Author: Edward Bartlett

115 Lawmakers Call for Return to Failed Campus Policy

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date March 8, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Rebecca Stewart

Telephone: 513-479-3335

115 Lawmakers Call for Return to Failed Campus Policy

WASHINGTON / March 8, 2021 – SAVE is challenging a Congressional letter that calls on the Department of Education to replace the current Title IX regulation, which took effect last year, with “key portions” of its 2011 campus sexual assault directive. Organized by Rep. Jackie Speier of California, the March 2 letter is signed by 115 Democratic members of the House of Representatives (1).

Unfortunately, the 2011 directive, also known as the “Dear Colleague Letter,” failed to achieve its primary goal of reducing campus sexual assaults. The American Association of Universities reported increases among undergraduate students in the rate of nonconsensual sexual victimization from 2015 to 2019 (Men: 1.4% increase; Women: 3.0% increase). (2)

The Obama-era policy also failed to improve the reporting of sexual misconduct:

Eight years after the policy took effect, only 11% of sexual assaults were reported to campus police. In addition, only 45% of victims reported that school officials were “very likely” or “extremely likely” to take their report seriously (3).
The American Association of University Women reported that 89% of American colleges received zero reports of rape incidents in 2016 (4).

SAVE has documented numerous cases in which complainants were mistreated by campus officials (5). As a result, the number of Title IX complaints to the Department of Education increased more than five-fold following issuance of the 2011 directive (6).

The 2011 policy also gave rise to a spate of false allegations. According to Brett Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators, “Probably 40 or 50% of allegations of sexual assault are baseless.” (7) To date, over 680 lawsuits have been filed by accused students against their universities (8).

The directive was criticized by law professors from Harvard University (9), Penn Law (10), Cornell University (11), and from numerous other schools (12). Former Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also criticized campus procedures, commenting, “There’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know, everyone deserves a fair hearing.” (13)

A number of organizations issued reports sharply critical of the Department of Education statement:

American College of Trial Lawyers (14)
American Association of University Professors (15)
National Association of Scholars (16)
American Bar Association Task Force (17)

These findings reveal the 2011 directive, which cost colleges many millions of dollars to implement (18), was both ineffective in curbing campus assaults, and harmful in curtailing accused students’ due process rights.

In light of these facts, SAVE urges lawmakers to speak out in support of policies that are consistent with constitutional due process guarantees, and are likely to succeed in reducing campus sexual assaults.

Links:

Investigations Wrongful Convictions

Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 20, 2021

Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest

Ryan MacDonald

February 20, 2021

In September, 1988, Keene, New Hampshire sex crimes detective James F. McLaughlin received a letter from Ms. Sylvia Gale, a New Hampshire child protection social worker. Ms. Gale’s letter reported third-hand information that Catholic priest, Gordon J. MacRae, had once been a priest in Florida “where he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated. The case is supposed to be still unsolved.”

According to Sylvia Gale’s letter, the information was passed to her by an unnamed employee of New Hampshire Catholic Social Services who claimed that she had been told this information by her employer, Monsignor John Quinn, on condition that she would be fired if she ever divulged it.

Detective McLaughlin skipped the logical first steps that such a letter might have set in motion. He did not consult the priest’s personnel file – which revealed nothing about his ever being in Florida. And he did not consult Monsignor John Quinn, the named originator of the story.

Instead, armed with the explosive Florida murder-molestation letter, McLaughlin set out to interview dozens of parents and their adolescent sons who had prior contacts with MacRae. Within a week, the entire community was in a state of alarm about the murderous lecher-priest in its midst.

Among those McLaughlin interviewed about Ms. Gale’s letter in 1988 were four young adult brothers, Jonathan, David, Thomas, and Jay Grover, the adopted sons of another state social worker, Ms. Patricia Grover, a colleague of Sylvia Gale. According to McLaughlin’s 72-page report, she vowed to question each of her sons about their interactions with MacRae. None of them reported knowing or suspecting anything of a criminal nature.

McLaughlin’s report on this investigation was filled with innuendo, but no substance. He repeatedly attributed untrue information about MacRae to unnamed “informants” and other “subjects.” Toward the end of the report he finally quoted a “Sgt. Smith” from an unnamed Florida police agency.

“Sgt. Smith,” if he actually exists, reported that while there was no molestation-murder case involving a priest, there was a priest who molested a child in Florida and was “quietly moved by the church to New Hampshire.” “Sgt. Smith” added that “your suspect is too young to be that priest.” McLaughlin’s report gives the impression that he never even thought to ask for the name of that priest.

Five years passed. In 1993, one of the Grover brothers, Jonathan, age 24, appeared in McLaughlin’s office with a new story that he had been unable to remember five years earlier. He said he was repeatedly sexually assaulted when he was twelve years old by two priests, Gordon MacRae and Stephen Scruton. His initial claim was that the two priests acted in concert, fondling his genitals with their feet while in a hot tub at the YMCA. He then went on to describe other assaults “in the rectory where the priests live.”

