U.S. Rep. Jared Polis is taking heat from his Boulder constituency regarding the outrageous comments we told you about last week — that anyone accused of rape on a college campus should be expelled without due process.
The Boulder Daily Camera called it “A spectacularly bad idea” from Polis, whose district includes the University of Colorado at Boulder and Colorado State University, and criticized the liberal Democrat’s lack of reasoning.
Polis conjured up several ideas we would characterize as spectacularly bad, which created a lightening rod for criticism from the national media. Chief among them was this jaw-dropping statement:
“If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people,” Polis said during a congressional hearing. “We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud.”
The Daily Camera called Polis’ remarks dumfounding, including his solution of merely expelling those who commit such a crime.
Such a policy would be such an astonishing abrogation of due process that it’s hard to know where to start in condemning it.
The Daily Camera argued that sexual assault charges should be handled by the cops, not campus administrators.
The answer is not to throw up our hands at the prospect of adjudication and delete all the messy steps between allegation and punishment. The answer is to preserve individual rights through due process, assign such cases to institutions trained to investigate and prosecute them, and punish those found guilty to the fullest extent of the law.
This is one of those rare occasions when we agree with the Daily Camera’s editorial board.
Polis’s imbecilic suggestion that students merely accused of a crime should be unfairly expelled, or even worse, a guilty rapist dispatched to another university to continue committing crimes, is repugnant and beneath the stature of a United States Congressman.