In a recent interview with CSPAN’s Book TV, Stuart Taylor, Jr., co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities discusses the lack of just due process in campus rape cases. What created this Orwellian nightmare on our campuses? Taylor outlines a few causes below:
Stuart Taylor, Jr: Another way is they’ve put a virtual ban on cross-examining accusers. That’s probably the worst thing they’ve done because, because, as the Supreme Court has said many times, cross-examination is the greatest engine of truth that the legal process has ever come up with, and if you’re talking about not being able to examine an accuser, particularly in a context where it’s often he said, she said and there is no conclusive evidence other than which of them you believe, and you take away the right to discredit the accuser, taking that away loads the dice towards bias, not quite a presumption of evidence- In 2011 they said, don’t cross examine, in 2014 they upped the anti, and said if you allow cross examination, you are violating Title IX.
Beth Frerking: You mean the accused person having the right to Cross-Examine the accuser?
Stuart Taylor, Jr: Exactly. the law was laid down that nobody on behalf of the accused person, not a lawyer, not a representative, not anybody can cross-examine the accuser, and generally, can’t examine any other witnesses either. The supreme court had said repeatedly that cross-examination is the greatest engine for discovery of the truth the legal system has ever invented. And so taking that away in any case is a formula for unfairness. Taking it away in a he said she said context where you don’t know much except what he said, and she said, and sometimes theres evidence but not always, this hugely loads the dice against the accused. The other way they loaded the dice was they had a form of double jeopardy, not criminal so it’s not per say unconstitutional but they gave her, the woman a right to appeal the guy, I keep saying man and woman, once in a while it is a man and a man, they’ve the right to appeal the accused which has not been true and which has not been true in any other criminal proceedings… This atmosphere of pressure coming from the Obama administration and the colleges, all of them, became terrified that if they didn’t hammer as many accused guys as possible, and sometimes roundup people to do the accusations, they would get an investigation started by the Obama office of civil rights, they would make an announcement they were investigating these colleges, and theres more than 300 on the list now, and this would be terrible publicity with the ultimate threat being we will take away your federal money, maybe all of it, which could put campuses out of business. unless you do exactly what we want so , the people who ran these adjudicatory systems on campus, title IX coordinators had a huge conflict of interest. they knew the federal government was likely to come down hard on them if they did not hammer the accused and so hammering the accused became the order of business.
Beth Frerking: Thats quite a charge in terms of literally rounding up- talk more about that. I certainly understand where you’ve got cases and we’ve seen activism on the campuses by not just women, but men too, who say that these kind of things have been ignored in the past and that this isn’t being made up in a lot of cases. and that in fact part of the response Obama admin had was in response to various cases all over country where police hadn’t handled in in such an organized way that it fell on the campuses
Stuart Taylor, Jr: The outstanding example of this is Jack Montague, the Yale Pascual Canton who suddenly disappeared about a year ago from the basketball court. It became apparent that he was kicked out on account of sexual assault allegations. The woman did not make the allegations, she said she had an unhappy experience with him and told a roommate and someone told somebody and it gets around to the campus Title IX bureaucrat, and thats what they are. They have been hired by the thousands under the Obama administration. They decide, in part, because they want to gratify themselves under the Obama administration, they decided they would have an investigation and it was a prosecution anyway, even though the woman didn’t ask for it.
.
Watch the full interview here.