An immediate problem was that MacRae was never in that parish until Grover was fourteen years old, and Scruton was never there until Grover was sixteen. A second problem was that one of Grover’s high school classmates, “T.B.” claimed 18 months earlier in an interview with McLaughlin that he was molested by Stephen Scruton alone who fondled his genitals with his foot in a hot tub at the YMCA. “T.B.” received an undisclosed financial settlement from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, NH.

The “T.B.” case had no connection to MacRae. McLaughlin wrote the Grover report while apparently having no memory whatsoever that he wrote a nearly identical report eighteen months earlier about a foot molestation event by a priest in a hot tub at the YMCA.

Complicating both accounts, McLaughlin’s investigation file contained a transcript of “The Church’s Sexual Watergate,” an episode of a Geraldo Rivera Show that aired in November 1988. It had apparently been faxed to McLaughlin from the studio. The Geraldo transcript preceded McLaughlin’s reports in both cases above, and contained this excerpt:

Geraldo: “What did the priest do to you, Greg?”

Greg Ridel: “When I was 12 years old, he placed his foot on my genitals in a YMCA hot tub and began rubbing. This went on to other things in the rectory where the priests live.”

MacRae was brought to trial for these unsubstantiated claims in September, 1994. Pre-trial, he was twice offered plea deals to serve one-to-three years in prison for a guilty plea. Then the offer was reduced to one-to-two years. Citing his innocence, MacRae rejected these offers. Before his trial commenced, his Catholic diocese, already heavily into settlement negotiations, issued this press release:

“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals …. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

After the trial, the Grover brothers received financial settlements from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, NH in excess of $610,000.

Unlike his protocols in nearly all other cases, Detective McLaughlin recorded none of his interviews with claimants in the MacRae case. A reason for the absence of recorded interviews may become clear from a statement of Steven Wollschlager, a young man who accused MacRae during one of McLaughlin’s interviews, and then recanted, refusing to repeat his accusations to a grand jury. From his sworn statement:

“In 1994 before [MacRae] was to go on trial, I was contacted again by McLaughlin. I was aware at the time of the [MacRae] trial, knowing full well that it was all bogus and having heard all the talk of the lawsuits and money involved, and also the reputations of those making the accusations …. During this meeting I just listened to the scenarios being presented to me. The lawsuits and money were of great discussion and I was left feeling that if I would just go along with the story I could reap the rewards as well.

“McLaughlin asked me three times if [MacRae] ever came on to me sexually or offered me money for sexual favors. [He] had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about [MacRae] and I could reap a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin … referenced that life could be easier with a large sum of money … I was at the time using drugs and could have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money. A short time later after being subpoenaed to court, I had a different feeling about the situation.”

Mr. Wollschlager has never been allowed to present his testimony before a judge in any of the summarily denied state and federal appeals of the MacRae case.

Knowing that MacRae rejected plea deal offers to serve only one to two years in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan chastised the priest for insisting on a trial and sentenced him to consecutive terms for a total of 67 years. MacRae is now in his 27th year in prison and continues to maintain his innocence.

Author’s Note: For a full version of this story, see “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?”

Prosecutorial Misconduct

Judge Calls for DOJ Probe of Prosecutorial Misconduct

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 18, 2021

Judge Calls for DOJ Probe of Prosecutorial Misconduct in Iran Sanctions Case

The order followed a blistering opinion that took to task the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office for making “countless” belated disclosures.

By Tom McParland | February 17, 2021 at 05:46 PM

A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday called on the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate “systemic” failures brought to light by the bungled prosecution of an Iranian businessman accused of funneling more than $115 million through the American financial system.

The four-page order, from U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan of the Southern District of New York, followed a blistering opinion in September, which took the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office to task for making “countless” belated disclosures to lawyers representing Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad before, during and after his trial earlier this year.

Sadr was convicted last March, following a two-week trial that was complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but his Steptoe & Johnson attorneys have since aggressively pursued evidence they suspected the government had withheld in discovery. In June, then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman acknowledged a spate of “discovery-related issues” and determined that it would “not be in the interests of justice to further prosecute this case.

Nathan, however, had continued her own fact-finding mission to determine whether any lawyers for the prosecution had either intentionally withheld exculpatory evidence or purposely misled the court about the late disclosures.

“Government lawyers wield enormous prosecutorial power,” Nathan wrote in her Sept. 16 ruling. “They must exercise it in a way that is fully consistent with their constitutional and ethical obligations. And it is the obligation of the courts to ensure that they do and hold them accountable if they do not.”

On Wednesday, Nathan said that she had found not found any intentional wrongdoing by individual prosecutors, but reiterated that “disclosure failures and misrepresentations in this case represent grave derelictions of prosecutorial responsibility.”

“In light of this, and given the systemic nature of the errors and misconduct that occurred in this case, the court will not engage in further fact-finding,” she wrote. “Instead, the court urges a full investigation by DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility of all matters related to prosecutorial misconduct in this case.”

