Fraternity Won’t Face Charges for Branding

Hanover — The Hanover Police Department and the Grafton County Attorney’s Office have found insufficient evidence to charge Alpha Delta fraternity with hazing stemming from revelations that 11 new members at Dartmouth College had branded themselves last fall.



Police Chief Charlie Dennis said Tuesday that the investigation was closed and that the evidence indicated that the fraternity members who burned Alpha Delta’s Greek letters onto their bodies had done so of their own free will.



“Our understanding is that it was all voluntary on their part,” Dennis said.



The proportion of new members who received brands — 11 of 35 — helped lead police to that conclusion, he said.



“I fully expected that,” the fraternity’s alumni adviser John Engelman said Monday of the police findings. “The college didn’t find us guilty of hazing, and their definition of that is a lot broader than the state’s.”



The lack of criminal charges, however, is unlikely to affect Alpha Delta’s status at Dartmouth College, where administrators this spring cut ties with the fraternity over the branding incident.



A college judicial committee, in its own investigation, did not find that the branding, which the fraternity’s lawyer described as a voluntary act of “self-expression,” was hazing.



However, the committee cited an ongoing suspension and other past misbehavior, as well as concern for student safety, in ending the college’s affiliation with the fraternity.



“While Dartmouth has not received any information about why the police decided not to pursue criminal charges, the decision not to pursue criminal charges does not lead to the conclusion that the committee was wrong,” college spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said Monday.



Dennis said the college’s internal investigation had closer access to students than Hanover detectives, who received more of their information from attorneys and college security staff. One witness told police of seeing a roughly 4-by-8-inch brand on a fraternity member’s hip, Dennis said.



Hazing is a misdemeanor under New Hampshire law.



Part of the authorities’ decision not to charge Alpha Delta with hazing was that the branding did not appear to be an official practice of the organization, Dennis said.



Yet a college judicial official, in an April 13 letter notifying the fraternity of its derecognition, said the committee had determined that the branding was “an overtly condoned and long-standing practice of the organization.”



The official, Assistant Director of Judicial Affairs Alexandra Waltemeyer, said that reports of past branding indicated the fraternity as a whole encouraged it.



“The College and the police have very different thresholds for organizational activity,” Lawrence said. “The question for the police was whether the activity at (Alpha Delta) was a violation of the hazing statute. The question for the College was whether the activity violated our standards of conduct. The police are enforcing a different rule using different standards. There is no change in Dartmouth’s view of the practice of branding. There can be no dispute that the ‘branding’ of a fellow student has been prohibited by Dartmouth for some time.”



The fraternity’s next steps will focus more on its ongoing battle with town zoning authorities, Engelman said, than on its status with the college.



The Hanover Zoning Board of Adjustment recently declined to rehear Alpha Delta’s request for zoning authority to house students in its East Wheelock Street mansion, and Engelman said the fraternity has until the end of the month to decide whether to file a lawsuit in Superior Court.



Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.





