Looser legal standards for sexual assault conviction on campus spark heated debate

The Office of Student Conduct’s announcement of its revised sexual misconduct policy on April 10 was met with mixed reactions and heated debate.

The changes to the Student Code of Conduct charter include lowering the burden of proof in a sexual violence case to the “preponderance of the evidence” standard — which requires finding the accused student more likely responsible than not of committing an alleged act.

According to political science professor Rogers Smith, the lesser standard is akin to being 51 percent sure of the accused person’s responsibility.

While College senior Jayson Weingarten believes that “anyone who actually commits a rape or sexual assault or any misconduct should be punished to the fullest extent they can be,” he feels that the lower standard can “open up the floodgates” to possible false accusations.

Under the previous standard, “if you were falsely accused, you could rely on the fact that there wouldn’t be enough evidence” to be found guilty, Weingarten said. Now, “the 51 percent standard could amount to lying … that could have dramatic effects and could be what gets you in trouble.”

College junior Adrienne Edwards, who serves as chair of the Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women, disagreed that the new policy will lead to false accusations.

“There can always be one incident in which someone lies or has vicious intent, but the fact is that sexual assault is widely underreported,” she said. “If a victim experienced something traumatic but there wasn’t enough evidence to meet a particular standard, it doesn’t mean they’re not still a victim.”

Edwards feels that victims of sexual assault are often wrongly blamed for the incident.

“Telling someone to not do something or act a certain way doesn’t change whether they’ll be a victim of sexual assault,” Edwards said.

According to OSC Director Susan Herron, around 3-6 percent of sexual violence accusations are found to be false, “which is consistent with false accusations of other crimes.”

However, Will Creeley, the director of Legal and Public Advocacy at the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, believes that the use of a preponderance of evidence standard will “undermine the integrity, accuracy, reliability and basic fairness of the judicial process.”

“Because many allegations of sexual misconduct involve contested facts, drug or alcohol use and few if any witnesses, the risk of error from using the weak preponderance standard is substantial,” he wrote in an email.

Herron wrote in an email, though, that the new policy “can support victim’s rights without compromising the respondent’s due process rights.”

Creeley disagreed, explaining that the comparison between academic and civil cases involving sexual assault “ignores the vast differences between civil courts and campus hearings.”

He added that campus hearings offer significantly fewer protections to the defendant such as access to counsel, an impartial judge and the ability to cross-examine witnesses.

As a result, Creeley believes that finding the student “more likely than not” responsible “leaves many accused students all but guilty before the proceedings begin.”

Herron wrote that while the change to the charter was a direct response to a Department of Education mandate, “students will be involved in the discussion of increasing awareness of the impact of the charter changes on the Penn community.”

College junior Jonathan Skekloff, the president of One in Four — an all-male sexual assault peer education group — believes that a great deal of education is still needed on campus to correct common “rape myths.”

“This policy is based on creating a culture that does not tolerate the disgustingly high rate of sexual assault on our campus,” he wrote in an email. He added that because only an estimated 5 percent of sexual assault cases are reported, “false accusations are not the problem — the thousands of sexual assaults that go without justice are.”

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