“It is the Court’s hope that reforms adopted by the United States Attorney’s Office, coupled with a full investigation by OPR, will ensure that the Government’s errors in this case are not repeated,” the order said.

Excerpted from: https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/02/17/sdny-judge-calls-for-doj-probe-of-prosecutorial-misconduct-in-iran-sanctions-case-398-65294/?kw=Judge%20Calls%20for%20DOJ%20Probe%20of%20Prosecutorial%20Misconduct%20in%20Iran%20Sanctions%20Case&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=dailyheadlines&utm_content=20210218&utm_term=nlj&slreturn=20210118122441

Campus Title IX Title IX Equity Project

Budget Cuts Urged for Colleges that Persist in Discriminating on the Basis of Sex

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 18, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Rebecca Stewart: 513-479-3335

Email: info@saveservices.org

Budget Cuts Urged for Colleges that Persist in Discriminating on the Basis of Sex

WASHINGTON / February 18, 2021 – The federal Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced that it currently has [number] open investigations of [name of state] universities for allegedly discriminating against male students (1). SAVE urges state lawmakers to impose a 5-10% budget cut on institutions that fail to promptly comply with the long-standing Title IX law designed to end sex discrimination.

Following is a screen shot from the OCR website that lists the [name of state] universities currently under investigation for discriminatory single-sex programs or scholarships (2):

[Screen shot here]

The Investigation Date column reveals that some colleges are resisting implementation of needed changes, even months after the federal investigation was opened. In contrast, numerous other universities promptly eliminated their sex-discriminatory programs upon notification (3).

Female students now represent 56% of all undergraduate students, compared to 44% male students (5). Male students are under-represented in numerous fields such as the health professions, public administration, education, and others (6).

“In the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion…universities have often chosen inequity and exclusion,” commentator Adam Kissel ironically reveals (7). State lawmakers should not allow sex discriminatory policies to continue on college campuses.

Citations:

https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/investigations/open-investigations/tix.html In the Type of Discrimination box, select “Title IX – Single Sex Campus Programs” or “Title IX – Single Sex Scholarships”
Institution Type “PSE” signifies “Post Secondary Education”
https://www.saveservices.org/equity/case-resolutions/
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/qa-single-sex-20210114.pdf
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cha.asp#:~:text=In%20fall%202018%2C%20female%20students,trends%20between%202000%20and%202018
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-degrees-by-field-and-gender-for-the-class-of-2015/
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/12/pervasive-sex-discrimination-at-north-carolina-universities/

Investigations Start By Believing

Has EVAWI Been Moderating or Covering its Tracks?

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 17, 2021

Has EVAWI Been Moderating or Covering its Tracks?
By James Baresel

February 16, 2021

In 2020 End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI) issued a revised version of its instruction manual Effective Report Writing: Using the Language of Non-Consensual Sex, an older edition of which had been in use since 2006. Both versions are based in a forensic assumption of guilt (consequent upon a prejudiced assumption of the veracity of complainants), moderation to which in the revised manual has been characterized by critics as “too little, too late.”

That, however, is something of an understatement. The truth is that the changes were not only made following years of criticism of EVAWI’s methods of investigation and report writing by legal experts, advocacy groups, academics and journalists The truth is that they were not only made after numerous court rulings in favor of due process. And the truth is that there is little reason to believe the changes do much more than (somewhat) hide the prejudiced and prejudicial nature of EVAWI’s methods from public view or a shift to more subtle ways of inculcating them.

Since EVAWI receives considerable support (both financial and otherwise) from the federal Department of Justice, and since the new presidential administration is the ideological successor to one that had a record of undermining due process, it will be useful to take a closer look at the history behind the changes to the above named instruction manual and its relationship to the practices of the organizations in question.

Founded in 2003, EVAWI purports to be an independent agency dedicated to fighting sexual assault. In that capacity it has received over $7.5 million from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women and provides training programs for police officers accredited both by the governments of ten states and by particular agencies within others [https://evawintl.org/olti/olti-accreditation/]. But what it really does is attempt to instill a prejudiced assumption that complainants’ honesty is to be taken for granted, and, therefore, to substitute presumption of the guilt of those accused of sexual assault for forensic objectivity and the legal presumption of innocence.

Both versions of Effective Report Writing reveal the prejudiced nature of the methods advocated by EVAWI. Both teach investigators to document “suspect statements, especially those that corroborate the victim’s account or provide an implausible or even absurd version of reality.” To “especially” record statements by suspects that seem to corroborate the accounts of self-professed victims, rather than give due attention to statements that put the veracity self-professed victims’ accounts in question, is nothing other than deliberate misrepresentation. And while it might be reasonable to highlight claims impartial assessment has judged implausible, such impartiality is impossible if an investigator begins by assuming the veracity of complainants. Both version also insistent upon police reports presenting their accounts from the perspective of complainants rather than from that of a neutral third party.

