Sex, Drugs, and Booze, and Other Legal Issues for the College Student

Assault And Battery

Assault is the intentional creation, other than by mere words, of a reasonable apprehension in the mind of the victim of imminent bodily harm, or an attempt to commit battery. Battery is the unlawful application of force to another person resulting in either bodily injury or offensive touching. Assault and battery are both illegal and are usually misdemeanors carrying with them hefty fines and the possibility of a jail sentence.

Before you throw that punch in the bar or fraternity basement, remember that if your punch lands, you have committed a battery. Punch the wrong person (or worse yet, punch him and break his nose, a facial bone, or otherwise cause disfigurement), and you can either find yourself (1) looking down the barrel of a loaded handgun in the hands of an angry and irrational person; (2) on the receiving end of a criminal misdemeanor complaint that could earn you a hefty fine or jail time; or (3) on the receiving end of a civil lawsuit by the punchee's parents for the cost of his medical bills and pain and suffering. In addition to that, your instigation of a wild rumpus on campus might well get you suspended or expelled. In other words, fisticuffs are simply not worth it. Sometimes the wisest comeback is a good decision to simply walk away

Hazing

If you've been following the news at all, you know that hazing has become a hot-button legal issue on college campuses, due to several highly publicized lawsuits by the families of students killed, seriously injured, or sexually harassed in fraternity and sorority hazing incidents. Keep the following bits of advice in mind: the law applies to fraternity basements, dorms and farm fields the same way it does in ordinary life. A lot of popular hazing activities constitute either assault or battery. All it takes is one litigious person who didn't like your ritual, or one ritual that went too far and prompted a complaint, to get you and your fraternity or sorority into a lot of hot water.

Date Rape

Date rape and its commonly affiliated activities (such as lacing drinks) can land you in legal trouble faster than you can possibly imagine. We have dealt with the subject of date rape extensively in Chapter 10. Suffice it to say here that experience has taught us that it is a bad idea to meet and hook up with anyone while one or both of you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

"Date rape did occur at Duke, and almost every instance I heard of involved al­cohol," Chase noted. "Often, women wouldn't even refer to it as date rape, but instead, would say things like 'I can't believe I drank that much. I don't even remember sleeping with him.' If you do this to someone, that's date rape. Be careful around alcohol. The line between a great evening and a disastrous one is crossed by having only a few extra drinks."

File Sharing

By now, if you have an iPod or an MP3 player and have downloaded music on the Internet, you have probably heard something about the lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against people who share their music collections on the Internet. Many of these file sharing lawsuits have been filed against college students, and most of them have concluded with the students' having to pay many thousands of dollars to settle the cases to avoid a trial. In fact, the Copyright Act provides for automatic statutory damages of $75 per song that you have illegally downloaded. In case you think you can hide your identity behind an anonymous "handle" while engaged in this behavior, remember that your college or university is your ISP and that in almost all cases, each individual computer hooked up to a college network is assigned an individual IP address that can be tracked by your college or university's IT department. So calling yourself "Donkey3438" isn't really fooling anyone.

Keep this in mind if you are in the habit of letting other people use your computer or if you leave your room open and your computer constantly connected to the network without an enabling password. The RIAA has people lurking about in most of the common file sharing rooms with screen-capturing devices that capture the names and numbers of files that you are making available to others for free downloads in violation of the Copyright Act. If RIAA folks come calling, they'll be looking for the registered user of the IP address that was connected to the file sharing room at the time they took the screenshot, and if the incriminating files are on your computer when the federal subpoena arrives, well . . .

Gambling

Gambling laws vary widely from state to state, and with the recent explosion in the popularity of poker games like Texas Hold 'em, more and more state legislatures are moving to regulate these games. The chances of your being prosecuted for gambling with a group of friends in a casual dorm-room game are remote"but such a game can get you into hot water with the administration, particularly if it gets big and one of the perennial losers complains to a dean about how you took his financial aid money in a poker game.

Things get considerably more dicey if you start running regular poker games, tournaments, or other such events out of your suite or fraternity house. If you do this, some states may consider you to be running an unregulated gambling hall. Stories abound of these "home games" getting raided by the local police, and people have been prosecuted for it. In many other states, it has not yet been resolved whether poker is a game of chance (subject to gambling regulations) or a game of skill. Best you let the "entrepreneurial" types run the on-campus games and take this risk"at least until the still-developing laws in this area become more reliable..

E-mail And Internet

By now, most people know and understand that when you surf the Net or send e-mail from an office or university server, you can never really count on those searches or e-mails remaining private. Most colleges and universities have clearly stated privacy statements in their student handbooks, and you should read yours carefully to fully understand what, if any, protections you have. As we noted in the section on file sharing, because your college or university is also your ISP, your school can pretty readily track the sites you visit, and because e-mail is often maintained on a general server rather than downloaded to your individual computer, e-mails can also be fairly readily accessed and reviewed. This is not to say that your college IT professionals are going to sit in their office getting their jollies reading the e-mails you send to your boyfriend or girlfriend"but it does mean that if a subpoena should arrive, your having deleted the e-mail doesn't necessarily mean it is gone.

Oh, and one other point worth noting: under the new provisions of the Patriot Act, if you do something truly stupid, such as communicate terrorist threats or otherwise link yourself to terrorists or terrorist organizations, well . . . good luck to you.

