Jonathan Carone wrote:rmiller1959 wrote:I'm afraid that's not even remotely accurate. I don't know how this was being pitched out there in the general public, but it's simply not true. Each player was allowed to present whoever they wanted to speak on their behalf, and they were allowed to have legal representation present for advisory support even though it wasn't a legal proceeding. Some of them took advantage while others didn't.
Being allowed and having witnesses willing to testify are two different things. The witnesses testified with the police because they knew there would be no negative blowback unlike if they testified to the school.
There's a reason the athletics department was fighting for kids and not distancing themselves. They knew the kids were innocent.
Innocence and meeting the prosecutorial standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" are two different things, as we've discussed before. They may have met the latter, but that doesn't automatically presume innocence.
Title IX is a different beast, and the rules are very clear about the differences between a criminal and a Title IX investigation, even making the point that the lack of a criminal charge does not mean an assault didn't occur. Neither past sexual history nor previous consensual relationships preclude an assault investigation of a specific incident. To quote the rules: "a school should recognize that the mere fact of a current or previous consensual dating or sexual relationship between the two parties does not itself imply consent or preclude a finding of sexual violence."
I accept that people will draw their own conclusions based on the information to which they may be privy, or the circles in which they commune. What bothers me is the assumption that everyone involved in this process is somehow complicit in a grand conspiracy to provide cover for Jerry to hire a big-name athletic director with the stain of a failed Title IX process.
The young people involved in these allegations, the accuser and the accused, were valued by the people who made these decisions - some of the people who had to make these decisions taught them as students - and there were no winners here. No one was thinking about football or athletics or how it would make the University look. Do you think that every single individual in the Title IX office or the Dean of Students office or the faculty chosen independently to conduct the appeal are calloused enough to casually discard these young lives?