excellent article. It will be neither read nor understood by those who refuse to see.
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You’re not wrong unfortunately.
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This is a wonderfully well written article with great points. Thank you for sharing it. So many people do not understand the difference between civil and criminal law and this really lays it all out there. Hopefully everyone will take the time to read through.
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Thanks for linking! I’ve been offline with other stuff lately - holidays and then kids out on snow days now.
anyway, It’s good to see a lawyer spell out the difference between criminal and civil matters, and the EEOC comparison was quite interesting to me.
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Great article, unfortunately followed by ridiculous comments. Trainers will take out their competition with SS, being accused ruins livelihoods as people are presumed guilty, etc, etc. I’d like one of these people to tell me how they would “improve” the process. Do we just allow someone that’s been accused of raping children to continue with business as usual unless a criminal court convicts them? That’s what has been going on for decades, and it’s not good enough anymore.
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Even after a criminal conviction, there was a woman on FB who swears Tom Navarro is not a danger to her kid when he was convicted of 3rd Degree Sodomy… in a court of law. Because she asked him and he said it was bogus.
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If you all will permit me a broad yet salient rant.
That’s because the whole anti-intellectual thing that Amerka has liked for so long as come to a head. We cannot agree that there are things like True and False, Fact and Fiction, Logic and Crap, nor genuine and earned Expertise. Furthermore, no one is required to agree to some common, shared reality whether that means the facts of some matter or how logic works. This is all the current state of affairs in politics, vaccination epidemiology (among people who have no use for the word “epidemiology”) and within out utterly unregulated world of horse training.
But here’s the thing: We pay for that. We reward that. We co-sign that. We do that every time we send our money and our respect to trainers who don’t value what we do. And surely everyone values kids being safe or not getting ripped off above having a horse go well. But the folks who feel they have no skin in the game, that the bad stuff their pro does can be sequestered off into some small abscess somewhere that will never infect them, those people are the ones who are responsible for making all of this willful ignorance possible.
Do not pay for what you don’t want. It really is a simple as that.
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AMEN and pass the peanuts.
Because of this, no amount of explanation of civil vs criminal law, or how this actually works, will sway the people who are convinced SafeSport is the devil.
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I, too, welcomed this article! Yes, there is the usual idiotic push back… but there are far more standing with SS and not GM. This is heartening.
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Louder for those in the back! Well said!
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@mvp nailed it. As did the article - well done, well written and accurate. At this point, the nay-sayer comments are just outing those who can’t or won’t read for comprehension.
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Thanks for sharing the article on this thread Denali.
A good article. And though some of the comments afterward were infuriating, I actually found some others encouraging.
I found two aspects really interesting.
1st… the comparison of Safe Sport and the center to EEOC law. There are MANY folks and lawyers who are far more knowledgeable and specialized in this particular field than I am who can probably compare and contrast the two laws and how they work in actual practice to a considerable extent… but I found it an interesting comparison. To me, this comparison made a little more sense than the whole line of reasoning concerning kicking people out of a private club. I’m not saying the arguments made about the legality of making rules for private clubs aren’t correct… I just felt like the comparison to EEOC law was an interesting way to look at the issue.
2nd… I find it really interesting to hear from one of the MANY MANY lawyers who are active in our sport, active with a platform like COTH about the really basic concept of our legal system criminal vs our civil legal system. Again… I am not a lawyer. But worked administratively for several years for legal departments, grew up in a family of lawyers, and at one time during my undergraduate years was pre law. So I know just enough to be dangerous. With that said, I’ve been STUPEFIED by how many adults seem to be unaware of basic things like the difference between the criminal
system of justice, and civil law. So much of the Safe Sport resistance is out in Southern California. I would have thought after the mid 1990’s and the OJ Simpson legal saga, everyone of a certain generation who lives in that part of the country during that era would understand the difference. I was pretty much a teenager then on the other coast… but even I know that OJ was found not guilty of murder in criminal court, but sued for wrongful death by Ron Goldman’s father… who prevailed.
Anyway… many many thoughts. But I will leave it at that. The lawyer who wrote this article for COTH did a really good job of educating many. I wish folks would read it and just pause and think about these issues more.
