Police arrested one of the men, Corey Batey, 19, of Nashville, on Friday afternoon. Aaron said Batey was taken to a hospital for mandatory HIV testing before being held on a $350,000 bond.
Aaron identified the others as Brandon Vandenburg, 20, of Indio, California; Brandon Banks, 19, of Brandywine, Maryland; and Jaborian McKenzie, 19, of Woodville, Mississippi.
Vandenburg, in whose room the rapes are said to have occurred, was also was charged with tampering with evidence and unlawful photography.
Aaron said police have contacted authorities in the states where the other men live. He encouraged them to come to Nashville and turn themselves in.
The incident allegedly took place in Vandenburg's dorm room in the early hours of June 23, but was not immediately reported.
"The matter first came to light the next week when university officials checking the dorm's hallway surveillance recordings regarding an unrelated situation observed concerning behavior by the defendants," according to a police press release.
The university's police force contacted the city police on June 26, which led to Friday's indictments.
District Attorney General Torry Johnson said the investigation was ongoing and that other people may be implicated in the attack.
"We are shocked and saddened by the allegations that such an assault has taken place on our campus and that they include members of our football team," said Beth Fortune, Vanderbilt vice chancellor for public affairs, reading from a prepared statement.
This is the latest in a series of alleged incidents of sexual assault involving college football players. In June three U.S. Naval Academy football players were charged with raping a female midshipman at an off-campus party in April 2012.
In May the U.S. Justice Department struck a deal with the University of Montana in which the school pledged to change the way it responds to rape accusations.
A federal review listed at least 11 reported sexual assaults since 2010 involving University of Montana students, several of whom were members of the football team.
(Editing by Nick Carey and Xavier Briand)
Impunity for College Athletes Who Rape
October 7, 2010 by
Two Michigan State University basketball players accused of sexually assaulting a young woman in their dorm are off the hook, according to a report released by The Michigan Messenger.
Many elements of the case are typical of campus acquaintance rape scenarios. The accused are college athletes and the assault allegedly occurred after a night of drinking and casual socializing:
The victim told police the players penetrated her in various positions. The victim told detectives the players allegedly asked her ‘how does that feel?’ and ‘how do you want it?’ The victim says she told the players she didn’t want it and gave ‘other indicators she was not a willing participant.’The victim told police that the players pinned her down, but at one point she freed her arms momentarily and struck one in the face. In response, he allegedly said, “Don’t. Just relax. C’mon baby,” as he continued to assault her.
But what sets this particular case apart from others is that one of the accused players actually corroborates the victim’s statement, admitting to authorities that he knew the young woman was unwilling:
During his interview with detectives, the one player who volunteered a statement corroborated much of the victim’s statement, the report shows. He told investigators that when it was clear from the victim’s statements that she did not want to have sex, he stopped. However, the other player continued ‘despite her reluctance and statements that she did not want to continue.’ The victim confirms that player’s account.
The player told detectives he was concerned “over the girl’s reaction to the circumstances,” noting she was “timid” and “not aggressive.” The player then admitted to detectives that he understood how the woman believed she was not welcome to leave the room, in part because she kept referencing that the two were “bigger” than her.Given the player’s affirmation of the victim’s statement, the case against the men should have been a “slam dunk.” Accordingly, the MSU Police Department wasted no time sending their report to the prosecutor’s office, with the recommendation that both men be charged with Criminal Sexual Conduct 1, the severest level of sexual assault under Michigan law.
But the assigned prosecutor, Stuart Dunnings, has declined to press charges against the athletes, saying that the prosecutor’s office is not convinced that force or coercion occurred in this case (a judgment directly contradicted by the police report), and that the victim herself chose not to press charges (a claim denied by the victim).
Dunning’s decision, while reprehensible, shouldn’t be surprising. An investigation of sexual assault on campuses conducted last year by The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) found that the number of prosecutions of campus acquaintance rapes is minuscule. When prosecutors turn down these cases, the only available recourse for many victims is to seek justice through their university’s disciplinary system. Unfortunately, most colleges are ill-equipped to investigate and resolve sexual assault cases, and moreover are unwilling to impose harsh sanctions on perpetrators.
A 2002 report [PDF] commissioned by the Department of Justice found a number of inherent problems with university policies and practices regarding sexual assault, including a tendency to “unintentionally condone victim-blaming.” Only 38 percent of schools require sexual assault sensitivity training for campus law enforcement, while only 37 percent fully comply with federal regulations about reporting crimes. The CPI investigation similarly found that even when college administrators deem a student guilty of sexual assault, they are reluctant to expel the perpetrator:
Verdicts are educational, not punitive, opportunities. … Not every sexual offense deserves the harshest penalty, [administrators] argue; not every culpable student is a hardened criminal.So, while a man who rapes off-campus could face years in jail for his crime, a man who rapes on-campus is unlikely to even be expelled. In too many cases, student rapists face mere suspension or even lighter sanctions. The tendency among administrators to view sexual assaults as “teachable moments” flies in the face of evidence that student rapists are often serial rapists—guilty of victimizing an average of six women during their college career.
The decision to absolve student rapists of their crimes can be costly, as doing so could violate Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in publicly funded educational programs. In recent years, the ACLU has won two landmark lawsuits against public universities guilty of letting rapists off the hook. In 2008, Arizona State University paid out $850,000 after it failed to expel an athlete with a history of harassment who later raped a young woman, and in 2007 the University of Colorado paid out $2.5 million after members of its football team sexually assaulted two women.
