If you seek justice for victims of sexual assault, then you have to support a system of justice that is, at its heart, just. It must be based not on expediency or its ability to easily deliver a pound of flesh, but one that protects both the accuser and the accused.

This isn’t just some high-minded concept; it’s pragmatic. Anything less struggles to stand up to time and protest, losing its credibility, leaving verdicts debased and disbelieved and causing harm to the victim. Soon enough there is no system at all for future complainants.

The Yale University basketball team will appear in the NCAA tournament on Thursday for the first time since 1962. It will do so without its captain, Jack Montague, who was expelled on Feb. 10 after a disciplinary panel determined he had unconsented sex with a fellow student.

On Monday, Montague fought back with a public-relations offensive, issuing a statement from his lawyer detailing some of the facts of the case. It was designed to call into question the actions of the woman and the system that found him guilty. He also vowed to sue the university.

It is a reminder why colleges and universities should work to change federal government and get out of the business of trying to handle complex cases involving what is otherwise criminal conduct, such as sexual assault. No matter how noble the goal, they aren’t equipped for it.

If a murder occurred on campus, would anyone think a panel of provosts and deans should handle it in abridged fashion?

Is Montague guilty? Is Montague innocent? I have no idea. I am not arguing either thing and couldn’t at this point, although many others are convinced one way or the other. This is especially on the Yale campus, which descended into division – players backed their old teammate with T-shirts while protestors posted flyers denouncing them for supporting a “rape culture.” Tensions are high. At this point, the team is just trying to make the most of its tournament game against Baylor.

View photos Jack Montague (R) was expelled from Yale in February. (AP) More

“This has been going on the better part of a month, five or six weeks,” coach James Jones said. “We feel like we’re doing a good job. We’re trying to focus on playing a basketball game.”

Due to the private nature of the procedures, only limited facts have been made public, all via Montague’s lawyer, Max Price. Who knows what he didn’t include?

The problem is: he didn’t need to tell everything on Monday. Because of the system’s inherent deficiencies, Price was able to piggyback off the media attention for the NCAA tournament to turn Montague into a martyr for the wrongly convicted and attack campus political correctness while leaving the woman to deal with stories that suggest she was dishonest. For Montague, it was a smart play.

To rebut this requires the woman to step forward publicly or hire her own counsel, just the kind of acts that can cause a chilling effect for future reporting. This should outrage fair-minded people, especially at Yale. Not that Montague defended himself, that’s his right and he may be right. It’s that the system is so bad, his “conviction” is still open to debate. It all but forced him to take this course of action.

It’s a mess. And it’s a mess Yale, and federal law, created.

And it’s a mess lots of schools are dealing with nationally. In 2015, 124 were under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over how they investigated sexual assaults involving students. Basketball is shining the spotlight on Yale now, but there are 23 schools in the NCAA tournament – more than one-third of the entire field – dealing with Department of Education Title IX investigations. Kansas. North Carolina. SUNY-Buffalo. Hawaii. Iowa. It’s everywhere.

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