Bad as this might be, the original manual contained particularly damning statements that were removed as part of the revision. The most serious of these was the instruction that, in order to “better support successful prosecution,” police investigators should “try to fill in details that are realistic, based on the kinds of sexual assault cases you have handled and the victims you have interviewed” as doing this will better “articulate the context of force, threat, or fear that the victim experience.” Detectives, in other words, are to state in their official reports that particular incidents of alleged sexual assault included actions which the complainants themselves never claimed happened but which, by being typical of the type of incidents alleged, and can communicate the “feeling” of such incidents.

While these statements are not found in the revised manual, the paragraph that followed them in the original remains unchanged and continues to refer to “‘missing information’ [details that are realistic] that is filled into the report.” It would seem that those receiving instruction from EVAWI are still taught to include made up “realistic details” in official reports despite the removal of such teaching from the written manual.

The history behind the changes to Effective Report Writing further suggest that they are little (if anything) more than cosmetic, designed to improve EVAWI’s public image or to hide evidence of its methods from the public and from government agencies. In February 2018 the Center for Prosecutor Integrity–an organization dedicated to defending due process–sent a letter to the Federal Department of Justice, informing it of the manual’s biases (1). The DOJ responded in May of the year, informing the CPI that its communication had been forwarded to Office on Violence Against Women (2), the DOJ department that funds EVAWI. Allowing for the time it would have first taken for the Office on Violence Against Women to analyze the complaint and to communicate with EVAWI and then taken for the EVAWI to act on any communications from the Office on Violence Against Women, the release date of revisions to Effective Report Writing suggest they were (at least partially) an attempt to counteract CPI criticism.

And that means that unless the DOJ and the Office on Violence Against Women possess “an implausible or even absurd” degree of naivety they must be willing to turn a blind eye to EVAWI’s attempt to hide its intentions from the public record

1. http://www.prosecutorintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/OIG-complaint-Start-by-Believing.pdf
2. https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/07/start-by-believing-program/

Source: http://ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.1497

Investigations

“For 1989, that was standard practice for the N.Y.P.D., but now we know better.”

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 16, 2021

3 Detectives Obtained a False Murder Confession. Was It One of Dozens?

Huwe Burton was wrongly convicted because of deceptive interrogation techniques. How many more cases were “solved” the same way?

For Huwe Burton, the breaking point came late on the night of Jan. 5, 1989, as he sat with detectives in a cramped, windowless room on the second floor of a Bronx police precinct. He had not eaten or slept much in 48 hours.

A detective leaned in and said, “Tell us again about what happened that day.”

Mr. Burton, who was 16 then, repeated his story. He had come home two days earlier after spending the day at school and then at his girlfriend’s house, to find his mother, Keziah Burton, facedown on her bed, stabbed to death. Her nightgown was pulled up to her waist. A blue telephone cord was wrapped around her wrist.

What happened next in the interrogation room would reverberate in powerful ways over the coming decades. A false confession. An innocent man imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Serious questions about the tactics used by the three detectives involved in the investigation into Ms. Burton’s killing — and many others.

And now, a wide-ranging inquiry by the Bronx district attorney into whether the detectives’ tactics had tainted guilty verdicts in 31 homicide cases that relied on confessions.

The inquiry highlights how a new generation of prosecutors in New York and elsewhere is delving deeply into whether deceptive police interrogation tactics might have warped the criminal justice system through false confessions and wrongful convictions.

The examination comes after the emergence of hundreds of cases across the country in which people were sent to prison only to be exonerated later through the use of DNA or the discovery of new evidence.

Most of the Bronx cases being reviewed date to an era when violent crime in New York was at record highs. The police were under significant pressure to make arrests, especially in high-profile cases, and prosecutors faced similar demands to win cases they brought to trial.

But in some instances, the police and prosecutors moved too fast, made mistakes and ignored or withheld evidence that suggested they had the wrong person, exoneration experts say.

In Mr. Burton’s case, a judge exonerated him in his mother’s killing in 2019 after the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that investigates wrongful convictions, unearthed evidence not only that detectives used psychologically coercive techniques to get his confession, but that the prosecution had withheld evidence suggesting someone else was the killer.

That, and questions about other cases, prompted the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, to order her office’s Conviction Integrity Unit to review dozens of other homicide investigations handled by the same detectives.

In a federal lawsuit filed in December, Mr. Burton accused the detectives of using lies, a false promise and a threat to persuade him to admit to something he had not done. He asserts that the detectives, to protect their reputations, and the prosecutor pressed ahead with the charges even after learning he had an alibi.

“Everybody got on board and thought it was a good idea to do this to a 16-year-old child after he had just lost his mom,” Mr. Burton said. “They chose to say ‘No, this is what we’re doing — we’re just going to lock him up.’”

The National Registry of Exonerations found that official misconduct played a role in the criminal convictions of more than half of 2,400 Americans who were exonerated between 1989 and 2019. For Black men wrongly convicted of murder, the proportion was 78 percent.