Whether Michigan State University will take action against the basketball players accused of rape remains to be seen. The prospects don’t look good. While the Office of Postsecondary Education shows that the university reported 32 forcible sex offenses on its campus between 2007 and 2009, it does not show any reports of disciplinary actions associated with those crimes.
Cross-posted from Campus Progress.
Rape at Occidental College: Official Hush-Up Shatters Trust
When Leah Capranica decided to go to Occidental College
in Los Angeles, she thought she had found a school whose values matched
her own. With its tranquil campus in Eagle Rock and its diverse student
body — after all, President Barack Obama went there — the Springfield, Ill., native couldn't wait to attend an institution that would give her the opportunity to pursue her dream of studying politics.
But two weeks before her sophomore year began, Capranica, now 22,
says she was sexually assaulted by another student. When she went to
report the crime to school officials, Capranica was shocked by their
response.
"I was told I might have to stay in the same dorm as the guy who had done this," she says, "and that my case wasn't really that serious."
Capranica, who declines to divulge details about her rape, unfortunately didn't report the alleged assault to the Los Angeles Police Department. "It's an incredibly emotional process," she says, "and based on the experience I was having at the school, I just didn't feel it was something I wanted to do at that time."
Capranica did push for an internal investigation at the school, though, and following a secret, closed-door hearing involving campus faculty and administrators, her rapist was found responsible by Oxy for assaulting her — as well as two other students. But after initially being expelled, the male student's punishment inexplicably was reduced to a suspension.
He will be allowed back on campus in December, never having been publicly named.
Then, when a rape near campus was revealed by CBS2 News in February, angry students and faculty began lashing out at college president Jonathan Veitch, dean of students and vice president for student affairs Barbara Avery and college counsel Carl Botterud for failing to alert the campus and for mishandling previous rape allegations. Critics dubbed themselves the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition.
In April, members of that group, including Capranica and 37 current and former Occidental students, filed two federal complaints against the college. They say Oxy's secretive, image-conscious administration violated Title IX, which prevents colleges and universities from discriminating against students based on gender, as well as the Clery Act, which requires schools to report crimes that happen on campus.
They allege that Occidental has made a habit of discouraging students from reporting rapes to the college administration, retaliating against the mostly female students who do report rapes, and allowing alleged rapists back on campus.
Amidst this tension, a student accused the college's attorney, Botterud, of belittling the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition to a group of male athletes, telling the men, "Fuck 'em," and arguing that the coalition had vilified male students in the complex cases to which police sometimes refer as "he said, she said." On May 6, the faculty considered a vote of "no confidence" in Avery and Botterud. It passed overwhelmingly.
Then, on May 22, prominent attorney Gloria Allred — representing eight students at Oxy — announced that those clients would be joined by women from USC, UC Berkeley, Swarthmore and Dartmouth who had filed similar complaints. "We have up to 16 violations that we lay out in the complaint," says Tucker Reed, 23, a female co-filer at USC. "They are not only federal civil rights violations but also violations of school policy."
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has announced that it is investigating one of the federally filed complaints. If that investigation ultimately shows that the school isn't compliant with Title IX and Oxy doesn't correct the problem, it could cost the private four-year college its federal funding.
Avery did not return numerous calls from L.A. Weekly seeking comment, but Botterud says it's possible he said "fuck 'em" because he strongly feels that all students — male and female — should have a voice in the tense conversation unfolding at Occidental, and some men feel they don't. "I don't recall whether I said that or not," Botterud says. "But it sounds like something I would have said under the circumstances."
Unfolding events have left the campus divided and the highly active Eagle Rock community wondering how this could happen in their backyard.
Danielle Dirks, an assistant professor of sociology, has firsthand experience with what she describes as the school's mishandling of rape allegations. After starting her job at Occidental in 2011, she says she was floored by the number of students who came to her office feeling "hurt and betrayed by the administration" after trying to report they had been sexually assaulted by other students.
"People have the idea that this college is kind of idyllic, and our campus is stunningly beautiful and amazing in every other way," Dirks says. "So it's hard for them to think, 'Oh my gosh, that's going on at Oxy.' "
Dirks and other faculty members say that, when they pushed the administration to change, long before the eruptions in the spring, they were ignored. Veitch, who took over at Oxy in 2009, admits he was too slow to respond, telling L.A. Weekly, "When we get these cases, we need to do a better job of investigating them, adjudicating them, responding empathetically to the students that have been violated, and we have to do a much better job on education."
First he had been convicted of a rape he swears he did not commit, and now this. District judge Murray Richtel was about to read the sentence - 24 years, the maximum under Colorado law - and Antonio Harris couldn't keep quiet.
So, the former Colorado University football player spoke up in the courtroom in Boulder, Colo. Standing before the bench, wearing handcuffs, Harris started yelling.
"How do you think I could get a fair trial with eight white women and four white men on the jury?" Harris shouted. "I was guilty even before the trial. If you went on trial in Oakland, Calif., for raping a black woman, with an all-black jury, a black judge and a black bailiff, what do you think these black people are going to think about you, pal?"
"I was told I might have to stay in the same dorm as the guy who had done this," she says, "and that my case wasn't really that serious."
