A federal judge has recommended that James Madison University pay nearly $850,000 in damages to an anonymous student who says the school punished him for a rape he didn’t commit, using a secretive process that didn’t allow him to confront witnesses or present evidence.
The complainant, John Doe, won his lawsuit against James Madison just before Christmas, according to The College Fix, when another federal court judge found that the school had violated his Constitutional right to due process when they gave him a five and a half year suspension based on a bizarre “double jeopardy” clause contained in a 2011 Obama Administration directive to institutions of higher education.
The “Dear Colleague” letter instructed schools to suspend the guarantee against double jeopardy if further evidence presented itself after a student had been cleared of a sexual assault. In Doe’s case, he was accused of rape by a female classmate and exonerated by a faculty panel.