New York State has the third-highest exoneration rate — behind Illinois and Texas — and it ranks second for the number of convictions overturned because of a false confession, with 44 such cases since 1992, according to the registry.

Ms. Clark’s office will not release the names of the defendants in the cases being reviewed, but records show that the detectives in Mr. Burton’s case were involved in at least three other homicide cases that have been challenged in court.

The detectives — Stanley Schiffman, Sevelie Jones and Frank Viggiano — declined to be interviewed or did not respond to messages, but in past court proceedings Mr. Jones defended their handling of Mr. Burton’s confession and claimed it was spontaneous and credible.

A lawyer for Mr. Viggiano, Kyle Watters, said his client denied wrongdoing. Asked about the review, Mr. Viggiano said, “I don’t think it’s fair at all.”

Ms. Clark, who sought to overturn Mr. Burton’s conviction, has defended the work of the detectives, two of whom later worked for the Bronx district attorney’s office as investigators.

“What they did was not necessarily wrong — that is the way things were done then,” Ms. Clark said in 2019 shortly after Mr. Burton’s exoneration. “For 1989, that was standard practice for the N.Y.P.D., but now we know better.”

Lawyers for Mr. Burton, however, likened the detectives on his case to Louis Scarcella, a Brooklyn homicide detective who has been linked to several wrongful convictions, and whose tactics led to a review of 70 murder cases. At least eight convictions have been overturned at the request of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

“The question that should be on everyone’s mind is how many other people were coerced into falsely confessing by these detectives and continue to languish behind bars?” said Susan Friedman, an Innocence Project lawyer who worked on Mr. Burton’s case.

With a woman dead, police turn to her teenage son

The events that led up to Mr. Burton’s confession are detailed in his lawsuit and in other court filings related to his exoneration.

Two days after Mr. Burton’s mother was killed, the detectives arrived at a house where he was staying with his godmother and asked him to come to the 47th Precinct for a polygraph, he said in his lawsuit. When he arrived, however, he realized that the request was a ruse to get him to the police station without a guardian.

Mr. Burton did not know he had become the prime suspect after a teacher mistakenly told the investigators he had missed a morning class the day of the killing. (The teacher later said he had actually been in school.)

The detectives thought the killer was “an insider” who had staged the crime scene, according to court papers filed to vacate Mr. Burton’s conviction.

The contents of Ms. Burton’s purse were scattered on the floor and her car was missing, but there was no evidence of rape or of a struggle, the papers said. Ms. Burton’s husband was in Jamaica at the time.

Two hours into the roughly six-hour interrogation, Detective Viggiano started to bluff the teenager, pretending there was evidence that he was the killer, Mr. Burton and his lawyer in the federal suit, Jonathan C. Moore, said.

In an interview, Mr. Burton recalled breaking into tears and crying out: “I didn’t kill my mom.”

It is not illegal in New York for the police to deceive suspects about evidence to get a confession. Although state courts have thrown out some confessions obtained through such tactics, they have not banned the practice.

Mr. Burton said in an interview and in court papers that Detective Viggiano had warned him that if he did not confess to the killing, he could still go to prison for the statutory rape of his girlfriend, who was 13, and that rapists were abused in prison.

If he confessed, the detectives said, his mother’s death would be treated as an accident in Family Court and he would be released to his father, Mr. Burton said.

“I said, ‘What do I have to say?’” Mr. Burton recalled in an interview. Then, he said, the detectives began to feed him a story, asking repeatedly: “At this point you did this?” He said he responded with “yes” and “no.”

Later, he said, they had him write down his statement and make a videotaped confession.

“The state of mind I was in,” Mr. Burton recalled, “finding my mother in that state, trying to process that — if they said, ‘We want you to say you were responsible for the assassination of J.F.K.,’ everything they told me to say, I would have.”

Instead of being taken to Family Court, Mr. Burton was paraded past a phalanx of flashing cameras and news reporters as he entered Bronx Criminal Court to be charged with murder as an adult.

Excerpted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/nyregion/3-detectives-obtained-a-false-murder-confession-was-it-one-of-dozens.html?fbclid=IwAR2P8Y2s4gTBs3roUEfw_mjH6Kolxq1y9UlMBsSnletP5fM6wZieLypVR2g

Sexual Harassment

HB 2155 Will Multiply Frivolous ‘Harassment’ Lawsuits, Harm Virginia Businesses Recovering from COVID Pandemic

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 16, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Rebecca Stewart: 513-479-3335

Email: info@saveservices.org

HB 2155 Will Multiply Frivolous ‘Harassment’ Lawsuits, Harm Virginia Businesses Recovering from COVID Pandemic

WASHINGTON / February 16, 2021 – SAVE is calling on Virginia lawmakers to oppose HB 2155, which dramatically expands the definition of “workplace harassment” to the point that almost any employee experiencing any job-related interpersonal discomfort could claim to be a victim of “harassment.”