Capranica, who declines to divulge details about her rape, unfortunately didn't report the alleged assault to the Los Angeles Police Department. "It's an incredibly emotional process," she says, "and based on the experience I was having at the school, I just didn't feel it was something I wanted to do at that time."
Capranica did push for an internal investigation at the school, though, and following a secret, closed-door hearing involving campus faculty and administrators, her rapist was found responsible by Oxy for assaulting her — as well as two other students. But after initially being expelled, the male student's punishment inexplicably was reduced to a suspension.
He will be allowed back on campus in December, never having been publicly named.
Then, when a rape near campus was revealed by CBS2 News in February, angry students and faculty began lashing out at college president Jonathan Veitch, dean of students and vice president for student affairs Barbara Avery and college counsel Carl Botterud for failing to alert the campus and for mishandling previous rape allegations. Critics dubbed themselves the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition.
In April, members of that group, including Capranica and 37 current and former Occidental students, filed two federal complaints against the college. They say Oxy's secretive, image-conscious administration violated Title IX, which prevents colleges and universities from discriminating against students based on gender, as well as the Clery Act, which requires schools to report crimes that happen on campus.
They allege that Occidental has made a habit of discouraging students from reporting rapes to the college administration, retaliating against the mostly female students who do report rapes, and allowing alleged rapists back on campus.
Amidst this tension, a student accused the college's attorney, Botterud, of belittling the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition to a group of male athletes, telling the men, "Fuck 'em," and arguing that the coalition had vilified male students in the complex cases to which police sometimes refer as "he said, she said." On May 6, the faculty considered a vote of "no confidence" in Avery and Botterud. It passed overwhelmingly.
Then, on May 22, prominent attorney Gloria Allred — representing eight students at Oxy — announced that those clients would be joined by women from USC, UC Berkeley, Swarthmore and Dartmouth who had filed similar complaints. "We have up to 16 violations that we lay out in the complaint," says Tucker Reed, 23, a female co-filer at USC. "They are not only federal civil rights violations but also violations of school policy."
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has announced that it is investigating one of the federally filed complaints. If that investigation ultimately shows that the school isn't compliant with Title IX and Oxy doesn't correct the problem, it could cost the private four-year college its federal funding.
Avery did not return numerous calls from L.A. Weekly seeking comment, but Botterud says it's possible he said "fuck 'em" because he strongly feels that all students — male and female — should have a voice in the tense conversation unfolding at Occidental, and some men feel they don't. "I don't recall whether I said that or not," Botterud says. "But it sounds like something I would have said under the circumstances."
Unfolding events have left the campus divided and the highly active Eagle Rock community wondering how this could happen in their backyard.
Danielle Dirks, an assistant professor of sociology, has firsthand experience with what she describes as the school's mishandling of rape allegations. After starting her job at Occidental in 2011, she says she was floored by the number of students who came to her office feeling "hurt and betrayed by the administration" after trying to report they had been sexually assaulted by other students.
"People have the idea that this college is kind of idyllic, and our campus is stunningly beautiful and amazing in every other way," Dirks says. "So it's hard for them to think, 'Oh my gosh, that's going on at Oxy.' "
Dirks and other faculty members say that, when they pushed the administration to change, long before the eruptions in the spring, they were ignored. Veitch, who took over at Oxy in 2009, admits he was too slow to respond, telling L.A. Weekly, "When we get these cases, we need to do a better job of investigating them, adjudicating them, responding empathetically to the students that have been violated, and we have to do a much better job on education."
Rape And The College Athlete
First he had been convicted of a rape he swears he did not commit, and now this. District judge Murray Richtel was about to read the sentence - 24 years, the maximum under Colorado law - and Antonio Harris couldn't keep quiet.
So, the former Colorado University football player spoke up in the courtroom in Boulder, Colo. Standing before the bench, wearing handcuffs, Harris started yelling.
"How do you think I could get a fair trial with eight white women and four white men on the jury?" Harris shouted. "I was guilty even before the trial. If you went on trial in Oakland, Calif., for raping a black woman, with an all-black jury, a black judge and a black bailiff, what do you think these black people are going to think about you, pal?"
Richtel's reply: "From the bottom of my heart, you got a fair trial."
Harris is in Colorado's Canyon City prison now, refusing all interview requests. His case is on appeal. But his cry - that racism has become entangled in the administration of justice, that black athletes charged with sexual assault get treated differently than whites - is a familiar one.
In a three-month investigation, the Daily News uncovered 61 incidents of athletes being reported for sexual assault. In 30 of the cases involving NCAA football and basketball players, the race of the athlete was able to be determined. Twenty-eight of the 30 were black. The black athletes made up 40 percent of the group studied, but they were reported for more than 90 percent of the sexual assaults.
In addition, the Daily News found:
* Atonio Harris's accusation of racism was one of several encountered during the investigation. It comes up almost every time a jury is selected. It is the basis of a $4 million lawsuit filed against a university by a football player charged in a sexual assault. Pretrial statements about alleged racism in violation of a gag order helped get one athlete's attorney cited for contempt of court.
* There is a body of statistics that indicates blacks in this country are reported for a disproportionate number of rapes. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, blacks make up 11.7 percent of the population but are reported for 46 percent of the rapes.
Some experts say the statistics are self-explanatory - that blacks commit more of the crimes. Others suggest that racist influences on the criminal justice system account for blacks being reported more frequently. Either of those explanations also might apply to college athletes.
