Colleges lose series of rulings in suits brought by male students accused of sex assault. In stinging decisions, judges fault lack of due process.
Last week, the California Court of Appeals ruled against the University of Southern California in a lawsuit brought by a student suspended for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman during group sex.
The encounter had started as consensual, the woman told the university, but soon became violent. The accused student violated Southern California's sexual misconduct policy, the university argued, not by harming the woman himself, but by failing to stop the other men from slapping her and for later leaving her alone with them.
The accused student, according to the court’s decision, was not "provided any information about the factual basis of the charges against him," was not able to examine the evidence supporting the victim's statements and was not allowed to appear before the panel deciding his case.
The case joins three other legal wins for accused students in the past two months, and at least 10 in the last year. Some legal experts, including the federal and state judges deciding the cases, say the flurry of recent successes for disciplined students may show how some colleges and universities are eliminating “basic procedural protections” in an attempt to combat campus sexual assault.
“In over 20 years of reviewing higher education law cases, I’ve never seen such a string of legal setbacks for universities, both public and private, in student conduct cases.” Gary Pavela, editor of the the Association of Student Conduct Administration's Law and Policy's Report and former president of the International Center for Academic Integrity, said. “Something is going seriously wrong. These precedents are unprecedented.”
