The Cornell Seven and the Revolution

W hen the horrific Cornell Seven story broke, I happened to be watching a series about the “Terror” phase of the French Revolution on The Rest Is History, the scintillating podcast of historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. The climactic events that lead to Maximilien Robespierre’s fall are ignited by a provision he himself forced through a skeptical National Convention: Law of 22 Prairial Year II (i.e., June 10, 1794, the haughty radicals having endeavored to reset time itself such that the calendar would trace it from the proclamation of the First Republic rather than the birth of Christ).

The purport of the new law was to save a revolution based on the “natural, imprescriptible, and inalienable” rights of man by . . . of course . . . repealing the rights most essential to man, the substantive and procedural trial protections of the accused.

For the radicals, then as ever, not enough enemies of their revolution were being convicted and executed under the established legal tradition that actually safeguarded liberté. So they gamed the system, broadly defining “enemies of the people” as those who slandered “patriotism,” spread news that was “false,” and “depraved” the “public morals” — as defined the regime, and constantly updated because totalitarianism comes at you fast.

As for due process, the provision did away with such inconveniences as defense counsel for the accused and the presentation of evidence. The outcome of the trial was left to the conscience of the jurors — themselves in fear of being deemed disloyal — rather than anything so passé as, you know, proof and legal standards.

The results were what you’d expect: Convictions surged, and in just the seven weeks between the new law’s enactment and its repeal, about 1,370 citizens were put to the guillotine — more than had been executed in the previous, extraordinarily bloody 14 months.

The radicals’ delirium notwithstanding, Year II was no different from the millennia of human history their new calendar undertook to erase. It is no different from today — or tomorrow, or ever. When the rule of law gives way to ideological passions and partisan score-settling, when prosecution is politicized, when the radicals replace justice with social justice, then we no longer have trials worthy of the name. We have passion plays for which the regime writes the script.

That’s what we have now in New York. Yet again.

I could do an exacting legal analysis of the Cornell Seven misadventure: The young woman, a sophomore at the storied Ivy League school, got herself plastered at a sorority party, then enthusiastically headed for a similarly boozy, drug-addled frat party where — at least initially — she willingly offered herself as a sex object to the young men who abased themselves by taking her up on it. We could detail how the woman exchanged exculpatory messages in the ensuing days, saying she’d enjoyed herself and observing that nothing illegal had happened — “I don’t think we should feel any shame. . . . Our body our choice.” But then, after learning the frat boys spoke disparagingly of her and disinvited her from their next Bacchanal — which she had hoped to attend — she suddenly decided she’d been raped.

But what would be the point?

If this were about the law, there’d be nothing to talk about because everything was done by the book. The men’s conduct was atrocious, but as the chorus of the last three decades reminds us, on everything from impeachable abuses of power to errors of split-second judgment that lead to outsize tragedy, not every wrong is a legal wrong, and not every legal wrong is a criminal wrong.

In a real legal justice system, as opposed to social justice theater, proceedings are about assigning culpability under both procedures that safeguard our rights and laws that must be well established before the alleged wrongdoing. The procedures and laws cannot be altered just because the regime decides that the suspects are enemies of the people and that the only comeuppance that will do is the stigma of criminal conviction. If the prosecutor assesses that a guilty verdict would be irrational because guilt — including criminal intent — cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, then ethical obligations oblige him not to file charges.

That doesn’t end the matter. In murky cases, the prosecutor also stays his hand because the civil justice system, in which proof demands are less daunting, is available. Jane Doe has now filed what seems to me a very weak lawsuit — and discovery is apt to make it weaker still — but the law entitles her to do that.

Meantime, since the legal justice system is not a functioning free society’s only recourse in instances of appalling private conduct, the affected institutions can take decisive action. Here, Cornell imposed a range of discipline, from expulsion to probationary measures, commensurate with the varying degrees of the “Seven’s” malfeasance. Even without criminal convictions, the stigma of the episode will haunt them for years to come as they try to launch careers — despite their Ivy League diplomas.

There should be no more to the story. But this is New York, where the radicals are on the march, so the nightmare is just beginning.

It’s often recalled that Letitia James campaigned for office in 2018 by promising that, if elected the Empire State’s attorney general, she would use the powers of her public trust to doggedly pursue the Democrats’ archnemesis, Donald Trump — a brazen pledge to politicized law enforcement that, in the not so distant past, would have been disqualifying.

What’s not so often recalled is that James won in a landslide. What she represents is what New Yorkers want. The state no longer has a legal system; it has radical politics masqueraded as law. If you do business or pleasure there, you do it at your peril.

Governor Kathy Hochul, a chameleon nonentity desperate to ingratiate herself with these New York voters, named James as the Cornell Seven special prosecutor. That was only after the attorney general had publicly prejudged the case, pronouncing that Jane Doe is the victim of sexual assault. Just like her Alice in Wonderland case against Trump: Verdict first, trial later. The James whom Hochul appointed, naturally, has been reelected since that 2019 landslide, winning progressive plaudits for hounding Trump and the National Rifle Association. Legally, the cases were risible — travesties of due process. But as the Cornell Seven are about to learn, when the regime decides the targets are “enemies of the people,” the hounding is the whole point.

Welcome to the revolution.