It is possible that black athletes actually commit an unusually high percentage of the sexual assaults. One black leader suggests that this might be true because black athletes are faced with pressures that white athletes do not encounter.
It also is possible, as some black leaders suggest, that the high reporting rate for black athletes is misleading. They say it is logical to conclude that the prejudices of the criminal justice system could account for a 90 percent reporting rate in a group with a relatively high black population, such as athletes.
* The issues of race and rape are so new to college athletics administrators that many contacted by the Daily News refused to comment. One who did comment was Jim Satalin, the Duquesne University coach, who had four black players charged with rape in 1984. Three of the players were tried and acquitted, and the charges were dropped against the fourth player. The university subsequently expelled two of the players. The other two played in the second half of this season for the Dukes.
"I've had letters, terribly obscene phone calls, death threats," Satalin said. "I've had people call me 'nigger-lover' and other things like that. That says more to me than the charges that were brought against our players. There's a tremendous, tremendous amount of racist people in the United States.
"That scares me more than the issue (of rape) itself," Satalin said.
*
Experts do not know exactly how race is factored into the equation. Nevertheless, it continues to be mentioned:
* It happened in the case involving five black West Virginia athletes who testified before a grand jury investigating the alleged rape of a white student. The grand jury declined to indict the players, but the National Organization for Women (NOW) has called for an investigation of the case by the state legislature.
Barbara Fleischauer, the executive vice president of West Virginia NOW, said there was considerable racial tension on campus after the incident. She said the white students made racist statements in answer to reporters' questions, and that black men felt that whites were looking at them and wondering if the blacks were the rapists.
"As I have talked to people about these issues and tried to gain more understanding, I've realized that the publicity surrounding this incident merely had the effect of putting additional coals on a (racist) fire that was already burning," Fleischauer wrote in an article in the Daily Athenaeum, the school's student newspaper.
* It happened in the case of Mitch Lee, the Minnesota basketball player who was tried and acquitted of criminal sexual conduct this year. Ten days later, Lee and two of his teammates were charged in a different rape case. Their trial is pending.
But in Lee's first trial, during the selection of the jury, defense attorney Philip Resnick repeatedly asked the prospective jurors if they could deal fairly with a case involving Lee, who is black, and the alleged victim, who is white. In fact, he asked that question of every prospective juror. This, by the way, is a typical practice and not limited to cases involving athletes.
The jury selected was all-white. After the trial, Resnick said that if his client had lost, at least two elements of his appeal would have dealt with the question of race. First, there was the failure of the court to disqualify a prospective juror who said that he had no problem with blacks, "as long as all my grandchildren have blue eyes."
This man, a retired policeman, did not sit on the jury because Resnick used one of his preemptory challenges to remove him. Resnick referred to him afterward as "racist."
Resnick also said that "dismissing the only black (prospective) juror was a good grounds for an appeal."
* It happened in the case of Percy Moorman, a quarterback from North Carolina State University who was convicted of rape last year. His case is on appeal.
In his opening statement to the jury, Jerry Paul, Moorman's attorney, confronted the all-white jury with this:
"We will show that some of her (the alleged victim) friends talked about blacks and talked about the fact that Percy is black and showed her and told her that they disapproved of her association, or being associated with a black; which is another motivation for crying rape, an age-old explanation for it."
One basis upon which Moorman is appealing is that Paul had not fulfilled his legal responsibility to provide Moorman with a competent defense. His new attorney, Roger W. Smith, attempted at a hearing last July to demonstrate Paul's incompetence in several ways.
For example, Smith said, although Paul had made an issue of blacks being excluded from the jury, he never put that issue into the record, precluding it
from being considered in an appeal.
"Nowhere does it say that the jury was white," Smith said.
At the same hearing, another lawyer who briefly represented Moorman, L. Michael Dodd, testified that he (Dodd) was dismissed by Moorman and replaced by Paul because of Dodd's refusal to make race an issue in the trial.
"Percy told me he thought the case had some racial element in it and that I wasn't doing anything about that and that Jerry Paul would," Dodd testified.
Moorman testified that he never told Paul that the charges against him were racially motivated. Nevertheless, it is clear that Paul held that belief. In an interview before the trial in Moorman's hometown newspaper, the Danville (Va.) Register, Paul is quoted as saying:
"Percy Moorman is facing a charge that has historically been used against black men to intimidate them, to keep the white power structure going, and to maintain the system the way it is."
Partly because of that interview - granted in violation of a pretrial gag order - Paul was convicted of contempt of court.
* And the issue of race cropped up in the matter of a rape allegation against a football player that led to a $4 million lawsuit being filed against Towson State University.
The player is Sheldon Nelson; Towson State is in suburban Baltimore. Nelson's attorney, H. Patrick Stringer, refused to comment on the case and refused to make his client available for an interview. Through a spokesman, the university also declined to comment, but in its depositions filed with the court, the university denies Nelson's charges.
In the lawsuit, Nelson says that on Sept. 4, 1984, after Towson State played Sheppard College in a night game, he had a sandwich in the parking lot with the family of a teammate. He says he went back to his dorm room, where about 30 people were having a party. He said he had two beers.
At 1:30 a.m., Nelson says he went to an outside plaza area and saw the woman. He says she greeted him with a hug and asked him to stop by her room. Nelson says he did visit, and that the woman sat on the bed and laid back. He says they talked.