As a result, any Virginia business could find itself the target of a costly lawsuit made by a disgruntled or under-performing employee. This would hamper efforts to overcome the devastating effects of the COVID pandemic on Virginia businesses.

The problems with HB 2155 start with its broad characterization of “workplace harassment,” which is defined as “unwelcome conduct on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions including lactation, age, marital status, or veteran status, regardless of whether it is direct or indirect, or verbal or nonverbal, that unreasonably alters an individual’s terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, including by creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.” (1)

The words “intimidating, hostile, or offensive” are not defined by the bill, so an employee who is merely “offended” by a person’s personality, awkward remarks, or even slovenly attire could claim to be a victim. A supervisor who gives a performance review that reveals areas of needed employee improvement could be accused of harassment, as well.

The bill expands the scope of “workplace harassment” in several other ways. The bill would allow trivial incidents to give rise to a lawsuit by stating that “Conduct may be workplace harassment regardless of whether:

the complaining party is the individual being harassed;
the complaining party acquiesced or otherwise submitted to or participated in the conduct;
the conduct is also experienced by others outside of the protected class involved;
the complaining party was able to continue carrying out the duties and responsibilities of such complaining party’s job despite the conduct;
the conduct caused a tangible or psychological injury; or
the conduct occurred outside of the workplace.”

The “conduct occurred outside of the workplace” provision is especially problematic for employees who gather for lunch, holiday parties, and other events.

The provisions of HB 2155 are inconsistent with court decisions and federal law (2).

Eight percent of Americans report being targeted by a false allegation of abuse (3). Such allegations undermine due process, dissipate scare public resources, undermine the credibility of future victims, and harm the reputations and careers of the falsely accused.

Citations:

Campus Title IX Title IX Equity Project

233 Investigations of Colleges for Sex-Discriminatory Programs and Scholarships

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 15, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Rebecca Stewart: 513-479-3335

Email: info@saveservices.org

233 Investigations of Colleges for Sex-Discriminatory Programs and Scholarships

WASHINGTON / February 15, 2021 – The federal Office for Civil Rights has announced that it currently has 233 open investigations of programs and scholarships that allegedly discriminate against male students (1). The sex-bias complaints have been submitted by a variety of individuals and groups, including the SAVE Title IX Equity Project.

The sex-discriminating universities are located in 47 states across the country. These states are listed at the bottom of this press release, along with the number of institutions in each state under investigation. The states with the largest number of colleges under investigation are Pennsylvania (22 institutions), California (19), New York (16), and Ohio (10).

Last week, for example, it was reported that OCR has opened an investigation of the BOLD Leadership program at Ithaca College, which “requires that applicants identify as women.” (2) The University of Missouri – Columbia offers 70 scholarships for female students, and one for male students. The scholarship for male students, the Eric G. Rowe Scholarship Fund, is reserved for “deserving farm boys,” according to a description on the university website (3).

Sex-discrimination in higher education appears to be widespread. A review of North Carolina’s largest colleges concluded that discrimination on the basis of sex is “rampant.” “In the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, North Carolina universities have often chosen inequity and exclusion,” author Adam Kissel ironically comments (4).

A number of the institutions have eliminated their sex-discriminatory programs (5). But many of the OCR investigations were opened over six months ago, revealing that some universities may be resisting efforts to assure equal opportunity for all students.

The federal Title IX law states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” On January 14, the Department of Education released a guidance that re-affirms the ban on sex discrimination, stating, “a school may not administer scholarships, fellowships or other forms of financial assistance that impose a preference or restriction on the basis of sex, with limited exceptions.” (6)

Female students now represent 56% of all undergraduate students, compared to 44% male students (7). Male students are under-represented in numerous fields such as the health professions, public administration, education, and others (8).

To avoid government sanctions, SAVE urges university officials to take steps to assure sex-discriminatory programs and scholarships are promptly removed.

Listing of States with Universities Under Investigation for Sex-Discriminatory Programs

AL – 5 universities
AR – 3
AZ – 4
CA – 19
CO – 3
CT – 3
DC – 2
DE – 1
FL – 9
GA – 4
HI – 1
IA – 4
ID – 5
KS – 6
KY – 7
LA – 2
MA – 4
MD – 5
ME – 1
MI – 1
MN – 8
MO – 4
MT – 4
NC – 3
ND – 1
NE – 3
NH – 2
NJ – 5
NV – 3
NY – 16
OH – 10
OK – 2
OR – 4
PA – 22
SC – 2
SD – 2
TN – 3
TX – 3
UT – 5
VA – 9
VT – 1
WA – 4
WI – 9
WV – 2
WY – 2

Citations:

https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/investigations/open-investigations/tix.html In the Type of Discrimination box, select “Title IX – Single Sex Campus Programs” or “Title IX – Single Sex Scholarships”
https://theithacan.org/news/bold-program-under-investigation-for-title-ix-complaint/
https://endowedscholarships.missouri.edu/EndowmentPublicInfo.aspx?id=2344
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/12/pervasive-sex-discrimination-at-north-carolina-universities/
https://www.saveservices.org/equity/case-resolutions/
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/qa-single-sex-20210114.pdf
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cha.asp#:~:text=In%20fall%202018%2C%20female%20students,trends%20between%202000%20and%202018
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-degrees-by-field-and-gender-for-the-class-of-2015/

