A federal judge on Thursday ruled that a list of formal sexual misconduct complaints lodged at Syracuse University must be unsealed in court and partially redacted. 

The judge’s decision follows a challenge filed by The Daily Orange in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. 

The university asked the court to seal the document in October after The D.O. reported on it. And Judge Thomas J. McAvoy temporarily made the data inaccessible on Oct. 21. 

But Michael Grygiel, of Greenberg Traurig LLP, filed a motion Nov. 5 on behalf of the newspaper opposing SU’s request.

The list was submitted as an exhibit in an ongoing Title IX lawsuit brought against the university by an expelled SU student accused of sexual assault. It has been described as a “statistical summary.”

According to the document, 76 formal student conduct complaints alleging sexual misconduct were filed at SU from the start of the 2013-14 academic year to the end of the 2016-17 academic year. Dozens of students were suspended or expelled in those cases, the data revealed.

Decision and Order on The D… by The Daily Orange on Scribd

SU argued that releasing the list would discourage sexual assault and abuse victims from pursuing formal charges, according to McAvoy’s Thursday decision.

But McAvoy, a senior district court judge, wrote that the document “would not permit the general public or anyone without prior knowledge of the incident to discern the identity of the parties.”

The list, which does not identify “any complainant or any other student involved in the process, does not present a sufficient risk of discouraging reporting to require sealing of the information,” he wrote.

The judge, though, agreed with SU on one point. The names of faculty and staff on the University Conduct Board and the University Appeals Board should not be made available in the data, he said. 

“Faculty and staff would be less likely to volunteer to resolve cases — which are emotional and can become controversial — if they could not keep their names out of public discussion,” McAvoy wrote. 

He ordered the case’s plaintiff, “John Doe,” to redact the UCB and UAB information before resubmitting the document in court no later than May 14. 

The list must be unsealed after that, the judge ruled.

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Published on May 1, 2020 at 4:30 pm

Contact Sam: sfogozal@syr.edu | @SamOgozalek