"Some mutual caressing began," is how Nelson's deposition reads, "and after a few minutes, (she) said (Nelson) had to go, and (Nelson) stood up and left immediately. (Nelson) denies that there was oral sex, and denies that (she) ever fell asleep."
The woman, however, filed a complaint in the district court of Maryland for Baltimore County, and a complaint with the university police. She accused Nelson with "engaging in a sexual act with her by force and against her will and without her consent . . . while she was asleep."
After the woman made her allegation, Nelson was charged with violating his residence contract and suspended for five years by the school. Nelson says that decision was "arbitrary and capricious." After a hearing - of which Nelson said he was given only three days' notice, and before which he was denied access to campus to talk to witnesses and prepare a defense - the five- year suspension was reaffirmed.
After examining the case, a grand jury declined to indict Nelson. That is when he filed his lawsuit against the university and the woman who made the allegation. The suit against the woman alleges a false accusation on her part. The suit against the university is the one that charges racism in the handling of the case.
Nelson alleges that in May of 1984, a Towson State student admitted to raping a fellow student in her room. "Towson State University took no action against the said student," is the claim made in Nelson's lawsuit.
The suit continues:
"(Nelson) is black; the male student who confessed to the rape of a female student on Towson State University's campus is white, and the only reason for the different application of university rules in the two cases is that the other student is white and (Nelson) is black."
According to the suit, Nelson "has suffered nervousness, sleeplessness, and loss of weight. He will continue to have his reputation diminished in the eyes of friends, associates, acquaintances, and others with whom he has associated or may learn about the charges, disciplinary proceedings and suspension. The conduct of the (woman), through (her) agents, will cause (Nelson) to lose opportunities for employment and loss of income . . .
"(Nelson) lost weight, felt sick, could not sleep many nights, felt tired constantly, could not eat, felt stomach pains and cramps, and had this matter constantly on his mind. The fact that false allegations were made, and the fact that the false allegations were republished in the news media will forever be on (Nelson's) mind."
The lawsuit is pending.
Blacks make up 11.7 percent of the population of the United States. According to the 1985 edition of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, blacks were reported for 46 percent of the nation's sexual assaults in 1984. It is the disparity in these numbers that makes some black leaders wary of the FBI reports.
"I don't think any report of statistics like that can be rationally valid," said Frank Chapman, executive director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Last year, Chapman led a group of black leaders who urged the Justice Department to drop vote fraud charges against three Alabama civil rights activists.
"Blacks would have to be criminal by nature for that to be true," Chapman said. "It would have to be in their genes. It seems to me that those figures reinforce racist notions."
There are others who argue that those figures are a fairly accurate representation of the facts. They argue that blacks are reported for so many of the crimes because blacks commit so many of the crimes.
It is not in the genes, these researchers say. It is in the economics. They argue that the crime rate of a given population is a function of its level of poverty. There are more poor blacks than whites. Therefore, blacks would show up in the crime statistics in disproportionate numbers nationwide.
But when it comes to black athletes, it also is in the history, according to Richard Lapchick, director of the Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sports. Lapchick is also the author of a book, "Broken Promises: Racism in American Sports."
"Traditionally," Lapchick said, "black athletes who have become involved with white women took tremendous heat, as did the women. Way back in time, the response of the woman was to bad-mouth the athlete. She didn't necessarily cry rape, but she would say things that let her off the hook when she felt the
pressure . . .
"Even where athletes were treated well on campus, seemingly accepted in classes and fraternities, there was still frequently a bottom line: Don't date white women. It went far enough that I was told . . . that at some schools that recruited black athletes, they also recruited black women to come to the schools, to be the sex partners of the black athletes."
Lapchick would not comment directly on the Daily News' finding that more than 90 percent of the alleged athlete assailants identified in the study were black. But he did say that he does "suspect" the number is somehow tied to this history he has written about.
Then, there is another group of researchers whose studies have demonstrated the racist tendencies of the criminal justice system in this country.
One investigation centered on men executed for rape in seven Southern states between 1945 and 1965. The researchers found that nearly seven times as many blacks were executed as whites. The study also found:
"If the defendant is black and the victim is white, the defendant is about 18 times more likely to receive the death penalty than when the defendant is in any other racial combination of defendant and victim . . . Far from being freakish or capricious, sentences of death have been imposed on blacks, compared to whites, in a way that exceeds any statistical notion of chance or fortuity."
Another study, called the Philadelphia Rape Victim Project, involved research conducted in the 1970s of rape victims taken to Philadelphia General Hospital. It found:
"There are also variations in police response that seem to reflect racial bias. If the victim is black and the offender is white, there appears to be less concern than if the combination is reversed. However, if the white victim is known to socialize with blacks, the police may be slow to respond to the victim's allegation of rape."
This finding is consistent with a 1969 report from the United States National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which said that police might arrest blacks in disproportionate numbers on suspicion, and that this might lead to a higher reported black involvement in crime than is actually the case.
If all of this is true for the United States as a whole, Chapman and others agree with the hypothesis that the same racial bias might be magnified in a population with a greater percentage of blacks - such as college athletes.
According to Ursula Walsh, director of research for the NCAA, a study was done in 1982 of male football and basketball players enrolled in Division I schools who were receiving either full or partial athletic scholarships. Divided by race, they were 55 percent white, 40 percent black, 5 percent others.
