California: State representative promises legislative response to campus sexual violence

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2014-07-07 03:33

Article here. Excerpt:

'Consequences for assailants are "not significant or harsh enough to act as a deterrent," [Das] Williams [link added] said, and light penalties are undermining students' trust in their schools to handle cases of sexual violence.

Community colleges should also be able to expel students from the entire system, like UC or CSU, he added, so that they can't just transfer to another campus.

Punishment has been the biggest point of contention surrounding campus sexual violence. While victims have pushed for stronger responses from universities, a growing opposition has countered that expelling students could ruin the rest of their lives.

Williams acknowledged that this last proposal could be controversial, but said it provides an opportunity for justice that victims do not always get.

"Rape is a very difficult thing to prosecute," he said. With their lower "preponderance of evidence" standards, "there is a real role that schools can play that law enforcement can't" in these incidents.'

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Also notoriously hard to prove. After all, corruption, bribing, etc. tend to happen behind closed doors, with winks and nods, implicit, unspoken quid pro quo "understandings", etc. So a preponderance of evidence standard in such cases would be a good thing, yes? After all, corruption among pols affects not just one victim directly but many, and often quite directly.

So let's see some political action from our legislators on that front... Mr. Williams...

While we're at it, other kinds of crimes can be hard to prove. Extortion's one. Racketeering is another. Fencing can also be hard to prove, as it has to be shown the fence either knew or ought to have known the fenced goods were stolen. So let's lower the standard of evidence on those, too, to preponderance.

Heck, let's chuck the whole stupid presumption of innocence thing entirely! I mean, look where it's gotten us! The U.S. is ONLY the Number One-ranked country *in the world* for incarceration rates! SURELY WE CAN DO SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT!!!

This is why I propose we chuck presumed innocence and adopt the Napoleonic Code, which blessedly yielded a de facto presumption of guilt in criminal cases. Guilty until *proven innocent* beyond a reasonable doubt: Much better! That'll take care of this insane crime wave, these campus rapists, these corrupt politicians, these racketeers and fences and extortionists, we'll have all of them behind bars in a jiffy, yes, yes, buhhh hahahahha!!!!

Indeed.

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Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2014-07-07 05:10