Attorneys Justin Dillon and Matt Kaiser of Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC note in yesterday’s Washington Post that they indeed know how hysterical college sex assault cases can be … because they’ve defended against a lot of them.
They note, in particular, Washington DC’s law for dealing with such: It includes a “scarlet letter” provision — colleges would have “to brand the transcripts of any student convicted of sexual misconduct with a note saying the student committed a sexual assault.”
The note never gets deleted.
If these transcript notes came in an unambiguous area of the law where the processes were full and fair, this scarlet letter may not be troubling. It’s also ironic that these laws are being proposed at the same time President Obama is urging companies to hire people who were convicted in real courts of real crimes. There is a legitimate question about how long a person’s past should haunt his future.
But campus sexual assault cases are not unambiguous, and the procedures in these cases are not fair.
As lawyers who have represented students accused of sexual misconduct at dozens of colleges and universities nationwide, we find it hard to see the purpose behind such a law — apart, that is, from vengeance.
The unfairness of these proceedings is also, by now, well-documented. You have the right to an attorney, but your attorney can’t talk during the hearing. You can’t cross-examine your accuser. You often can’t even submit questions for the “court” to ask your accuser during the hearing — no matter what your accuser says.
And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get a hearing. Many schools, prodded by the Department of Education, are moving to a “single investigator” model. In this model, a school outsources the entire investigation to a third-party firm, which will alone decide guilt or innocence.
“Of the dozens of men we have represented in these cases,” the lawyers add, “we have never seen a serial predator — or even a non-serial predator.”
They conclude that legislators “taking action on the backs of the ignorant and the railroaded is wrong.”
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