Law Review: Campus sex-assault trials bypass rights to pass judgment

Article here. Excerpt:

'Justin Dillon, former federal prosecutor and now a white collar defense lawyer, knows all too well the ways campus sexual abuse investigations can go wrong.

His litany of bizarrely skewed hearings is fraught with the potential for harm and tragic outcomes.

The college student brought up on charges of giving his girlfriend an unwanted kiss, more than a year after the relationship ended; an alleged rape victim who said friends had information the accused had raped others, but then declined to identify the friends; the hearing panel, composed of a librarian, a student dance major, and a professor of romance languages, whose job was to decide whether a sexual assault had occurred.

"It feels oftentimes that every new case I get is more absurd than the last. Sometimes you get people who are not old enough to drink, but are old enough to decide whether someone is a rapist," says the Harvard-trained lawyer, based in Washington.

Due process is a venerated constitutional right, but apparently not on many U.S. college campuses. For nearly four years, the Office for Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education has been bluntly threatening colleges and universities with the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding unless they crack down on what the feds say is a wave of sexual violence. No matter that the data on this problem are in dispute.'