Winston Ruling

This is the only article I have read on the topic with balance and reason.  Sadly, few actually believe in those principals, the lynch mob rules the day with the press.


Winston Ruling

"Jameis Winston has been cleared of violating FSU's code of conduct. Other than the inevitable civil suit and countersuit, the sexual-assault matter is now closed.

So what have we learned?

Sadly, nothing we didn't know from the start. Major B. Harding knew that, so he made the only reasonable ruling possible.

It was bound to cause a backlash because just about everybody else thinks they know the truth.

Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston was cleared of the accusations he faced at a student code of conduct hearing involving an alleged sexual assault two years ago, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

One side knows Winston is a coddled jock who committed rape and has been protected by police, FSU and scummy lawyers. The other side knows his accuser willingly had sex with the football star, and now she and her scummy lawyers are just trying to cash in.

How do they know?

It's based on utter infallibility of preconceived notions. And it turned this saga into a high-profile game of character assassination with no winners.

The accuser has been trashed as a gold-digging sleaze and faced death threats for trying to bring down Mr. Heisman. It's far easier to sympathize with her, but how do know for sure Winston isn't the victim here?

"This is the worst attack on an athlete that we have ever seen in the history of amateur sports," his attorney, David Cornwell, said Monday on NBC Sports Radio.

The 1972 Israeli Olympic team might beg to differ. But there's no doubt that Winston has never enjoyed the benefit of the doubt.

Part of that is because his own doing (see: Burger King, Publix, FSU Student Union). There's a big difference, however, between being a serial knucklehead and a rapist.

It didn't help Winston that the incident occurred as "rape culture" awareness was skyrocketing on campuses. The Washington Post recently ran a column titled, "We Should Automatically Believe Rape Victims." As FSU was struggling in a game against Boston College, a San Francisco columnist tweeted, "Beat the Rapist."

A mob mentality set in. When Treon Harris was accused of sexual assault, there were calls for Florida to immediately kick him out of school. Within 48 hours, the accusations were dropped.

It's as if nobody remembered what happened to the Duke lacrosse team. Rolling Stone editors sure didn't when they green-lighted the expose on Virginia's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

As with those stories, Winston fit a media narrative about privilege and victimology. Even when the stories were shot full of holes, activists defended them on grounds they exposed a larger truth.

There's that word again. In quest of their version of the truth, activists are glad to dispose of a centuries-old principle of justice - the presumption of innocence. That led to the predictable fallout to Sunday's news.

"Winston Cleared of Rape Like Every Other Sports Star," was the headline at The Daily Beast website.

If you believe the fix was in, take a deep breath and think about what that entails. Harding, a former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, would risk his legacy to join the conspiracy to keep Winston eligible.

The fact is that despite the stumblebum police investigation, Harding still had 1,000 pages of testimony and evidence to review. And it all came down to what everyone should have admitted from Day One.

"I do not find the credibility of one story substantially stronger than that of the other," Harding wrote in his finding to Winston. "Both have their strengths and weaknesses."

Unlike snarky media tweeters or idiots issuing death threats, Harding does not pretend to have been in the bathroom with Winston and the accuser on Dec. 7, 2012.

"You and [the accuser] are the only persons with personal knowledge as to what actually happened," he wrote to Winston.

Everybody else could just fill in the blanks to fit their agendas. And after two years, the only lesson we've learned is people prefer that to the truth."