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OTOH, I really appreciated the patient, bullet-pointy tutorial on where Carney gets it wrong and where someone who knows about legal processes gets it right. I’m not a lawyer, so this was helpful to me.
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In other news… Athletes for Equity in Sport has put forth ANOTHER letter online. They now have two public Facebook pages… it’s a bit confusing. One has an “inc” on the end of their name. The other does not.
Anyway, the letter was directly from Diane Carney to Ju’Riese Colon, the CEO of the US Center for Safe Sport. It’s dated January 6, 2020. I would just link to it, or copy and paste it here, but the forums won’t let me link anymore (lol :lol: - the software doesn’t like me and thinks I’m bot or something) and the way they seem to be publicly putting forth their letters on Facebook makes it inconvenient for folks like me to copy and paste to the forums (:winkgrin:
). Oh well. Maybe someone else can link to the FB post. In short though, DC wants the CEO to answer three specific questions… and again… says this is for “statistical purposes.”
- Are conversations recorded at the Center for SafeSport? If so, which calls?
- Who decides which calls are forwarded up the chain of command?
- What type of Assessment Tests are administered to those accused for example but not limited to: VRAG, SORAG, Static-99R and Static-2002, and are these used in your evidentiary procedure and if not why?
The letter closes with this paragraph…
”I am asking this as a member of USEF. I am required to take training by that organization. I am not requesting victim identifying information, only information for statistical purposes.”
I’m baffled by this, and don’t know what to make of this, but I admittedly haven’t followed any of these issues much since earlier in December. Been busy with other stuff and holidays. I thought there was another Michael Henry Safe Sport presentation at the USEF meeting yesterday though, and a town hall. Were any of these ongoing questions and concerns from Diane Carney’s group addressed? It seems to be radio silence regarding that town hall, and I would have thought they would have sent out a link again like they did for the USHJA presentation.
Bonnie Navin appears to have refocused her public feed and comments away from Safe Sport issues. To other concerns about equine law - sales contracts, etc.
And the Athletes for Equity group also posted a link to an “announcement” concerning the 2nd phase of their development onto their Facebook page. But, if a curious onlooker such as myself attempts to click the link and read their announcement… you will find that it is a private announcement. You have to “subscribe” in order to read about this new phase. I am not interested in subscribing to their group, nor do I share anything other than public posts to these forums about the ongoing “anti Sage Sport” activity on these forums… so all I can say is that the title of their private announcement/organization news release is about “membership.”
I thought after the USHJA townhall and Safe Sport presentation with Michael Henry last month, this organization would have reorganized, refocused, and perhaps gone quiet to an extent. But apparently not.
If anyone was present at the USEF town hall and are willing to share if there was anything new, I’m curious. Hopefully it was informative and well done.
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I say this a lot, here and in life, about a variety of horrifyingly ignorant people, but like, the bonus is that a lot of these people are old, and will die sooner rather than later. That’s more often the way real change happens :lol:
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Did anyone catch the USEF live stream today from Wellington? I unfortunately wasn’t able to watch.
I believe there were two different safe sport presentations. One on Tuesday at the horse show grounds, which was open to anyone. And then another on Wednesday at the USEF meeting at the hotel in West Palm Beach. Presumably that was just for people who were attending the annual meeting. There was a live stream of the second one, which I did not get a chance to watch, but hopefully they will post the video online as they did with the one from the USHJA meeting in Denver.
Thanks for this explanation. I was definitely confused as to why the Safe Sport presentation seemed to be happening the day BEFORE the USEF meeting. This makes a bit more sense though 
Agreed - I also hope they post a link in a few days farther the meeting.
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It seems to me that Ms.Carney is out of her legal depth, shown by the way in which she is approaching the Safe Sport people. Safe Sport has some big-time legal talent.
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I just asked DH (a lawyer) if statistical purposes is some sort of legal term and he said no. Then I started reading him the list of requests and in the middle, he stopped me to ask, “Is this person trying to do discovery via the Internet?” Lol
Well, I mean, lol if not for the victims and whatnot.
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