A star player accused, and a flawed rape investigation

Yet another university community has been accused of denying justice to a female sexual assault victim in order to protect a star male athlete. The New York Times today chronicled the shortcomings of an investigation by Tallahassee police into a reported sexual assault in which Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston was the alleged assailant.

Police failed to conduct a proper investigation when the incident was reported, the Times found. Even after the accuser identified her attacker to the police, Winston was never interviewed and DNA evidence was not collected. By the time prosecutors began to investigate 11 months later, the trail had gone cold.

The university also failed to conduct any investigation of its own into the incident, though there is evidence that the athletics department was aware that there was an open police investigation.

Read the story here.

A California state senator introduced legislation to limit sterilization surgeries in state prisons, jails and detention centers after the Center for Investigative Reporting found that 132 women received tubal ligations in violation of prison rules.

Prison medical staff had been coercing and targeting women “deemed likely to return to prison in the future,” CIR reported.

“If passed, the proposal would close several loopholes on inmate sterilizations and for the first time bring California law up to federal standards. Federal and state laws ban sterilizations if federal funds are used but allow for the use of state money to pay for the procedures. Prison rules have restricted tubal ligations since 1994, but no such limits were placed on surgeries that removed women’s uteruses and ovaries," CIR wrote.

Read more here.

A New York Times article states that in a debate that has focused largely on women, this fact is often overlooked: The majority of service members who are sexually assaulted each year are men.