Stanford sex assault case: Sentence was too short — but the system worked

Washington Post

Last week, a California judge sentenced former Stanford University swimmer Brock Allen Turner to six months in jail for a horrifying sexual assault on an unconscious, alcohol-impaired woman. The resulting uproar over the sentence’s undue leniency risks missing the most important lesson of the case. Contrary to campus conventional wisdom, the Turner case shows that the best way to deal with a campus sexual assault problem is to rely on law enforcement professionals to protect women and to pursue justice, not on campus disciplinary systems run by amateur sex bureaucrats. The backlash against Turner’s sentence is being exploited by a […]

Why Trump’s Assault on the Judiciary Is the Most Dangerous Thing He’s Done

Politico

We should heed closely what Donald Trump has been saying about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel of San Diego—perhaps more so than anything else he has said or done to date. The prospect that a President Trump might defy the judiciary and the rule of law, together with his vows to violate international treaties and his disrespect for domestic laws, may make him the most dangerous candidate in American history. There are so many things to deplore about Trump’s recent attacks on Curiel it is difficult to know where to begin. Trump has asserted that Curiel is unfit to hear […]

Legal Group Weighs Radical Expansion of Sex Crimes

Real Clear Politics

Imagine the following case: Two recent college grads meet in a bar, talk, begin kissing, and go to her apartment. After a little more talking, they resume kissing there. He undresses her and initiates sexual intercourse. She neither objects nor resists. He leaves, and they have no further contact. A month later, she files a criminal complaint with police, complaining that this was rape because she never expressed verbal consent and was physically passive. Under the law as it has been from time immemorial, the woman’s complaint would be rejected because her failure to say no or resist would be […]

The Hollywood Hit-Job on Justice Clarence Thomas

Wall Street Journal

I covered the confirmation hearings in 1991. HBO’s movie heavily edits history to favor Anita Hill. The current battle over President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland is child’s play compared with the lurid brawl over George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas 25 years ago. On Saturday, HBO marked the quarter-century anniversary with “Confirmation,” a retelling of how Judge Thomas, a conservative, up-from-poverty black jurist from Pinpoint, Ga., saw his nomination nearly derailed by allegations of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill, a black attorney who had worked for him 10 years earlier. Ms. Hill’s calm, graphic testimony during the three-day hearing on her charges […]

Scalia’s Poorly Worded Comment Has Merit

Real Clear Politics

Justice Antonin Scalia ‘s dreadfully worded comments last week during oral argument about racial preferences in college admissions understandably offended many people. But what he was obviously trying to say made an important point that had nothing to do with racism — a charge hurled at Scalia by people including Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who once again wallowed in shameless demagoguery.

Until Proven Guilty: The vanishing of due process in campus rape tribunals

National Review

When it comes to due process on campus, Republicans in Congress, who campaigned on vows to rein in the Obama administration’s abuses of executive power, have largely acquiesced in its bureaucratic imposition of quasi-judicial tyranny. For more than four years, the White House and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have used an implausible reinterpretation of a 1972 civil-rights law to impose mandates unimagined by the law’s sponsors. It has forced almost all of the nation’s universities and colleges to disregard due process in disciplinary proceedings when they involve allegations of sexual assault. Enforced by officials far outside […]

A Little-Understood Engine of Campus Unrest: Racial Admissions Preferences

American Spectator

Why are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like? The reasons are of course multifaceted. But one deserves far more attention than it has gotten: Many or most of the African-American student protesters really are victims — but not of old-fashioned racism.

A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’

National Review

A so-called documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground, is set to air Thursday on CNN, which co-produced it. But a newly available e-mail from an investigative producer of the film spectacularly belies its pretensions to be honest, balanced journalism. Instead, the e-mail adds to the large body of evidence that that the film is highly misleading if not dishonest.

More College Rape Hype — This Time from the Washington Post

The Weekly Standard

Since 2012, the New York Times has led the way in systematically biased coverage of on-campus sexual assault allegations and how colleges are responding. The paper has relentlessly hyped the issue, has smeared quite possibly innocent students while omitting evidence that they were innocent, and has cheered efforts to presume guilt and deny due process for the accused. It has also parroted egregiously misleading statistical claims used by the Obama administration and others to portray the campus rape problem, which is clearly serious, as an out-of-control “epidemic,” which it clearly is not. (In fact, the campus rate rape has plunged […]