ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 31, 1996 TAG: 9601310020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
WHAT HAPPENED the night of Sept. 22, 1994, in the Virginia Tech dorm room of football players Tony Morrison and James Crawford is known for sure only to those who were there - and their accounts conflict. Former Tech student Christy Brzonkala says she was raped. Through his attorney, Morrison has said anything that happened was consensual. Crawford has said nothing at all happened between him and Brzonkala, consensual or otherwise.
A forum exists by which society seeks to get to the truth of such matters: the criminal-justice system. Imperfect as it may be, it over time has developed techniques and rules of evidence that make it preferable to the alternatives - including campus student-disciplinary systems - for trying allegations of serious crimes.
In this case, the best forum was not used, and the result has been additional confusion.
Brzonkala first raised allegations against Morrison and Crawford in a complaint to the campus judicial system last spring, several months after her visit to the dorm room. Too little evidence was found to take action against Crawford. Against Morrison, an original finding of sexual misconduct, with a two-semester suspension, was reduced after two appeals to abusive conduct, with probation and one hour of counseling.
This past November, after learning that Morrison had been reinstated to the football team, Brzonkala went public with her accusations in an interview with the campus newspaper. The charges have been further detailed in a civil lawsuit, unsealed this month, against the two players and the university.
Her stated reasons for not seeking a criminal prosecution - she didn't report it until the shock and repression of the incident wore off; by then, too much evidence was gone to likely win a conviction - are not implausible. If true, they inspire sympathy. But they don't alter the consequences of not quickly reporting the incident to anyone on campus, let alone to a health facility, police station or prosecutor's office: The accusations inhabit a kind of twilight zone where it can be difficult to resolve anything at a satisfactory level of evidentiary rigor.
In the absence of evidence-based resolution, sides are chosen according to where you stand on other issues: gender politics, the adequacy of the Tech administration and of the student-discipline system, the proper role of varsity athletics. Such broader questions are not out of order: Sexual abuse is too common, and too commonly belittled or ignored; universities sometimes are prone to cover up scandals, especially involving football athletes.
The problem is that such questions too often are asked, and the answers too often framed, in the mistaken assumption that a campus disciplinary system is a substitute for the criminal-justice system. It isn't, and shouldn't be.
The student-discipline and criminal-justice systems exist for different purposes, and operate under different rules. The confidentiality requirement imposed by federal law on student-discipline systems, for example, is utterly at odds with the imperative for open proceedings in criminal courts.
Morrison remained on the football team most of the fall; given the seriousness of the charge, that was wrong. Playing football, after all, is not a right. As it happened, after Morrison was charged by Blacksburg police with public drunkenness and petty larceny, and Crawford with defrauding an innkeeper and felony hit and run with injury, they were booted from the team before the Sugar Bowl.
If this juxtaposition reflected the university's view of the relative seriousness of rape and petty larceny, it would be alarming. But it also may have reflected the greater seriousness of an official police charge over a student-code conclusion of misconduct.
The answer to all this is not to make student-discipline systems more like the criminal courts. The answer is to make sure everyone understands that serious crime is as serious on the campus as off, and is to be taken to the forum best-equipped to deal with it.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB