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R E C E N T L Y

My crabs or yours?
By Dan Stern
Protecting yourself from the creatures of the sexual swamp
(10/07/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Trouncing feminist film criticism and its cadre of ass-kissing puritans
(10/07/98)

Scholars of smut
By Carina Chocano
World Pornography Conference: Academics cheer as porn stars theorize
(10/05/98)

Escaping college poverty
By Hank Hyena
If this campus parasite can make money and get laid, you can too
(10/02/98)

Playboy goes limp without feminist vice grip
By Nicole Nolan
Playboy's flaccid College Girls issue
(09/30/98)

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____creeps on campus
____DO BAD GUYS HAVE A RIGHT TO HIGHER EDUCATION?

BY DAWN MacKEEN | One evening last month a wholesome-looking college student with long, straight hair took the floor of the UC-Berkeley Student Senate and began speaking as if she were delivering a sixth-grade book report. She had been researching one of her fellow students, David Cash, for two whole weeks, and it was finally time to present the facts to the student senate and answer any questions posed to her. Her descriptions were, at times, speculative, recounted as if she were both an eyewitness to the events in question and inside Cash's mind during the crime. She even subtly mimed a scene from Cash's grand jury testimony -- of him peering over a toilet stall to see what his friend Jeremy Strohmeyer was doing with the little girl he had just dragged in there.

The senators had requested the Student Advocate Office employee to research this information because they wanted to be well-informed about the decision they were about to make: whether David Cash was morally fit to walk among them as a fellow student. After all, he had witnessed his best friend kidnap a 7-year-old girl named Sherrice Iverson and hadn't done anything to stop it. He also hadn't reported it. The little girl was later found strangled in the bathroom of a Nevada casino. Her neck had been snapped and she'd been molested. Did they really want "someone like that" in their dorms, in their classes or late at night on the university walkways that wind through dark groves of eucalyptus trees?

Cash broke no law, except the moral law that commands us to help others. Neither in Nevada, where the slaying occurred, nor in California, where Cash lives, is it illegal not to report a crime. Cash claimed he walked out of the bathroom before the molestation and murder took place, but even if he had witnessed the murder, he still couldn't be charged. The case has inspired Nevada politicians to introduce a "good Samaritan law," which would require witnesses to report crimes inflicted on children. Congressmen have proposed bills that would bar states from receiving federal child abuse prevention funds unless they pass similar laws. But even if these bills are passed, they would not be retroactive. Legally, Cash is untouchable.

But there are ways to punish beyond the law, and his critics aimed at Cash's education -- the first step along the path to the American Dream. They wanted to deny Cash his dreams, just as Sherrice's -- who would never grow up to be the nurse, policewoman or dancer she hoped to be -- were denied.

"I think it sends out the wrong message to young children, that someone watched a little girl being raped and murdered and they are rewarded with a college education," said Najee Ali, who as spokesman for Sherrice's family has been spearheading the fight to throw Cash off campus. "Everyone's afraid of standing up for what's morally right. From President Clinton on down to David Cash, people are afraid to hold people morally responsible."

The contentious meeting lasted until almost midnight as the student senators debated the pros and cons of liberty, the meaning of education and Cash's character. There was no realistic chance that their decision would have any concrete effect, but the debate was no less heated for that.

If Cash had come forward and expressed his remorse about what he didn't do -- turn in his friend -- probably none of this would have happened. It took about a year for public resentment to boil to the surface, a year for Ali and others in Los Angeles, where Sherrice lived, to collect enough signatures to call for the good Samaritan law, to help organize a protest on the Berkeley campus, where critics traveled by the busload to voice their discontent that Cash had gotten away with -- if not murder, then something almost as egregious. "It would be much different if he expressed remorse," said Ali. "But because of his arrogant and cocky attitude, he really opened up this Pandora's box himself."

Without question, Cash was his own worst enemy. In a slew of media interviews, he was quoted as saying that he was going to profit from the killing by selling the movie rights and, incredibly, that his notoriety was helping him pick up girls, he has since denied both statements. During the Berkeley meeting, an interview on a Los Angeles radio station, KLSX, was played aloud: "I have a lot of remorse toward the Iverson family, it's very difficult, they lost a loved one and it's a tough thing, an innocent bystander lost her life, a very tragic event. But the simple fact remains that I do not know this little girl -- I don't know dark children in Panama, I do not know people that die of disease in Egypt. The only person I knew in this event was Jeremy Strohmeyer ... and I'm sad because I lost a best friend." (Strohmeyer has since pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence without parole.) Cash's recent appearance on "60 Minutes" didn't help. When asked if he would do anything differently, he said no.

Some of the Berkeley speakers that night took the issue one step further, asking what should be done about actual criminals on campus. (University of California applications do not ask if the applicant has a criminal background; according to one university spokesman, in all probability there are felons on campus.) Should those students be expelled as well? "I have no problem with setting a precedent that would get rid of rapists and murderers on campus," said Arian White, the senator who wrote the bill seeking to "condemn" Cash and ask for his "voluntary withdrawal" from campus.

Ironically, Cash's most implacable critic, Najee Ali, himself has a criminal past. The man calling for Cash's expulsion and demanding "moral responsibility" is a former member of the notorious Crips gang who was convicted of armed robbery in 1988 and spent two years at the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi. After his release Ali took classes at Los Angeles Community College, earning a certificate in AIDS training. It was there, he said, that he learned the lessons that helped him to turn his life around. "Before I went to college, my only interaction was with people from the inner city," he says. "I never talked to white people or Jews. But being on a college campus, I was forced to speak with people of different nationalities and understand what I went through. I definitely think that [ex-convicts] belong on campus if they have been punished for their crimes. I don't care what type of crime it is, you have a right to compete for an education to better yourself."

But what about Cash, who didn't even commit a crime? For Ali, the issue is remorse: He has it and Cash doesn't.

But judging a person's remorse, and making it a requirement for admission to college, is a slippery slope. If university students become moral arbiters of who is sorry and who is not, on what criteria will they base their decisions? Shifting the burden of dispensing punishment beyond the walls of the courthouse to the grounds of a campus may do more harm than good. Doesn't disqualifying someone because of his or her criminal or moral history contradict the highest educational and ethical ideals? Isn't education supposed to raise up even the most benighted souls?

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Murderers at the next table