I am truly embarrassed that the feelings of few have been disseminated so widely and have negatively affected the public. The values of fair appraisal, truth seeking and discourse with controlled emotion have been discarded and replaced with the irresponsible use and oversight of the school newspaper, and the unethical misuse of influence by many involved in school-funded organizations.
At no time in the past few years did I assume or defend the truth of what happened between Mr. Patterson and the alleged victim. He was my friend, my roommate and a member of my singing group-yet, not even I had the right to judge. Regardless of our beliefs, the freedom we are granted to express them is not a mandate to say whatever we feel.
This is a situation where a woman has gone through a great ordeal, and I can respectfully say that I do empathize. What many have not taken a second to consider is that being hurt or angered by a situation does not automatically mean there is culpability to be proven. Emotions are dangerous because they often circumvent facts, and cause one to seek any available way-reasonable or not-to make the pain or fear subside. Both Mr. Patterson and the alleged victim have responsibilities for what happened that night and demonstrated certain lacks in judgment that will follow them through time. Members of the public allowed their biased judgment to be swept up primarily by the physical evidence of this case, and allowed it to overshadow the legality. They then confused the purpose of the law with the purpose of bureaucracy.
Rather than rely on the "grapevine" as my reliable source, I went to listen in court for myself. I would much rather have sat down the middle to represent my view of the law; however, the courtroom only allows seating on one side or the other. I was a bit nervous like anyone should have been. This was a criminal trial, and the feelings of a few selected jurors could send a student to prison for years. As Dean Lieber pointed out (as quoted in Mr. Nguyen's Nov. 8 article "T. Patterson Found Innocent of Rape" in The Amherst Student), we would expect a case that had made it this far to be very strong. I would agree. However, up until that point, the state-not the alleged victim-controlled the case; Mr. Patterson was never in a position to speak freely, and the basis for the pre-trial was to determine whether there was a possibility Mr. Patterson was culpable, not whether he was indeed culpable.
Mr. Nguyen's article and Ms Weiss' Letter to the Editor in The Amherst Student maintain very dangerous tones with implications that the court system is flawed. The Weiss article in a libelous remark suggests that Mr. Patterson's "compelling performance" abilities assisted him while testifying in the court room. Its comment regarding the jury not having "adequate background" is in complete contradiction to the principles of American law whereby citizens of varied backgrounds are selected by both sides to handle cases of all complexities. Nguyen's article, classified as "News" rather than "Opinion," uses personal statements from our Dean of Students and Peer Advocate Advisor to support its underlying theme, but juxtaposes that with a personally selected court transcript of an attorney that inadequately represents Mr. Patterson's defense. In my supported opinion, it was not a crafty defense, or Mr. Patterson's sworn testimony, that created doubt and in less than half a day of deliberation led to a unanimous 12-0 "Not Guilty" verdict.
What the defense did do was expose inconsistent areas of a carefully structured story. The jury and everyone else seeking the truth wanted to hear from the alleged victim (and the prosecution) whether Mr. Patterson was guilty of a criminal act. What we heard instead was a compelling story of a woman who was ashamed of what happened, a woman who had to deal with a painful and embarrassing visit to the hospital, a woman who did not want to tell her parents about a medical bill as they would also find out about her private personal life and a woman who was angry at the male involved because he did not take responsibility for her suffering when they first spoke again. In fairness, he had assisted her for a short time that night after the act at her request; he had not been informed that she had been to the hospital prior to their conversation, and he was in a car with his father at the time of the call. Through cross-examination and the testimony of the parties involved, the defense challeneged several key points in the prosecution's version of events: the abridged timeline of the exchange in question that attempted to remove any accountability on the part of the alleged victim; facts about her relationship with him and her image that only supported a claim of innocence and non-consent; and characterizations of Mr. Patterson that only supported the stereotype of a drunk, insensitive jock.
The theme of this case to me was the oft-repeated quote, "I never wanted this to go this far." The Amherst public has tried its own case without first tapping the facts or neutrally hearing from the alleged victim herself what she holds Mr. Patterson responsible for. To support the labeling a student as a predator, to scream "rapist" out of a window and to spin the opening of an unlocked door in an Amherst dorm room into "breaking and entering" devalues the integrity of the legal process and the trauma other female and male victims suffer. Rape is a criminal allegation, and the Amherst public needs to truly consider what punishments they are advocating for. Dean Lieber's comments were continuously used out of context in previous articles by Weiss and Nguyen to support an agenda.
My other roommate (a former Peer Advocate) and I have been personally involved in situations where the school judges on a case in a bureaucratic fashion rather than in a legal one. Often, it is in the legal and social interest of the school to have the accused removed from campus or punished in some other way. No individual is greater than the image and community of Amherst and the accused is not always in a position of legal best interest to publicly defend themselves. Educational institutions, to an even greater degree than civil courts, are influenced by pain and suffering, and are interested in preserving the greater good. We should be grateful that we have higher courts to determine what is legally right and what is legally wrong, rather than what is in an institution's bureaucratic interest.
It is very painful for me to see kids and their parents, families and friends have to go through a situation like this. It's not wrong to be angry at someone; however I think it is self-interested, and irresponsible, to allow that emotion to publicly subject the alleged victim and the accused to unnecessary harm. People seem to think Mr. Patterson "got off easy" compared to the other party. To those people, I would only ask: how many of you have waited two years to see if your life would be taken away from you via imprisonment? How many have had to take on being a defendant in a state's case where the financial burden is yours? How many of you have had to watch your friends go back to your first Homecoming while you ponder all of the misinformed who deserted you in the face of adversity? I would never wish on anyone what the alleged victim had to endure. I would never wish this public trial on Mr. Patterson on anyone else either. The lesson I have learned is that we are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. The true colors of a great institution like Amherst College are no brighter than those of its students.
Todd graduated in 2004 with a law, jurisprudence and social thought and psychology double-major.
Editor's Note: While Mr. McDonald has levied accusations of prejudice, we at The Student must insist upon the integrity of our reporting. In no way did our coverage of Patterson's case seek to editorialize the facts, and we made every reasonable effort to print a story which was honest and even-handed. McDonald rightly asserts that popular opinion often favors a presumption of guilt in regard to accused rapists; however, his analysis falls well short of establishing such a bias in The Student. One wonders about McDonald's claim that Dean Lieber's statements were taken out of context, for example, since McDonald clearly was not at the interview.
As for Ms. Weiss' letter on behalf of the Peer Advocates, it should be clear that the Opinion section of The Student represents an open forum and that we published Weiss' letter on the belief that her interpretation, if not necessarily correct, was legitimate. McDonald seems to misinterpret this letter as well: Weiss' suggestion that the jury "did not have adequate background," for instance, clearly does not refer to jury members' personal histories, but to the extent to which they may have been deprived information relevant to the case.