Supposed it was announced in a newspaper article that a bar on First Street in Richmond, Virginia, had been a center for the sale of cocaine in 2012, so the mayor of Richmond and the city council ordered all bars in the city closed. A closer examination of the various bars revealed that half of them had not yet opened at the time of the supposed cocaine sales, but those bars were also included in the shutdown order. When some other news organization investigated the original story, they discovered that it was erroneous, and the paper that published the original story retracted it and apologized for its mistakes. In response to this retraction, the mayor then announced that there were bad things that happened at bars anyway, so he was keeping the order to shut the bars in place.
This story or punishment of a whole group for a non-existent act may seem ridiculous. After all, how could a mayor close down someone's business for something that someone else supposedly did? But it's not ridiculous. In fact, with some slight changes, this is actually what the president of the University of Virginia did to all the fraternities and sororities on campus when Rolling Stone published a now-discredited article claiming that there had been a gang rape at one fraternity over two years ago. There were no hearings. There was no chance for any of the fraternities or sororities to show that they had nothing to do with the event. There was no consideration given to the fact that half of the undergraduate fraternity/sorority members were not even students at the university at the time of the supposed rape. All that happened is that the president of the university indulged her preconceived liberal notions and punished every single one of the members of the Greek system at U Va.
The truth is that this is a violation of the civil rights of the university students affected. When the president of a public university like U VA takes action, she is acting under color of state law as defined in 19 USC 1983. That statute provides in its pertinent part:
Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress,
What this means is that the president of the university, acting under color of law, improperly deprived the students of their right of association guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as their right to due process of law. In other words, each one of these students has a claim for damages against the university president and against U VA as well.
I hope that there are students who bring this claim as a class action against the president of the university. She has gone off the deep end in her response to a magazine story.
This story or punishment of a whole group for a non-existent act may seem ridiculous. After all, how could a mayor close down someone's business for something that someone else supposedly did? But it's not ridiculous. In fact, with some slight changes, this is actually what the president of the University of Virginia did to all the fraternities and sororities on campus when Rolling Stone published a now-discredited article claiming that there had been a gang rape at one fraternity over two years ago. There were no hearings. There was no chance for any of the fraternities or sororities to show that they had nothing to do with the event. There was no consideration given to the fact that half of the undergraduate fraternity/sorority members were not even students at the university at the time of the supposed rape. All that happened is that the president of the university indulged her preconceived liberal notions and punished every single one of the members of the Greek system at U Va.
The truth is that this is a violation of the civil rights of the university students affected. When the president of a public university like U VA takes action, she is acting under color of state law as defined in 19 USC 1983. That statute provides in its pertinent part:
Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress,
What this means is that the president of the university, acting under color of law, improperly deprived the students of their right of association guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as their right to due process of law. In other words, each one of these students has a claim for damages against the university president and against U VA as well.
I hope that there are students who bring this claim as a class action against the president of the university. She has gone off the deep end in her response to a magazine story.
No comments:
Post a Comment