“Members found guilty of hazing will be permanently and irrevocably expelled from Sigma Gamma Rho.” “Hazing is wrong, prohibited and unauthorized,” it says. The Sigma Gamma Rho Web site, too, clearly states the sorority’s anti-hazing policy. But hazing is illegal, he said, and the university makes serious efforts to educate all incoming students and their parents about how to deal with it. Larry Carr, a spokesman for San Jose State, said he could not comment on pending litigation. Howard’s civil suit charges that the university and the sorority were negligent in investigating and responding to her accusations of hazing. Four of the sorority members have pleaded no contest to misdemeanor hazing charges, and been sentenced to 90 days in county jail, two years of probation and barred from any further involvement in the sorority. In 2008, San Jose State suspended the sorority chapter until 2016. “One of the girls who was a big sister told me it was supposed to be so you can feel what your ancestors went through in slavery, so you will respect what you came from,” Ms. Howard claims in her suit that they beat her and other pledges with wooden paddles, slapped them with wooden spoons, shoved them against the wall, and threatened that “snitches get stitches.” 31, that over a three-week period in 2008 she was subjected to progressively more violent hazing from Sigma Gamma Rho members. In the San Jose State case, Courtney Howard, a former student at the university, charged in a civil lawsuit, filed Aug. The trial, originally set for this month, has been delayed because of the prosecutor’s surgery. The charges were reduced to simple hazing, a disorderly persons offense. In two separate hazing cases at universities this year, members of Sigma Gamma Rho, an African-American sorority, have been charged with beating their pledges with wooden paddles.Īt Rutgers, six members of Sigma Gamma Rho were arrested in January and charged with aggravated hazing, a felony, after a pledge reported that she had been struck 200 times over seven days before she finally went to the hospital, covered with welts and bloody bruises.īoth the university and the national sorority suspended the Rutgers chapter.
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