MSU Football Sexual Assault Scandal

There is a nationwide conversation about sexual assaults on college campuses. A primary reason we have this separate EOAA quasi-judicial system on college campuses is that the criminal justice system is perceived to have woefully failed in the investigation and successful prosecution of these cases. The legitimacy of the numbers of assaults on campuses can be difficult to pin down, but whatever the number of actual assaults, the level of successful prosecutions is close to zero and many find that to be unacceptable. That's the audience Kaler is speaking to when he talks about standing with victims of sexual assault.

As a result of the lack of satisfactory resolutions from the criminal courts, we have seen the rise of student conduct code systems that result in "convictions" with little due process in the guise of providing safe environments on college campuses. The issues that plague criminal prosecutions of sexual assaults--lack of concrete evidence, credibility disputes, chemical and alcohol involvement, etc., are seen as barriers to justice and are therefore largely eliminated in the code of conduct investigations--proving affirmative consent makes almost any encounter subject to an adverse finding if any party to the encounter calls consent into question.

So we have a two part system in place where it seems that almost no set of facts can successfully support a criminal conviction, but almost every set of facts can give rise to a colorable claim of a conduct code violation. Neither system seems just.

Summed up extremely well.
 





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