Tallahassee law enforcement fails to uphold legal principles

On Wednesday, The New York Times published a scathing expose revealing glaring oversights in the investigation of rape allegations against Florida State quarterback and 2013 Heisman Trophy award winner Jameis Winston. The piece, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Walt Bogdanich and posted online to The New York Times’ website, revealed that Tallahassee police did not take a DNA sample of Winston or even interview the Seminoles’ quarterback in their investigation of rape allegations.

The difficulties of pursuing the case are clear: Winston admitted to having consensual sex with his accuser, but refused to speak with Florida State University officials or the police on the advice of his attorney, David Cornwell.

What’s troubling about this case is not the issue of whether or not Winston actually committed rape — it’s the simple fact that Winston had sexual intercourse with a woman who was clearly intoxicated and that woman had filed a police report, identified the perpetrator and the police prematurely closed the investigation without doing its due diligence.

At the time the report was filed, the woman alleged that she had “blacked out” at Potbelly’s, a Tallahassee bar where there were more than 30 video cameras installed. The amount of footage from Potbelly’s surveillance cameras that Tallahassee police requested to aid in the investigation of the rape charge: zero.

It’s no secret that football holds near-sacrosanct importance in the South. Jameis Winston was the phenomenally gifted football player who was taking the Seminoles to the promised land; his accuser, apparently too jumbled in her accusations to be taken seriously. The responsibility of the act of intercourse itself, however, is on Winston.

When Winston pursues a female with the intent of engaging in sexual intercourse, he opens himself up to the possibility that the female may withdraw consent at any time. It’s certainly understandable — in a sense that’s unnerving to almost everyone, the writer of this article included — that the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback may feel entitled to introduce himself to a woman with nothing but intercourse in mind. But the fact of the matter is that Winston’s accuser was clearly incapacitated by an excessive consumption of alcohol.

For a program to investigate such serious matters so lightly, despite the fact that intercourse occurred, is particularly disturbing. Florida State officials had every reason not to do their due diligence in the investigation of the accusations against Winston. They were riding a BCS National Title wave, coasting to national prominence with each improbable victory and lucrative marketing presence in a multi-billion dollar college football industry.

The city of Tallahassee had every reason to not investigate the star quarterback of their prized local football team. Effectively, by their lackadaisical show of effort in the carriage of justice, they have failed miserably as officials of their jurisdiction. The job of Tallahassee law enforcement is not to protect the fiscal interests of Florida State University football, and the job of Florida State University is not to protect its highly profitable athlete, but all of its students.

No single athlete, no matter how significant, should be considered above the law. The due diligence of a rape investigation is not solely for the sake of closure — its primary function is to bring criminals to justice and protect the interests of the constituency. Florida State University and the city of Tallahassee, in failing to do its due diligence in uncovering what exactly transpired that night between Winston and his accuser, is sending a message to its students and citizens: If you happen to be drunk, and then the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback of your football team has sex with you, it’s not worth looking too deeply into it while opening an investigation that could possibly hurt his performance.

This treatment of a victim of a crime as time-sensitive and delicate as rape is an absolutely appalling error in judgment, and Florida State University should be subject to a federal investigation. The state prosecutors were effectively at the mercy of a paltry set of evidence provided to them by a bungled police investigation in their efforts to prosecute Winston. But Winston was too instrumental in the Football Bowl Subdivision moneymaking machine, too quickly becoming a national darling, to be felled by such “shaky” allegations.

Those who saw video footage of Winston and his friends cheering the decision by the Florida state prosecutor’s announcement to not press charges will forever have that image indelibly marked in their minds. Here was a scholar-athlete sitting on top of the world, who was off the hook for a massive blunder he made one night in his off-campus apartment. Everyone in Tallahassee was rooting for Jameis Winston that fateful day — everyone except his accuser and the criminal justice system.

 

Euno Lee is a senior majoring in English Literature. He is also the Managing Editor of the Daily Trojan.