A Boston jury found that Boston College wrongly punished a student accused of sexual assault.
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A Boston jury has decided that Boston College failed to act with fundamental fairness toward a male student whom the college suspended for alleged sexual assault of another student aboard a cruise ship. Here are the facts, according to the complaint in the federal case.
In 2012 the accused student, “John Doe”, was covering a school-associated social event on a cruise ship for the college newspaper. On the ship, there was a dance with a crowded, loud dance floor and, just after John passed “Mary Doe”, she accused him of putting his hand up her skirt and digitally penetrating her anus. It was so loud that John couldn’t hear what she was saying. Another student, “JK”, who was nearby, turned to John and said, “sorry dude, that was my bad.” John did not understand what either Mary or JK were talking about.
When the ship reached the pier, John was arrested, handcuffed and plastic bags were placed over his hands to preserve blood and DNA evidence. The police eventually dropped all charges due to lack of evidence. Nonetheless, the college held a sexual assault hearing and decided that John was “responsible” (college terminology for guilty) and suspended him for a semester. He sued the school and a Boston jury decided that the college panel and a Boston College dean acted in a fundamentally unfair way.
There were two problems with how the college acted. First of all, the dean impermissibly interfered in the panel’s deliberation. The evidence against John was pretty weak, which is why the police dropped the charges. The police found no blood or other incriminating physical evidence on his hands or fingers. No one actually claimed to have seen him commit the act of sexual assault. The victim turned around after the act, saw him nearby, and therefore assumed that he committed the act. Her dance partner, who would have been looking right at John when the act happened, did not claim that she saw John commit any act of sexual assault.
As a result, the college sexual assault panel had a great deal of trouble deciding whether John had or had not committed the alleged act. The chair of the panel conveyed this to the dean and told the dean that the panel was considering rendering “no finding” on the case. The dean said that he “discouraged” the panel from doing that and the panel eventually ruled against John. The dean’s pressuring of the panel was found to have been improper interference with the panel’s deliberations.
The other problem is that John was obviously claiming that JK was the actual perpetrator. But the college administration was fixed on the idea that John, not JK, was the perpetrator. Rather than tasking the panel with seriously investigating the possibility that JK was the actual wrong-doer, the college administration instead told the panel chair to put JK “at ease,” in order to encourage his testimony. Again, this constituted undue interference in the panel’s deliberations.
As a result, the jury awarded John over $100,000 dollars in damages: $24,800 for a semester’s worth of tuition and $77,600 in lost income for the delay in starting his law career. The reason that the verdict wasn’t larger is that, while the jury found that Boston College acted in a fundamentally unfair way, the claim was for breach of contract, not discrimination. John had claimed that Boston College had discriminated against him as a male, but the legal threshold for making that claim is very high and the judge dismissed the claim long before it ever reached a jury. Unlike discrimination claims, breach of contract claims generally don’t result in the awarding of punitive damages or attorney’s fees. Those are the sorts of damages that, for example, resulted in the libel verdict against Oberlin College being so high.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this case. One is that colleges need a lot more guidance as to how to run these sexual assault panels. Deans and faculty members are not legally trained. The dean, in this case, was no doubt well-intentioned, but the college’s procedures should have been much clearer about the fact that no dean should be pressuring the panel to come to a decision that they did not feel confident making. Nor should a dean be giving the panel instructions that could bias it toward finding one student (John) rather than another student (JK) responsible for the sexual assault.
It would probably be better if the panels were chaired by outside attorneys or retired judges who, unlike academics, have serious training and experience with the concept of due process. Keeping a panel independent of administrative pressure would be second nature to an experienced attorney, but it is a lot to expect of someone whose primary job is studying subjects such as literature or string theory.
Finally, this case is another good example of how a lack of fair process hurts victims of sexual assault as well as students falsely accused of sexual assault. According to John, JK said of the victim: “What a b-tch. What kind of girl goes to a dance floor like that and doesn’t expect to get touched or grabbed?” If that is true, JK has the attitude of a repeat offender and represents an ongoing danger to the female students at Boston College. A system that allowed the dean to pressure the panel to put JK “at ease” rather than investigate him was not only fundamentally unfair to the accused student but to all of the female students at the college.
