A divided Washington Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Washington State University had no duty to protect a student from rape in a Pullman off-campus home, even though the school was aware of the rapist’s prior behavior.
In the ruling, five justices agreed the university had no type of protective custody over those who enroll, so there was no duty to protect her with “no power to control her decisions or actions away from campus.”
The justices also wrote the school could not have predicted the sexual assault because they could not control the rapist’s actions. Four justices disagreed.
Court documents say the female student and 23-year-old student Thomas Culhane both attended an off-campus party on College Hill in Pullman in August of 2017. The female student was “too weak and intoxicated to push him away” during the assault, so she started to scream. The documents state he wrapped his hands around her neck, causing her to lose consciousness. She woke up the next morning and told her friends what had happened. Culhane was found guilty of second-degree rape in 2019 and sentenced to nine months in jail.
Culhane was previously enrolled at WSU’s Vancouver campus. He had received two complaints against him from women alleging he had sexually harassed and groped them, the ruling said.
The complaints led to an investigation from the university that found him responsible for violating the school’s code of conduct, in which he was suspended for nine days and required to write an essay about consent. Culhane was later approved to transfer to WSU’s Pullman campus.
Three weeks after the transfer, court documents say, Culhane raped the female student at the party. She sued the school, alleging the university had direct knowledge of multiple complaints against Culhane and did nothing to intervene .
In 2021, a federal judge ruled WSU was not responsible for a rape that occurred off-campus. The female student appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which asked the Washington Supreme Court to answer two questions: Whether Washington law recognizes a special relationship between a university and its students, requiring a special duty to protect them; and if so, what the scope of the duty is.
The court decided that while a special relationship between universities and students does exist, it only applies to curriculum-based activities.
Universities also don’t have the same duties as K-12 schools, since students at a university are adults and able to come and go places as they please, “where interactions are far less intimate and consistent,” the court wrote.
“While sexual assaults are horrific, a university simply has no power to dictate students’ movements off campus and away from the oversight of campus security and administration,” the opinion said. “We place no blame on (the victim). But a lack of blame on the victim does not establish blame and duty on a third party. The blame lies on Culhane.”
Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis was one of the justices that disagreed with the majority. She wrote in her dissenting opinion that the university’s duty to protect “is not confined to the campus borders if the harm is reasonably foreseeable.” Because WSU has a code of conduct that extends off-campus, Montoya-Lewis also said its reasonable to assume it should have been taken into account the first time.
University involvement also spills beyond school life, she wrote, so students will typically rely on the university for certain types of assistance — “especially those living away from their parents or guardians for the first time.”
Montoya-Lewis claimed in her opinion that for many students, the majority’s approach to the questions was too rigid and didn’t align with the modern understanding of what university life is like.
“In light of our robust knowledge around the dangers university students are facing and the response by some universities, reducing the relationship to that between a business owner and a business invitee, as the majority opinion does, would excuse universities from accountability and would be inconsonant with the reality of the college experience and universities’ roles in students’ lives,” she wrote.
