周三,在一场耶鲁大学学生强奸罪的审判中,陪审团经过仅三小时的审议就做出了被告无罪的裁断,他们的信息似乎很清楚:可能导致校园委员会做出惩罚的证据,不足以在法庭上证明有罪。

At the heart of the trial was the question of whether the complainant could have agreed to have sex with the defendant, Saifullah Khan, 25, on Halloween night in 2015, when the two found themselves in her dorm room after a night filled with alcohol, text messages and conflicting accounts of flirtatious behavior. The complainant was not named in the arrest warrant application.

审判的核心是,2015年万圣节之夜,原告是否可能同意与被告——25岁的赛义夫拉·汗(Saifullah Khan)发生性关系,那天晚上,两人喝了不少酒,互发短信,并发生了一系列轻佻行为(两人对此有互相矛盾的叙述),之后原告发现两人置身自己的宿舍。原告的名字没有出现在逮捕令申请之中。

Had the case gone before Yale’s own internal panel, the outcome might have been different. The panel, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, uses a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in determining responsibility, and its members are trained in a notion of consent where only “yes means yes.”

如果该案件在耶鲁的校内委员会做出决定之前完成审理,结果可能会有所不同。这个名为不当性行为全校委员会(University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct)的机构在确定责任时使用了一种“优势证据”标准,其成员所接受的训练认为,所谓的同意,就是“说是才是同意”。

But the jurors seemed to have come to the case with a different understanding of what it means to show consent, highlighting the divide between the standards of sexual behavior espoused in freshman orientation programs and campus brochures, and those that operate in courts of law.

但在此案中,陪审员似乎对于何谓表达同意有着不同理解,这突出了新生入学培训计划和校园宣传手册中主张的性行为标准,与法庭上的标准存在分歧。