Promising younger athletes do tend to get more leeway than average kids for reasons this judge’s ruling partly explains: the reluctance to “ruin his future” is greater the brighter a future it is. What he doesn’t mention is the intense tribalism around college sports that extends long past graduation, quite often for lifetimes. Graduates who weren’t even in an athletic program will refer to themselves as “Buckeyes” or “Bulldogs.” With school pride comes alumni money, so anything that hurts the team’s reputation or chances of winning is to be avoided if at all possible.
One of my kids just witnessed something similar at her high school, except with the boys and girls track teams.
Schools don’t want the liability to reach back to them – and that’s one thing Title IX can do – so they need to keep the fact that there was a dangerous environment for female student athletes under wraps.
It’s putting it mildly considering how many get away with their crimes while in college, but you got to that.
My wife was a janitor at her school’s sports facility while at college. She does not have high opinions of her school’s handling of sexual assault by athletes.
I understand it as sports being a safe method of inter-group competition. Instead of fighting a war against your rival town or nation you challenge them to a contest of athletics with clearly defined rules and no stakes other than pride.
In that sense athletes are literally taking on the role of heroes fighting for their tribe against the enemy. Adulation is to be expected.
Makes me wonder how a judge can be removed after a clearly corrupted decision. The political system is touted as a system with checks and balances. However, cases like this clearly show that the checks are not working. How bad a decision should be before a judge is removed?
I find some parallels between this case and the case of some rich sheik whose defence was that he tripped and fell on the woman. Albeit, that was in UK. Still, nothing happened to the judge if I remember correctly.
It varies by state. IANAL. I don’t think being disbarred prevents one from serving as a judge, but being impeached definitely does. Being disbarred prevents one from practicing law in most states but I don’t know if being a judge counts as “practicing law.” Might well be one of those things where once you’re promoted up to management you can’t be in the workers’ union anymore. Cf. Roy Moore, who was removed from his post by the Alabama judicial authorities but nevertheless reelected some years later, and subsequently suspended again for countering federal authority wrt the legality of same-sex marriage. But that’s ＡＬＡＢＡＭＡ fer chrissakes, California has a different structure.
I hope an actual California attorney will chime in here. My sense is that impeaching a judge is extraordinarily difficult. You have to prove bribery or collusion or somesuch wrongdoing, not just vehemently disagree with a decision.
Wasn’t that the point of @knappa’s screenshot? Inside story: Rapist had history of creeping women out by making inappropriate comments about their bodies when they were in swimsuits. Front cover: Oh look! You can see Jen’s bump when she’s wearing a swimsuit! Look at the other pictures we took of her without her consent!
I’m a nerd cliché of girl that sucked at softball so I dislike most sports and feel you.
Our school system is different so there’s no cheerleaders or American football culture BUT our athletes are as venerated as any other. I loved swimming as a kid and liked the karate classes but hated the pressure of competition.
It’s about being an Idol. Being a champion is the nearest thing to being a demigod that mortals could achieve. Write their names into history. Honor their cities, their God, their school and their tribes through bettering themselves.
They become a representation of a group - it’s the country that gains the gold medal in the Olympics. So they must be protected to not tarnish the group they represent. When you become an Idol, people prefer to cut you slack than let the team suffer for lack of an element that contributes to victory.
As for competition, it is play-war. A way to direct aggressive impulses without killing anyone.
Competitive sports are inherently about competition. It’s right there in the adjective. Trying to excel at a physical activity is no less noble than trying to excel at chess. Don’t you get turnt doing what non-athletic thing what you do? Even something innocuous as, I dunno, crocheting is liable to simmer up some competitive fiya.
You can thrive on competition without the competition taking over or defining you. Even if it’s not other people you’re still swimming against your previous best times.
I don’t know why I’m saying this avuncular bullshit here in public. Hello, everyone else! I have dad jokes for ages! Let’s start a thread! calls a cab
When we spent a week on the Outer Banks, I got to do one of the things I love, which is solitary walking on the beach; I can hardly think of a more calming, less competitive activity. Then one evening after dinner, my brother-in-law from NC disappeared: his wife called him, turned to us, and said “He’s gone for a walk…”
The next morning, he was asking me:
“So, Marktech, you walked to the fishing pier yesterday?”
I had.
“Yeah, but didja get as far as the next fishing pier?”
Which is a good argument against the trend of allowing schools to self-police these kinds of criminal behaviors.
The idea seems to be that they will enforce conduct better, but waaaaaay too often the crooks in charge just sweep things under the rug and advise everyone to look the other way, while denying any sorts of FOIA requests.
In a better world than ours it might be the case that the judge just got conned(though ‘gullible enough to believe convicted felons’ is not an impressive qualification for a judge); but I can’t escape the suspicion that the judge was operating in a “Sexual predator? Bah, boys will be boys! It’s not a real rapist unless it’s Willy Horton.” mode.
I hope that the ‘behavior’ that Stanford allegedly pressured the women’s swim team members about didn’t reach this standard; but this seems like an appropriate thread for a very, very important PSA:
Thanks to the exciting quirks of US privacy law(such as it is) medical records produced by student health services can sometimes be FERPA records rather than HIPAA records. This changes(for some purposes drastically) the standards for accessing them. The most notable recent case was when the University of Oregon pulled a student’s mental health treatment records from when she sought counseling after being raped in the course of defending themselves against her lawsuit contending that they’d be negligent in their handling of the rapists.
And apparently what they did there was legal; because FERPA records allow that, since they are supposed to be about boring stuff like grades.
And you shouldn’t. The judge literally said he sounded like a good boy and didn’t want to affect the boy’s “potential”. Yep. Kids from “good families” like the judge when he was young aren’t the “young bucks” pictured in his mind.