So, 40 percent of the players are black, but more than 90 percent of the football and basketball players that the Daily News was able to identify as being reported for sexual assualt in the last three years are black. Again, many see this as predictable, considering the black reporting rate in the country as a whole.
"Something a black athlete does is more likely to be reported to the police," said the Rev. Ben Chavis, executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice. Chavis was one of the "Wilmington 10," a group convicted in 1972 of allegedly firebombing a grocery store in Wilmington, N.C. Chavis spent seven years in jail before the convictions were overturned. During his incarceration, the human rights group Amnesty International listed him as a political prisoner.
"Something a white athlete does is more likely to be overlooked," Chavis said.
Are there any underlying factors that might affect a black athlete more than a white athlete? Here is one opinion:
"There may be a problem in terms of the pressures black athletes have to face and them taking out their anxieties in other ways," Chavis said.
"You have to examine those pressures. The rules have been changed. There are pressures to do better academically. Somebody has to look at the pressures on a black athlete. A white athlete has other options after school, but a black doesn't. It's pro sports or that's it."
Several college sports administrators contacted by the Daily News would not comment on the findings of the investigation - especially about the finding that more than 90 percent of the athletes reported in sexual assault cases were black. A typical reaction came from Andy Geiger, the former Penn athletic director who now works at Stanford in the same capacity.
"I don't know how to react," Geiger said. "I just don't know. I'm not a psychologist or a sociologist. I'm just not able to comment meaningfully."
One man who had something to say was Jimmy Williams, the basketball coach at Minnesota who took over in January after Jim Dutcher resigned in the wake of the arrests of three Minnesota players on rape charges.
"Athletes probably need counseling or some kind of workshops to make them more conscious of the rights of women," Williams said. "Young people sometimes assume things about women they should not assume.
"There's pressure on all athletes, regardless of their color. (But) there are still a lot of pockets of prejudice against a lot of black athletes. These things sometimes give people motivation to go after black athletes.
"I do know it's a very, very good time for workshops," Williams said.
Harris is in Colorado's Canyon City prison now, refusing all interview requests. His case is on appeal. But his cry - that racism has become entangled in the administration of justice, that black athletes charged with sexual assault get treated differently than whites - is a familiar one.
In a three-month investigation, the Daily News uncovered 61 incidents of athletes being reported for sexual assault. In 30 of the cases involving NCAA football and basketball players, the race of the athlete was able to be determined. Twenty-eight of the 30 were black. The black athletes made up 40 percent of the group studied, but they were reported for more than 90 percent of the sexual assaults.
In addition, the Daily News found:
* Atonio Harris's accusation of racism was one of several encountered during the investigation. It comes up almost every time a jury is selected. It is the basis of a $4 million lawsuit filed against a university by a football player charged in a sexual assault. Pretrial statements about alleged racism in violation of a gag order helped get one athlete's attorney cited for contempt of court.
* There is a body of statistics that indicates blacks in this country are reported for a disproportionate number of rapes. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, blacks make up 11.7 percent of the population but are reported for 46 percent of the rapes.
Some experts say the statistics are self-explanatory - that blacks commit more of the crimes. Others suggest that racist influences on the criminal justice system account for blacks being reported more frequently. Either of those explanations also might apply to college athletes.
It is possible that black athletes actually commit an unusually high percentage of the sexual assaults. One black leader suggests that this might be true because black athletes are faced with pressures that white athletes do not encounter.
It also is possible, as some black leaders suggest, that the high reporting rate for black athletes is misleading. They say it is logical to conclude that the prejudices of the criminal justice system could account for a 90 percent reporting rate in a group with a relatively high black population, such as athletes.
* The issues of race and rape are so new to college athletics administrators that many contacted by the Daily News refused to comment. One who did comment was Jim Satalin, the Duquesne University coach, who had four black players charged with rape in 1984. Three of the players were tried and acquitted, and the charges were dropped against the fourth player. The university subsequently expelled two of the players. The other two played in the second half of this season for the Dukes.
"I've had letters, terribly obscene phone calls, death threats," Satalin said. "I've had people call me 'nigger-lover' and other things like that. That says more to me than the charges that were brought against our players. There's a tremendous, tremendous amount of racist people in the United States.
"That scares me more than the issue (of rape) itself," Satalin said.
*
Experts do not know exactly how race is factored into the equation. Nevertheless, it continues to be mentioned:
* It happened in the case involving five black West Virginia athletes who testified before a grand jury investigating the alleged rape of a white student. The grand jury declined to indict the players, but the National Organization for Women (NOW) has called for an investigation of the case by the state legislature.
Barbara Fleischauer, the executive vice president of West Virginia NOW, said there was considerable racial tension on campus after the incident. She said the white students made racist statements in answer to reporters' questions, and that black men felt that whites were looking at them and wondering if the blacks were the rapists.
"As I have talked to people about these issues and tried to gain more understanding, I've realized that the publicity surrounding this incident merely had the effect of putting additional coals on a (racist) fire that was already burning," Fleischauer wrote in an article in the Daily Athenaeum, the school's student newspaper.
* It happened in the case of Mitch Lee, the Minnesota basketball player who was tried and acquitted of criminal sexual conduct this year. Ten days later, Lee and two of his teammates were charged in a different rape case. Their trial is pending.