Trauma Informed Victim-Centered Investigations

PR: Defense Attorneys Should Tell Police Chiefs to Halt Program that Will Bias Investigations, Worsen Wrongful Convictions, and Target Black Men

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 12, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Rebecca Stewart: 513-479-3335

Email: info@saveservices.org

Defense Attorneys Should Tell Police Chiefs to Halt Program that Will Bias Investigations, Worsen Wrongful Convictions, and Target Black Men

WASHINGTON / February 12, 2021 – SAVE is today calling on defense attorneys to urge the International Association of Chiefs of Police to promptly suspend a proposed program to promote so-called “victim-centered” investigations around the country (1). Such methods serve to negate the presumption of innocence and remove investigative impartiality.

“Victim-centered” approaches, sometimes referred to as “trauma-informed,” are known to bias the conduct of police investigations, which contribute to one-third of all wrongful convictions (2). A recent National Registry of Exonerations report documents five ways in which biased police investigations contribute to wrongful convictions (3):

Concealment of evidence
Fabrication of evidence
Witness tampering
Misconduct in interrogations, or
Making false statements at trial

Such guilt-presuming investigations were found to target Black men. For murder cases, 78% of Black exonerees, compared to 64% of White exonerees, were victims of official misconduct. The misconduct disparity was even greater for drug crimes: 47% among Blacks and 22% for Whites, according to the National Registry of Exonerations (3).

A recent editorial describes victim-centered investigations as a “Pandora’s Box” because they place “emotional sympathy, prejudice, and ideologically driven agendas above cool-headed forensic and legal reasoning.” (4)

On January 28, 2021, CPI sent a letter to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, calling on the group to suspend the project (5). To date, the IACP has not acknowledged or provided a substantive response to the letter.

The inter-related problems of police accountability, wrongful convictions, and racial bias have been repeatedly cited as top legislative priorities for 2021 (6,7,8). Defense attorneys are urged to tell the International Association of Chiefs of Police to suspend its unethical and harmful “victim-centered” program. Contact IACP Executive Director Vincent Talucci at talucci@theiacp.org , or telephone: 703-836-6767.

Citations:

Campus Title IX

ATIXA’s Plan to Push a ‘Title IX Restoration Act’

Post author By Edward Bartlett
Post date February 5, 2021

ATIXA’s Plan to Push a ‘Title IX Restoration Act’

Wendy McElroy

February 4, 2021

President Joe Biden vowed to put a “quick end” to the Trump administration’s Title IX regulations and return to Obama-era ones at universities. If this happens, the sexual misconduct hearings will be deeply impacted. These “trials” judge whether those accused of sexual misconduct are innocent or guilty. The Obama-era hearings expressed social justice standards that greatly favored an accuser; the Trump-era ones were closer to the Western tradition of due process…..

Now a woke regime has returned to campus justice. Whatever happens will offer a window into how mainstream justice may evolve in the coming years. And ATIXA offers a window into the dynamics.

ATIXA is influential. Indeed, it is currently drafting what may be the next Title IX bill. ATIXA is “a professional association for approximately 5,500 Title IX coordinators, investigators, and administrators,” (as of January 18, 2021). It has the mission of “helping to advance gender equity in schools and colleges”; since 2011, it has trained and certified “more than 7,250 Title IX Coordinators and more than 23,550 Title IX investigators.” ATIXA’s job might seem to be the facilitation of whatever laws and policies are on the books, but it adamantly resisted implementing DeVos’s changes.

The College Fix documented one example. DeVos required the training materials used by Title IX administrators to be posted. This allowed an accused to access the rules and procedures by which he would be tried. ATIXA president Brett A. Sokolow has a history of covertly resisting such regulations. In a January 15, 2020, op-ed for Inside Higher Education, he advised: “About 20 to 25 percent of the (new Title IX) regulations are potentially very detrimental…and we will need…to work within those requirements, challenge them in court or find clever work-arounds” (emphasis added). Sokolow tried to work around posting training materials by claiming they were copyrighted and not able to be shared. The College Fix’s interpretation: “ATIXA will sue colleges for following a legally binding regulation.” Sokolow backed down, however, when the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) noticed and doubled down on its demand.

Passive-aggressive obstruction is no longer necessary. A memorandum to ATIXA listserv members in early January 2021 commented, “Dear Members….The Senate will now be in Democrat control.” A lobbying firm was duly engaged, as Sokolow now considers new Title IX legislation to be “a realistic possibility”; it is an endeavor in which ATIXA wants to take a leadership role. “Our initial thoughts include the promulgation of a model Title IX Restoration Act (TIXRA, naturally),” he writes, to show “how Title IX should be reshaped by the Biden administration and Congress to best serve the field and the goals of sex/gender equity.” (Sex/gender equity is not clearly defined.)

Sokolow’s memo gives lip service to “due process”—a term that appears with scare quotes around it. Elsewhere, a poll of “ATIXA Title IX experts” offers a more concrete sense of the looming danger to due process. JD Supra reported on the poll in an article by Sokolow entitled “Biden Is President-Elect. Can We Just Ignore the Title IX Regulations Now?“ The new woke hearings should include:

Relief from direct cross examination by an advisor

Removal of nonsensical exclusionary/hearsay rule regarding “statements”

Revocation of the confusing rules on relevance v. directly related evidence

Two ten-day review periods likely collapsed into one period

Formal complaint requirement will be reversed

Hearing requirements for at-will employees will be limited

Hearings only required when some form of separation is on the table, and the definition of hearing will be broader and less formal

Mandated dismissal of Title IX complaints removed

Broad retaliation protections rolled back, especially as applied to respondents

Removal of any necessity for two processes

In short, the woke campus hearings would discourage direct cross-examination, allow hearsay, loosen rules of evidence, be conducted quickly, and bypass the need for a formal complaint…the denial of due process would be policy. This despite the fact that, as Sokolow stated in a phone interview, “Probably 40 or 50% of allegations of sexual assault are baseless. There are a lot of cases where someone says they were incapacitated, but the evidence doesn’t support that they weren’t able to make a decision.” A “model” Title IX bill is currently being drafted by ATIXA and will be circulated the “to Congress and Biden Administration.” An earlier draft entitled “ATIXA Submission to the ED ART on Title IX 12.18.2020” that was submitted to Biden’s education transition team hints at the content. The hints are confusing, however. The bill endorses Biden’s progressive approach while stating, “a return to…the 2011 DCL (Dear Colleague Letter) or maintaining the status quo of the 2020 regulations would not be supported by ATIXA’s 6,000 practitioner members.” In short, there is pushback from the membership. Also, a mountain of complaints and lawsuits have proven expensive in time and money.

Therefore “ATIXA seeks a balanced approach that honors the rights of all parties in the Title IX resolution process.” So far, so good. The same hearing standards would seem to apply to all participants regardless of gender or race. Yet, elsewhere, the submission commits to “focusing broadly on the impacts that Title IX work can and should have on the LGBTQIA+ community [and] on people of color.” There is a tension between the two statements.

Moreover, an accused’s due process rights are directly attacked. The right of cross-examination, for example, would be restricted to spare an accuser distress; “if cross-examination is required in a jurisdiction [where the campus is located], it is sufficient to have party-proposed questions submitted to and then posed by the neutral, impartial decision-maker,” presumably appointed by the university. The right of direct examination by the accused or his advocate would be denied. (Nothing is said about jurisdictions in which courts do not require the cross-examination.) Currently, if a witness refuses to submit to cross-examination, his or her statements during the investigation are not considered at the hearing. ATIXA wants this rule to be “revisited,” because “it’s too drastic, is too complicated for laypersons to apply, has no litigation equivalent, and takes away the discretion of the recipient to appropriately assess relevance and credibility.” Why “laypersons” are holding court-like hearings when the basics of due process and court procedure are too complicated for them to understand is not addressed.

Elsewhere, the clarity of ATIXA’s recommendations is chilling. For example, “ATIXA supports universal application of the preponderance of the evidence standard….Existing regulations permit a choice of standards.” Preponderance of the evidence means that if a hearing believes a rape complaint to be supported by 50.01 percent of the evidence, the accused is “guilty” and open to expulsion or other common punishments.

All in all, a prediction in the JD Supra article seems half correct. “If we had to prognosticate, we’d guess that fairly early on, the Biden administration will rescind the 2020 regulations, and implement another new Dear Colleague Letter/Q&A style approach.” BUT the new Title IX is likely to be a new Obama-style DCL approach that is tweaked to avoid the legal pitfalls visited on the 2011 one. I disagree; withdrawing the 2020 regulations will not be a quick process.

The DeVos administration did not use a DCL or other guidelines to impose its regulations. It went through the arduous Administrative Procedure Act notice-and-comment process, which is why it was not enacted until 2020; the process and obstructionist tactics made it take that long. To rescind DeVos’s regulations requires the same long slog through bureaucracy and Congress. This alone makes new regulations unlikely before 2022 at the earliest.

ATIXA and Title IX may seem arcane to those not on campus or without a loved one who is. But the incredible bias and injustice embedded in earlier sexual misconduct hearings was integral in promoting a social division that borders on hatred. Close attention must be paid to the social justice measures on campuses, because they are part of the ideology promoting street riots, increased violence and hostility between groups. College administrators and professors have actively stoked hatred between the genders and the races for decades. And now society reaps a whirlwind.

Excerpted from https://mises.org/wire/title-ix-will-become-vehicle-more-injustice