SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Outraged by news that an attorney who represented Stanford University students in sexual assault complaints was let go after criticizing the school's process of adjudicating such cases, a student group has launched an online petition demanding that university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne immediately reinstate the lawyer.
"Stanford University should not take actions to silence lawyers, both affiliated and not affiliated with the university," reads the change.org petition.
"Doing so creates a silencing effect on any opinion criticizing university policy. ... We demand that Provost Persis Drell and President Marc Tessier Lavigne immediately reinstate (Crystal) Riggins as an approved attorney and continue to recommend her to victims of sexual assault," said the petition, which had already gathered 330 signatures by 10 a.m. PST Monday.
"Retaliation has no place at Stanford University," the petition said. "We expect better."
The letter is signed, "in solidarity," by the Stanford Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention. Copies were expected to be delivered to the offices of Tessier-Lavigne, Drell, Vice Provost for Institutional Equity & Access Lauren Schoenthaler and five others.
The petition stems from comments San Jose attorney Crystal Riggins made to The New York Times in a Dec. 29 story about how Stanford handles sexual assault cases.
Riggins was among six attorneys involved in the pilot project Stanford launched last February to provide legal advice to students involved in these cases; Stanford pays the legal fees.
The Hoge Fenton Jones & Appel attorney disagrees with the school's system that requires a three-member panel to unanimously decide whether a student committed sexual assault.
"The process is complex and takes a long time," Riggins told The Times. "It is very difficult to get a 3-0 decision from a panel, and these young women are terrified and traumatized and just want it to be done."
Schoenthaler, the Stanford administrator who oversees reviews of sexual assault complaints, emailed Riggins on Jan. 31 to say that as of Feb. 1, she would no longer be a "Stanford-sponsored Title IX attorney" because her comments to the paper criticized the university's process.
Title IX is a 1972 amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that mandates equal access to education regardless of gender. It also authorizes universities to carry out investigations of alleged sex crimes on campus, as well as complaints about sexual discrimination of any kind.
Stanford University spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said the Riggins case is "not a free speech issue" and "not a retaliation issue."
"It's a matter of fairness in the process for our students," Lapin said. "If you have an attorney participating in a process they do not believe in, and they are participating in a process where they may not fairly represent a student, then we cannot in good conscience refer students to them."
Under Stanford's new process, a panel of three _ drawn from faculty and administrators _ must decide unanimously whether an assault took place _ and, if so, whether the offender should be suspended or expelled from school.
The panel, according to the New York Times story, appears to be an "outlier" among its peers that use such panels and are listed among U.S. News & World Report's top 20 American colleges. The only other school with such a requirement is Duke University.
Critics such as Riggins believe that the high threshold tends to give accused students an advantage and ultimately creates an unsafe campus environment for accusers.