But in Lee's first trial, during the selection of the jury, defense attorney Philip Resnick repeatedly asked the prospective jurors if they could deal fairly with a case involving Lee, who is black, and the alleged victim, who is white. In fact, he asked that question of every prospective juror. This, by the way, is a typical practice and not limited to cases involving athletes.
The jury selected was all-white. After the trial, Resnick said that if his client had lost, at least two elements of his appeal would have dealt with the question of race. First, there was the failure of the court to disqualify a prospective juror who said that he had no problem with blacks, "as long as all my grandchildren have blue eyes."
This man, a retired policeman, did not sit on the jury because Resnick used one of his preemptory challenges to remove him. Resnick referred to him afterward as "racist."
Resnick also said that "dismissing the only black (prospective) juror was a good grounds for an appeal."
* It happened in the case of Percy Moorman, a quarterback from North Carolina State University who was convicted of rape last year. His case is on appeal.
In his opening statement to the jury, Jerry Paul, Moorman's attorney, confronted the all-white jury with this:
"We will show that some of her (the alleged victim) friends talked about blacks and talked about the fact that Percy is black and showed her and told her that they disapproved of her association, or being associated with a black; which is another motivation for crying rape, an age-old explanation for it."
One basis upon which Moorman is appealing is that Paul had not fulfilled his legal responsibility to provide Moorman with a competent defense. His new attorney, Roger W. Smith, attempted at a hearing last July to demonstrate Paul's incompetence in several ways.
For example, Smith said, although Paul had made an issue of blacks being excluded from the jury, he never put that issue into the record, precluding it
from being considered in an appeal.
"Nowhere does it say that the jury was white," Smith said.
At the same hearing, another lawyer who briefly represented Moorman, L. Michael Dodd, testified that he (Dodd) was dismissed by Moorman and replaced by Paul because of Dodd's refusal to make race an issue in the trial.
"Percy told me he thought the case had some racial element in it and that I wasn't doing anything about that and that Jerry Paul would," Dodd testified.
Moorman testified that he never told Paul that the charges against him were racially motivated. Nevertheless, it is clear that Paul held that belief. In an interview before the trial in Moorman's hometown newspaper, the Danville (Va.) Register, Paul is quoted as saying:
"Percy Moorman is facing a charge that has historically been used against black men to intimidate them, to keep the white power structure going, and to maintain the system the way it is."
Partly because of that interview - granted in violation of a pretrial gag order - Paul was convicted of contempt of court.
* And the issue of race cropped up in the matter of a rape allegation against a football player that led to a $4 million lawsuit being filed against Towson State University.
The player is Sheldon Nelson; Towson State is in suburban Baltimore. Nelson's attorney, H. Patrick Stringer, refused to comment on the case and refused to make his client available for an interview. Through a spokesman, the university also declined to comment, but in its depositions filed with the court, the university denies Nelson's charges.
In the lawsuit, Nelson says that on Sept. 4, 1984, after Towson State played Sheppard College in a night game, he had a sandwich in the parking lot with the family of a teammate. He says he went back to his dorm room, where about 30 people were having a party. He said he had two beers.
At 1:30 a.m., Nelson says he went to an outside plaza area and saw the woman. He says she greeted him with a hug and asked him to stop by her room. Nelson says he did visit, and that the woman sat on the bed and laid back. He says they talked.
"Some mutual caressing began," is how Nelson's deposition reads, "and after a few minutes, (she) said (Nelson) had to go, and (Nelson) stood up and left immediately. (Nelson) denies that there was oral sex, and denies that (she) ever fell asleep."
The woman, however, filed a complaint in the district court of Maryland for Baltimore County, and a complaint with the university police. She accused Nelson with "engaging in a sexual act with her by force and against her will and without her consent . . . while she was asleep."
After the woman made her allegation, Nelson was charged with violating his residence contract and suspended for five years by the school. Nelson says that decision was "arbitrary and capricious." After a hearing - of which Nelson said he was given only three days' notice, and before which he was denied access to campus to talk to witnesses and prepare a defense - the five- year suspension was reaffirmed.
After examining the case, a grand jury declined to indict Nelson. That is when he filed his lawsuit against the university and the woman who made the allegation. The suit against the woman alleges a false accusation on her part. The suit against the university is the one that charges racism in the handling of the case.
Nelson alleges that in May of 1984, a Towson State student admitted to raping a fellow student in her room. "Towson State University took no action against the said student," is the claim made in Nelson's lawsuit.
The suit continues:
"(Nelson) is black; the male student who confessed to the rape of a female student on Towson State University's campus is white, and the only reason for the different application of university rules in the two cases is that the other student is white and (Nelson) is black."
According to the suit, Nelson "has suffered nervousness, sleeplessness, and loss of weight. He will continue to have his reputation diminished in the eyes of friends, associates, acquaintances, and others with whom he has associated or may learn about the charges, disciplinary proceedings and suspension. The conduct of the (woman), through (her) agents, will cause (Nelson) to lose opportunities for employment and loss of income . . .
"(Nelson) lost weight, felt sick, could not sleep many nights, felt tired constantly, could not eat, felt stomach pains and cramps, and had this matter constantly on his mind. The fact that false allegations were made, and the fact that the false allegations were republished in the news media will forever be on (Nelson's) mind."
The lawsuit is pending.
