Holding Amherst College’s sex crimes kangaroo court accountable

The latest campus rape show trial, this one involving a rape accusation at Amherst College in Massachusetts, is finally in a real courtroom. The student expelled by Amherst College after being subjected to an extralegal rape “trial” on the university’s campus is suing the school. The particulars of the Amherst kangaroo court’s actions against this male student are, to put it mildly, insane. The alleged offense itself involves an act of oral sex that would, if anything, indict the accuser, not the accused, of sexual impropriety. For background, KC Johnson, who has done more than anyone to expose the campus rape tribunal fraud, wrote about this case in 2015 and updated the accused student’s lawsuit against Amherst last month. Johnson is an American history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. I fully endorse every effort to shut down the extralegal campus rape tribunal system, and I hope the young man expelled from Amherst takes the school to the proverbial cleaners. But conservatives watching this case closely are making a bit too much of a decision by a federal judge in Washington State to quash one motion to subpoena the purported victim for crucial evidence about her actions.

As reported by KC Johnson, Judge James L. Robart of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington rejected a subpoena that would require the accuser to submit to a deposition and provide possibly exculpatory evidence such as her cellphone texts from the night she claims she was raped. This evidence never came up as Amherst College merrily played at being a real justice system trying a real crime in its fake court. If there were going to be proceedings at Amherst at all, such evidence-collecting should have been part of the process. But thanks to rules promoted by former President Obama’s Department of Education, students accused of sex crimes do not enjoy the sorts of legal protections afforded to defendants charged by real prosecutors. In rejecting the motion to subpoena the accuser, the judge mentioned the possibility that the woman could be re-traumatized by being forced to re-live the night she said she was raped. In turn, his comment has been criticized as re-victimizing the young man who was tried by a kangaroo court and expelled from Amherst College. Referring to the young man now suing Amherst, Robby Soave at the libertine magazine Reason writes, “Whatever happened to believing the victim?” Soave has it wrong. The judge didn’t say he didn’t believe the young man. What he said was that he was quashing the subpoena because it was too broad. Because this is the real legal world and not some fake courtroom invented by Women’s Studies professors and college presidents, this is the way the judge said it:

It takes no leap of logic to reason that a live deposition would impose emotional and psychological trauma upon Ms. Jones. The court thus rejects Mr. Doe’s argument that “[t]here is no evidence to support” the burden on Ms. Jones (Resp. at 10) and instead concludes that the burden of an in-person deposition would be substantial.

The judge is objecting to the legal argument that there would be no burden placed on the young woman. Hair splitting? Sure. That’s the law for you. He then continued [bold inserted]:

The heavy burden imposed on Ms. Jones may therefore be justified in a case litigating what happened on February 4-5, 2012. However, the underlying litigation does not pose that question. Instead, Mr. Doe’s claims challenge the policies under which Amherst and its administrators conducted their investigation and review, whether the administrators in fact followed Amherst’s policies, and whether the process or policies discriminate against men, such as Mr. Doe. (See Am. Compl. ¶¶ 78-138.) The majority of the topics that Mr. Doe seeks to take up in a deposition are not relevant to those claims. (See, e.g., Resp. at 6 (proposing as one topic for the deposition Ms. Jones’s “decision to pursue” the disciplinary process), 7 (proposing as another topic for the deposition Ms. Jones’s “text messages, including review of their content and clarification of any ambiguities”).)

In other words, go back to the drawing board and draft a different subpoena. The judge has another objection that has nothing to do with “not believing the (male) victim”:

Furthermore, much of the arguably relevant information that Mr. Doe seeks appears to be available from other sources. For instance, Mr. Doe indicates that he seeks to question Ms. Jones regarding communications between Ms. Jones and Amherst administrators … These communications are arguably relevant to Mr. Doe’s claims, but he has failed to show why he cannot obtain those communications through Amherst and its administrators rather than by deposing Ms. Jones.

