In addition, many members of the Ad Board did not possess the training necessary to deal with the complexities of sexual assault cases.

OSAPR Director Sarah A. Rankin says that many Ad Board officers are “uncomfortable” with sexual assault cases, which can negatively impact students’ willingness to share their experiences.

When the Leaning Committee’s report came out in 2003, it offered a solution: an increased reliance on independent fact-finders. Since then, fact-finders—often attorneys who are hired on a case-by-case basis—have routinely been brought in to deal with much of the evidence gathering in Ad Board cases.

As the Ad Board does not perform or require rape kits or forensic investigation of any kind, the board relies heavily on witness testimony—making the fact-finder particularly important to the process. While there are rarely eyewitnesses in sexual assault cases, the fact-finder will interview students recommended by either the accused or the accuser to gain information, according to Ellison.

Though they were not necessarily present for the alleged incident, witnesses may provide valuable circumstantial information, such as the level of intoxication of the victim or the interactions of the complainant and defendant prior to the event, Rankin says.

And “fresh complaint” witnesses—often close friends of the victims who the victim confides in soon after the incident—can verify the consistency of the victim’s account and provide evidence of the victim’s emotional state shortly after the alleged assault, according to Perry Moriearty, who served as a fact-finder for the Ad Board on multiple occasions before becoming a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

The fact-finder also works to find inconsistencies in students’ accounts.

“If there are two students that are completely in disagreement about what happened, it comes down to credibility,” Ellison says. “If the details vary significantly [with each retelling], the fact-finder judges that for us,” Ellison says.

Adams House Resident Dean Sharon L. Howell says she thinks that fact-finders have been a “huge” help to the Ad Board process.

“Because they are professional lawyers, they have a professional sense of what ought to be pursued and what doesn’t necessarily apply to the case,” Howell says. “It’s their dedicated job to organize and follow through with what can be very, very complicated webs of witnesses.”

By the end of the process, the fact-finder has typically interviewed many students—up to 45 in one extreme case, according to Ellison—and written an extensive case report summarizing the information obtained from the witness testimonies and other research.

From start to finish, Moriearty says that the investigation can take fact-finders up to 200 hours.

DEFINING CONSENT

Over the past two decades, criticism of the Ad Board’s handling of sexual assault cases has been divided into two camps: one believes that the Ad Board and the Faculty rules set an unreasonably high bar for finding a student guilty of rape, while the other believes that the board does not treat accused students fairly.

The Faculty’s definition of sexual misconduct, as laid out in the undergraduate student handbook, mandates that sexual assault must “take place against a person’s will or [be] accompanied by physical force or the threat of bodily injury.”