Room Searches

Finally we come to the subject of the room search. This scenario typically unfolds when your RA smells something other than garden-variety tobacco wafting out from under your doorway or through your open window and either comes up to investigate or calls the police to do it.

The rule of thumb here is never to consent to having your dorm room searched. In most cases, when the police show up, they will have done so without a warrant, which means that unless they are chasing a fugitive or can prove some other form of exigent circumstance, or unless your dorm room lease agreement says otherwise, they are probably not legally permitted to search your room.

Be polite to a fault"but require them to go get a warrant.

Sale Or Possession Of Drugs And Alcohol

Although laws vary widely from state to state, the unlawful possession of alcohol by a minor is typically a violation or a second-degree misdemeanor punishable by a fine. If you attempt to use false identification to purchase alcohol, though, and someone decides to prosecute you for it, you could be looking at a felony for criminal impersonation or forgery punishable by a jail term and a serious fine.

Penalties for illegal drug possession also vary widely from state to state and are often dependent on the type of drug possessed. Possession of narcotics like cocaine, crack, or heroin is typically treated the most harshly, with long jail sentences and fines into the tens of thousands of dollars even for first offenses not uncommon. Next up are the dangerous hallucinogens, with first offenses also carrying serious jail sentences and fines into the thousands of dollars. And obviously, possessing any amount of these drugs considered by the authorities to be large enough to constitute a saleable amount rather than a personal use amount will ratchet up the charges to possession with intent to distribute, making the sentences and the fines that much more severe.

Absent an intent to distribute, possession of all other illegal drugs, other than those mentioned above, is typically treated as some form of misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine in the thousands of dollars. And with prosecutors in counties or districts containing colleges and universities always eager to make a point about illegal drug use, these charges are very often hard to negotiate down.

But the risks can be far more profound than that, and taken together, that's where the boundary decisions come in.

"Peer pressure is everywhere, and if you are not disciplined and grounded enough, you can easily begin to find excuses to party every night," Dave warned.

"I drank socially in college in a pattern technically known as binge drinking. That is, alcohol wasn't a part of my daily life, but on most weekends, many of my friends and I would drink, sometimes to the point of sickness, hangover, or passing out," one mentor admitted. "Because I never combined this with driving, I didn't feel that I was at risk of hurting anyone else, and through sheer luck, I never suffered any real harm to myself other than a hospital visit for dehydration from a terrible hangover. At the time, I thought of it as just plain fun and didn't see my partying habits as any different than those of many of my friends. However, by the end of senior year, I noticed I was drinking a little more often and a little more heavily. When I found myself having a beer before an afternoon class one day, it dawned on me that perhaps I had come to rely too heavily on alcohol."

Additional Resource

Lindsay, C. L., III. The College Student's Guide to the Law. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade, 2005.

Campus Confidential Mentors and Uber-Mentors:

Campus Confidential contains the collective advice of a a diverse group of people who have traveled the road to college. Some are recent college graduates who can counsel you on the college experience as it is today. Other are a few years removed from their college days and can provide a longer view of the decisions you will need to make before, during, and after college. Here is a little bit about the mentors and uber-mentors in these articles.

Dan Bissell – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Portland, Oregon

B.A. Middlebury College cum laude, 1993. Major: Geology

M. D. University of Colorado School of Medicine, Adler Scholar, 2002

Tom Teh Chiu – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Brooklyn, New York

B. A. Yale University, 1993. Major: double major in Chemistry and Music

M. M. Juilliard School, 1995

M Juilliard School, 2001

Jim Bright – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

B. A. Duke University, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1997. Major: History

Amanda Cramer – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Paso Robles, California

B.A. Cornell University Phi Beta Kappa, 1993. Major: Mathematics

Graduate study in food science – Enology, University of California at Davis 1997-2000

Zoe Robbins – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Gouldsboro, Maine

B.A. (1) Wellesley College magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1997. Major: Economics

B.A. (2) University of Pennsylvania, 2001. Major: Nursing

Carolyn Koegler – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Hopkinton, New Hampshire

B. A. Tufts University, cum laude, 1993. Double major: History and Spanish

Erik Norton – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Boston, Massachusetts

B. A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993. Major: Mathematics

Lyndsee Dickson – Campus Confidential Mentor

Concord, New Hampshire

B.A. New York University, cum laude, 2004. Major: East Asian studies

Kevin Donovan – Campus Confidential Mentor

Somerville, Massachusetts

B.A. Boston College, honors in the major, 1993. Major: English, Minor: Creative Writing

Tiffany Chan – Campus Confidential Mentor

Concord, New Hampshire

B.S. New York University, 2005. Major: Communication Science

Erica Eubanks – Campus Confidential Mentor

Memphis, Tennessee

B.A. Tennessee State University, National Deans List, 2003. Major: Criminal Justice

Dave Irwin – Campus Confidential Mentor

Carlisle, Massachusetts

B.A. Middlebury College departmental honors, 2004. Major: American Civilization, Minor: Education

Chase Johnson – Campus Confidential Mentor

London, England

B. A. Duke University, with Phi Alpha Theta distinction in history, 2005. Major: History

Aaron Paskalis – Campus Confidential Mentor

Magnolia, Massachusetts

West Point Military Academy, then transferred to UMass Amherst

B. A. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2005. Major: Legal studies