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sodiummuffin


				

				

				

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sodiummuffin


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A summary of her original written statement to police was just released today. Her statement to police does not allege that she was unconscious or was forced to have sex or take ketamine. She describes her refusals as being respected:




“[Male Number 1] would eventually wake up” and “said he wanted to take part and asked about making it a foursome, to which [Jane Doe] said ‘Hell No.” Jane Doe rejected this request “because [she] knew that a foursome meant that [she] would have to take part in anal sex.” Jane Doe then remembered Male Number 3 leaving the room.




And them stopping as soon as she said that she no longer wanted to have sex:




“The threesome continued until at some point, around 5:45am, [Jane Doe] said [she] was tired and needed to turn in. At that point, both guys stopped the threesome with [her] as far as [she] can remember.”




This is how she describes the ketamine use:




Male Number 2 “asked [Jane Doe] if she wanted to do more Ketamine.” At that, Jane Doe remembered “that [she] had taken Ketamine at some point on the couch with [Male Number 1 and Male Number 2] during this night” but she could not remember “where or when that took place.”






Jane Doe thought that she “had already done Ketamine once so why not do it a second time.” “At that point, [Male Number 2] poured a line of Ketamine on his erect penis, implying for [her] to snort the line. [Jane Doe] snorted the line of Ketamine, which was a heavy amount of Ketamine.”




I'm guessing that her going to the police was under the idea that intoxicated sex is rape even if she verbally agrees. However that does not actually constitute rape under New York law, which is why no charges were filed. Note that, for those who classify drunken sex as rape regardless of the law, reading the statement summary makes it seem like some of the other participants were probably drunker than her:




The three engaged in a “threesome” involving oral and vaginal sex in a room of the fraternity. At the start of the threesome, Jane Doe described her intoxication level as “5 or 6 out of 10” and that she was “pretty ok with having this threesome.” The sexual conduct ended when Jane Doe “noticed that [Male Number 1] appeared really sleepy and was no longer fully erect.” She told Male Number 2 “[they] needed to stop having sex in order to make sure [Male Number 1] was ok. [Male Number 2] then stopped having sex with [Jane Doe].”


Male Number 1 said “he was going to take a nap and refresh himself” and “would eventually stumble his way from the couch to the bed.” While Male Number 1 slept, “[Male Number 2] began to dry heave as if he was going to vomit. Jane Doe “began to take care of [Male Number 2] by patting his back while also waking [Male Number 1] every few minutes to make sure he was okay.”




In other news, per TMZ one of the accused was just fired from his job at Wells Fargo.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is an example of how results based on "controlling for confounders" are inherently dubious for complicated fields like social science. Fundamentally the researchers are coming up with a list of potential confounders (which must be legible across many individual cases, available to the researchers, etc.) and assuming that anything left after they're controlled for must be whatever signal they're looking for. I recommend this SSC post as a classic example of this, in which a study on the impact of bullying controls for bullies targeting unpopular disadvantaged kids using the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide. In this case this is what they controlled for:




The model presented in Table 6 includes only case characteristics that would have been known by judges and jurors: the number of prior convictions; the number of victims (included here as a binary variable for one victim/multiple victims); the nature of the defendant’s plea; the number of applied aggravators (as determined by the judge or jury); the number of mitigating circumstances identified; the number of defenses offered; and whether the victim was held hostage. (We also tested the significance of a concomitant sex crime and whether the victim was a law enforcement officer; neither of these factors was found to be a significant predictor of sentencing outcomes and are not included in the model shown below).




This misses nearly all the details of the case. They count the raw number of official "applied aggravators" but not what those aggravators are. They count the number of prior convictions but not their severity, the number of mitigating circumstances and number of defenses but not what those are or how convincingly they are argued. They check whether the victim was held hostage for some reason but not other similar specifics (chosen controls tend to be arbitrary and vary widely across studies on the same subject). The people making the decision have all the details that a set of controls can't possibly encompass, and we know the controlled factors differ by race, yet any systematic difference in their decisions is assumed to be a product of racial discrimination rather than everything they didn't control for.


Imagine a study trying to determine if the date of birth on a birth certificate is a biased indicator of age. Group 1 is stereotyped as being older than Group 2, does this influence the date written down when they're born? Naturally the study controls for age, with a multiple-choice question to choose an age range ("[B]: 20-29 years old"). They find that, while Group 1 does pick older age ranges, even after you control for age [B] respondents in Group 1 have an earlier date of birth than [B]s in Group 2. In fact, a later more sophisticated study outright asks for age, and finds that 25 year olds in Group 1 have an earlier birth date than 25 year olds in Group 2. Needless to say, this is a perfectly expected result even without any birth-certificate bias.




Interestingly, after controlling for race of defendant, the number of mitigating circumstances is no longer a significant predictor of decisions to impose death.




In other words "race" and "number of mitigating circumstances" correlate strongly enough that if they didn't put "mitigating circumstances" in their model any difference in sentencing from mitigating circumstances would be assumed to be due to racism. Naturally they don't consider whether the same thing might be happening with factors they didn't control for.




Second, the regression results indicate that case characteristics explain only a small proportion of the variation in the case outcomes analyzed here. Specifically, case characteristics alone explain only 9% of the variation in prosecutorial decisions regarding whether to seek death and 20% of the variation in juries’ sentencing decisions.






Unexplained variation documented in the results presented here suggest that other extra-legal and social factors –not captured by our statistical models – are playing an important role in death penalty case dynamics.




Interestingly their conclusion calls the variation not explained by their model "extra-legal and social factors". I don't think it's really "extra-legal factors" when the jury makes decisions using methods more complicated than "count up the number of applied aggravators".