In the far reaches of my fading memory, I recall a guy passed out on the couch in my fraternity’s TV room after a party. Blue Meanies was our beverage of choice, consisting of grain alcohol and Blue Curaçao, poured into red solo cups and occasionally the floor. The passed out guy, whose nickname was Ski Pole, survived. I can’t remember any women passing out. I assume they were smarter than Ski Pole and knew their limit.

Ski Pole was incapacitated. Others, myself included, were merely drunk. Had someone taken sexual advantage of Ski Pole (for the record, no woman ever did), it would have been sexual assault. I, however, could not have been a victim, because I had the capacity to give consent. Yes, I was drunk. No, I was not incapacitated.

My judgment was likely poor, but that was my fault. No one forced me to drink that Blue Meanie. I could walk, talk, make decisions. Even if I made a decision I later came to regret, the choices were mine, and the responsibility for those choices were mine. Hey, I made bad decisions stone sober too.

Paul Heyward Robinson was a student at the College of Charleston when he met a woman on OKCupid. I can tell you his name, but I can’t tell you hers. She’s only referred to as the “victim,” which is curious given that a jury returned a verdict of not guilty in 28 minutes.

Robinson and the woman, now both 31, were looking for a date on Valentine’s Day 2014. They connected through OKCupid, an online dating application.

They went to Frankie’s Fun Park and sampled beer at a Charleston brewery. They dined on triggerfish and duck, then met friends for more drinks at another restaurant.

Past midnight, the woman went to his apartment, where she got sick.

The description is sadly spartan. Did she vomit? One would assume, though there is nothing to suggest she was drunk, no less so drunk that she reached the point of incapacitation. And then the story takes a huge, inexplicable leap.

Robinson would later say that they had consensual sex.

But the woman would tell investigators that after passing out, she woke up to Robinson having sex with her. She hit him and tried to push him off, she said.

If true, this would be rape. There seems to be an epidemic of women passing out, and even more, “blacking out,” where they are apparently functional but claim to have no memory of what transpired. Black out claims are more problematic, as someone else would have no notice of their status beyond what appears to the world. If they appear functional, people will understand them to be so. What, if anything, is happening in their brain is their secret. No one else can guide their conduct according to secrets.

But passed out is different. And the “victim” had one additional bit of evidence.

But her own lawyers would point to the text message she later sent to him, indicating that their sexual rendezvous was unwanted.

“I’m not okay with what happened,” she told him.

When  later? It’s unsaid. What does “not okay” mean? Was it “you raped me” or “I regret having sex on a first date,” as the defense argued that this claim was a fabrication that came after she was slut-shamed by her friends for what she did.

After the allegations were made, Robinson was expelled from the College of Charleston.

His accuser expressed fear that she would encounter him on the downtown campus. Robinson was expelled after a hearing under the federal Title IX law, which aims to maintain a safe atmosphere for such accusers.

In that disciplinary process, officials must be about 51 percent sure* of an accused student’s guilt before taking such action. Attorneys are not allowed to speak for them.

“They just say, ‘We believe this happened,’ and kick the student out,” said Mark Peper, a Charleston lawyer who defended Robinson along with attorney David Aylor. “There’s no due process.”

Unlike most such accusations, a criminal accusation was made, the case prosecuted and a trial held.

But the victim’s attorney, Merritt Farmer of Mount Pleasant, lauded his client for withstanding a barrage of attempts to discredit her since she aired the accusation. The jury never heard some facts that could have aided its decision, he said.

If they were facts, if they were admissible into evidence, then it’s inexplicable that the jury never heard them. It appears the investigation was shoddy, though not in the defendant’s favor.

At Robinson’s three-day trial in late November, defense attorneys said the police investigator acknowledged never reviewing a medical exam of the victim or interviewing key witnesses before arresting him.

“There were aspects of the investigation that were not as thorough as it could have been,” said Assistant Solicitor Drew Evans, who prosecuted the case, “and the detective acknowledged this.”

It took the jury only 28 minutes to return a verdict of not guilty. This reflects the difference between a system that believes the “victim” and provides no due process versus a system that presumes innocence of the accused and provides the defendant with due process.

Such cases are “inherently difficult” to prove in the first place, [Assistant Solicitor Drew] Evans said.

And they should be. The burden of proof should be on the prosecution, on the accuser. The jury’s verdict failed to believe the “victim’s” testimony, that she was passed out, beyond a reasonable doubt. To anyone who refuses to accept this finding, who didn’t hear the testimony, the evidence, the argument, a 28-minute verdict suggests the jury didn’t struggle to find the defendant not guilty. One might well assume the jury found the “victim” not credible.

Still, he was thrown out of college and all his future plans went with it. There was no win here. Just a little less loss than there could have been.

When Ski Pole passed out, we knew it because we saw it. And everyone at the party took notice, because it was rare that someone passed out. Others were certainly drunk, and some went on to have consensual, if intoxicated, sexual liaisons that night while others did not. Whether anyone regretted it the next day is unknown, but there were no cries of rape because the only person incapacitated was Ski Pole.

Did the “victim” here pass out and get raped? The jury had little difficulty concluding she did not. Many will dismiss the verdict, rationalize why it’s all unfair to the woman who can’t prove she was raped, and use the verdict to prove the system is unfair to women and perpetuates victims’ silence and sexual oppression.

The next morning, Ski Pole knew it was his own fault for drinking too many Blue Meanies. He blamed no one but himself.

*Not to belabor the obvious, but the preponderance of the evidence standard, mandated by the Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague” letter, is but one aspect of an integrated system of due process. It’s the totality of process, not just standard of proof, that affords a fair outcome rather than a pre-ordained outcome based on “believe the victim” and precludes any effective defense.