Megyn Kelly Is Right about Due Process

The Hill tweets about Megyn Kelly’s defense of due process:

In and of itself, this tweet is hardly newsworthy. There is probably no more willfully dishonest repository of news headlines in all of the United States than the one found on The Hill‘s Twitter feed — and, as a general rule, it should be assiduously ignored. But as an example of the way in which this issue is now covered, it is nigh on perfect.

Note the phrasing of the headline’s charge: That Kelly believes the “Obama admin went ‘too far’ on protecting college sexual assault victims.” Does she? Or does she believe that the Obama administration went “too far” in fostering a legal framework within which those who make accusations are reflexively believed, and that this has profound implications for the rights of innocent people?

Here’s what Kelly said:

I’ve been covering this closely for years, for years. And I understand the argument on the one side that we were in a position, back when I went to school, back in my day, when the pendulum was completely against the woman, right?

And so there was a problem that needed solving. But I would submit that the Obama administration overcorrected the problem and swung the pendulum too far back against the accused, completely eroding their due process rights.

To get to The Hill‘s characterization of Kelly’s remarks, one has flatly to assume that all accusations of sexual assault are ipso facto accurate, and, moreover, to contend that there is no potential downside to our casually making that assumption. But that, of course, is untrue. The prospect of an assault victim being disbelieved is, naturally, an appalling one. But so too is the prospect of an innocent person being railroaded. It is for precisely this reason that we demand robust due-process protections, and some degree of neutral arbitration. And it is against the lack of those things that Kelly — an assault victim herself — is inveighing.

A few hours after Kelly’s comments, Nancy Pelosi characterized Betsy DeVos’s reform efforts like this:

Pelosi’s critique — which is part of a longer release — amounts to nothing more than an exercise in begging the question. She charges that DeVos’s rules will “undermine Title IX protections for survivors of campus sexual assault,” “create extraordinary new barriers to justice for survivors,” and amount in total to an “anti-student, anti-women and anti-equality agenda” — a fascinating way to describe an effort to improve due process protections in order to better determine whether those serious allegations are in fact true.

For some reason, the topic of sexual assault drives many self-described “liberals” into sounding like the most unthinking law-and-order reactionaries of the 1970s and 1980s. Before the dramatic drop in crime began slowly to change our attitudes, it was not uncommon to hear politicians lambast the ACLU for its alleged role in “letting criminals walk free.” The assumption behind this charge was that if a person was on trial for a crime then, well, he must have done it. Or, put another way, that even before the legal proceedings had begun, accusers could reasonably be labeled as “victims,” and the accused could be reasonably labeled as “criminals.” In general, that approach is less common than it once was. When it comes to sexual assault, however, it is rife. All credit to Megyn Kelly for pushing back against the trend.