The judge concludes:

[R]equests for [several of the documents] are arguably relevant to Mr. Doe’s claims … However, those requests relate to communications that could readily be obtained from other sources. Most of those other sources are Amherst employees, and none asserts to be the victim of sexual assault. (See, e.g., id. at 5 (requesting “[a]ll communications between you and the College”).) Furthermore, Mr. Doe already possesses at least some of these communications, which he obtained from other sources … Finally, the court again notes that it is uncertain whether and to what extent Mr. Doe has pleaded legally cognizable claims against Amherst and its administrators … The court thus concludes that at this juncture, the need for Ms. Jones to produce the requested documents is low … In light of the marginal relevance of the requests for production, the other sources that could provide responsive information, and the pending motion for judgment on the pleadings, the court concludes that ordering Ms. Jones to respond to the requests for production would be disproportional to the needs of Mr. Doe’s case as it presently stands … Accordingly, the court grants Ms. Jones’s motion to quash the requests for production.

All I removed from the above statement are the legal footnotes. The judge is limiting a virtually limitless stroll through the young woman’s life and placing the burden on Amherst College, where it belongs for now. He is also not foreclosing the opportunity for the young man’s lawyers to attach her to the case and then depose her under oath. KC Johnson points out that this decision shouldn’t be seen as a victory for campus rape accusers because the judge is sending a signal that young men suing after enduring campus tribunals will now be more likely to include the accusers in their lawsuits. He’s right. And frankly, given the damage the campus rape tribunal system has wrought, anything that takes us even a small step closer to limiting the practice of criminal law to real courts is welcome. But as they begin winning against the administrative monolith that began with the failure of omnibus rape reform legislation and is now collapsing under the weight of the Dear Colleagues juggernaut, it would be nice if activists like KC Johnson and the staff of Reason magazine would apply their talents and outrage to at least a few of the countless cases where real rape victims never got justice. It’s good that attention is being shed on the campus rape tribunals, but those tribunals have absolutely nothing to do with the way rape investigations and rape prosecutions play out in real courts. And the very aspects of the legal system they’re criticizing here play major roles in denying real victims justice every single day. Take, for just one charming example, Joseph P. Smith, who was repeatedly let go after being caught in the act of violently kidnapping or attempting to kidnap women off public streets. One time, a cop caught him, but a judge let him off easy. Another time, two couples on a golf outing witnessed one of his attacks, rescued the woman and testified in court. Smith’s prior crimes were inadmissible at the trial and he was liberated yet again after a particularly O.J.’esque jury was denied crucial evidence about his kidnapping-women thing. Smith was only put away when another of his attacks was captured on videotape and the body of the 11-year old victim was found. Warehouses of evidence about the failures of the justice system could be gleaned from the records of just this one felon, but there are no takers for such granular research among either the campus rape activists or their opponents. Unfortunately, the good crusade against campus rape tribunals can begin to sound a bit too much like the bad crusade for campus rape tribunals when they complain about the minutiae of evidence rules in one case or another without showing any interest in the larger implications of what they’re seeing – or any curiosity about our deadly failures to take real offenders off the streets.

Tina Trent——Bio and Archives

Tina Trent writes about crime and policing, political radicals, social service programs, and academia. She has published several reports for America’s Survival and helped the late Larry Grathwohl release a new edition of his 1976 memoir, “Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen,” an account of his time infiltrating the Weather Underground.

Dr. Trent received a doctorate from the Institute for Women’s Studies of Emory University, where she wrote about the devastating impact of social justice movements on criminal law under the tutelage of conservative, pro-life scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Dr. Trent spent more than a decade working in Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods, providing social services to refugees, troubled families, and crime victims. There, she witnessed the destruction of families by the poverty industry, an experience she describes as: “the reason I’m now a practicing Catholic and social conservative.”

Tina lives with her husband on a farm in North Georgia. She blogs about crime and politics at tinatrent.com.