat any other crime makes a ten percent conviction rate the highest it can hypothetically be, when it's really not radically different than any other crime if measured by the same metrics.
Dude, unreported crime rates exist for other categories than rape and sexual assult, but it's particularly high for crimes where victims believe that they are very unlikely to get a conviction and are very likely to have a terrible time in court and death threats afterwards, like sexual assault, rape, and organised crime syndicates.
It's not jail, it's school exclusion. It happens all the time over far less serious behaviour than rape. Don't bring that expensive lawyer justice-evasion victim-blaming victim-shaming shit into schools.
Don't keep failing to join the dots on the rapist changing the rules to benefit fellow rapists.
...but no one tries to use them when calculating conviction rates, because they're vague estimates rather than any kind of hard number and everyone properly understands in every other case that law enforcement can't even hypothetically do anything about an unreported crime.
Are you college aged or older? Do you have student loans? Now, imagine you have all those student loans, but you have no degree and a dramatically harder time moving to another school (for which you'd have to take out further student loans if you manage to get in) because the previous school says why you were expelled when asked.
If it were just "go to another school" with that being the full extent of the consequences, that would be one thing but it's really not.
Also, under the Devos rules supporting actions can be taken to make things easier for the accuser in response to the accusation alone (before any hearing, finding or even investigation), but those actions cannot be unreasonable, punitive or deny access to education (for example changing class schedules for one or both, changing housing assignments, or other things to prevent contact between them).
So, no one can question or challenge any part of an accusation in any way? Or do you have some (likely media fueled) image in your mind that the guidelines allow for the accused or his lawyer to grill the accuser, shouting irrelevant questions at her until she breaks down and submits? Because what the Devos guidelines actually call for for cross-examination is that all questions have to be submitted to the judge-analog (typically Title IX coordinator, but can be delegated) who is supposed to decide if the question is relevant or not to the accusation and the question can only be asked if it's approved. If she's a slutty slut slut is unlikely to be considered relevant, as is what she was wearing unless an article of clothing is somehow central to the evidence.
Question: In your ideal world, what would the process look like? Start from when it's reported (unless you don't think it should need to be reported, in which I want to know how the school is supposed to know) and go all the way through to a finding and punishment.
The original Title IX didn't say anything about accusations of sexual assault, at all. It literally just sad that federally funded educational programs could not discriminate with respect to sex. The interpretation that that included sports programs or similar extracurriculars came later, the interpretation that that requires a parallel court-like system for adjudicating sexual assault allegations by students under a looser standard than actual courts came even later.