Blacks make up 11.7 percent of the population of the United States. According to the 1985 edition of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, blacks were reported for 46 percent of the nation's sexual assaults in 1984. It is the disparity in these numbers that makes some black leaders wary of the FBI reports.
"I don't think any report of statistics like that can be rationally valid," said Frank Chapman, executive director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Last year, Chapman led a group of black leaders who urged the Justice Department to drop vote fraud charges against three Alabama civil rights activists.
"Blacks would have to be criminal by nature for that to be true," Chapman said. "It would have to be in their genes. It seems to me that those figures reinforce racist notions."
There are others who argue that those figures are a fairly accurate representation of the facts. They argue that blacks are reported for so many of the crimes because blacks commit so many of the crimes.
It is not in the genes, these researchers say. It is in the economics. They argue that the crime rate of a given population is a function of its level of poverty. There are more poor blacks than whites. Therefore, blacks would show up in the crime statistics in disproportionate numbers nationwide.
But when it comes to black athletes, it also is in the history, according to Richard Lapchick, director of the Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sports. Lapchick is also the author of a book, "Broken Promises: Racism in American Sports."
"Traditionally," Lapchick said, "black athletes who have become involved with white women took tremendous heat, as did the women. Way back in time, the response of the woman was to bad-mouth the athlete. She didn't necessarily cry rape, but she would say things that let her off the hook when she felt the
pressure . . .
"Even where athletes were treated well on campus, seemingly accepted in classes and fraternities, there was still frequently a bottom line: Don't date white women. It went far enough that I was told . . . that at some schools that recruited black athletes, they also recruited black women to come to the schools, to be the sex partners of the black athletes."
Lapchick would not comment directly on the Daily News' finding that more than 90 percent of the alleged athlete assailants identified in the study were black. But he did say that he does "suspect" the number is somehow tied to this history he has written about.
Then, there is another group of researchers whose studies have demonstrated the racist tendencies of the criminal justice system in this country.
One investigation centered on men executed for rape in seven Southern states between 1945 and 1965. The researchers found that nearly seven times as many blacks were executed as whites. The study also found:
"If the defendant is black and the victim is white, the defendant is about 18 times more likely to receive the death penalty than when the defendant is in any other racial combination of defendant and victim . . . Far from being freakish or capricious, sentences of death have been imposed on blacks, compared to whites, in a way that exceeds any statistical notion of chance or fortuity."
Another study, called the Philadelphia Rape Victim Project, involved research conducted in the 1970s of rape victims taken to Philadelphia General Hospital. It found:
"There are also variations in police response that seem to reflect racial bias. If the victim is black and the offender is white, there appears to be less concern than if the combination is reversed. However, if the white victim is known to socialize with blacks, the police may be slow to respond to the victim's allegation of rape."
This finding is consistent with a 1969 report from the United States National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which said that police might arrest blacks in disproportionate numbers on suspicion, and that this might lead to a higher reported black involvement in crime than is actually the case.
If all of this is true for the United States as a whole, Chapman and others agree with the hypothesis that the same racial bias might be magnified in a population with a greater percentage of blacks - such as college athletes.
According to Ursula Walsh, director of research for the NCAA, a study was done in 1982 of male football and basketball players enrolled in Division I schools who were receiving either full or partial athletic scholarships. Divided by race, they were 55 percent white, 40 percent black, 5 percent others.
So, 40 percent of the players are black, but more than 90 percent of the football and basketball players that the Daily News was able to identify as being reported for sexual assualt in the last three years are black. Again, many see this as predictable, considering the black reporting rate in the country as a whole.
"Something a black athlete does is more likely to be reported to the police," said the Rev. Ben Chavis, executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice. Chavis was one of the "Wilmington 10," a group convicted in 1972 of allegedly firebombing a grocery store in Wilmington, N.C. Chavis spent seven years in jail before the convictions were overturned. During his incarceration, the human rights group Amnesty International listed him as a political prisoner.
"Something a white athlete does is more likely to be overlooked," Chavis said.
Are there any underlying factors that might affect a black athlete more than a white athlete? Here is one opinion:
"There may be a problem in terms of the pressures black athletes have to face and them taking out their anxieties in other ways," Chavis said.
"You have to examine those pressures. The rules have been changed. There are pressures to do better academically. Somebody has to look at the pressures on a black athlete. A white athlete has other options after school, but a black doesn't. It's pro sports or that's it."
Several college sports administrators contacted by the Daily News would not comment on the findings of the investigation - especially about the finding that more than 90 percent of the athletes reported in sexual assault cases were black. A typical reaction came from Andy Geiger, the former Penn athletic director who now works at Stanford in the same capacity.
"I don't know how to react," Geiger said. "I just don't know. I'm not a psychologist or a sociologist. I'm just not able to comment meaningfully."
One man who had something to say was Jimmy Williams, the basketball coach at Minnesota who took over in January after Jim Dutcher resigned in the wake of the arrests of three Minnesota players on rape charges.
"Athletes probably need counseling or some kind of workshops to make them more conscious of the rights of women," Williams said. "Young people sometimes assume things about women they should not assume.
"There's pressure on all athletes, regardless of their color. (But) there are still a lot of pockets of prejudice against a lot of black athletes. These things sometimes give people motivation to go after black athletes.
"I do know it's a very, very good time for workshops," Williams said.
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