Florida anti-hazing bill seeks to curb violence

With a campus beauty queen telling tales of friends who suffered in silence from fraternity hazing, a legislative panel voted unanimously Monday to make mistreatment of new club members a serious criminal offense.

Rep. Adam Hasner, R-Delray Beach, said hazing usually is treated as an administrative problem on campus. He said the consent of victims - usually pledges eager to join fraternities or sororities and students wanting to belong to clubs in high school - hinders prosecution for what might otherwise be considered assault and battery.

"This is very important to me," said Kristen Murphy of Longwood, the new Miss Florida Gator. She said her platform in the coming Miss Florida Pageant is "Breaking vows of silence, eliminating hazing everywhere."

She said a friend was "forced to go out in freezing weather, dropped off in his underwear and told to find a house, while members drove by and threw raw eggs and fish" at him and other fraternity pledges. Murphy said victims of physical and mental abuse are afraid to speak out and usually pass along the unspoken tradition by harassing future pledges.

"They were physically harmed, they were psychologically harmed," she said. "One of my friends wakes up with nightmares in the middle of the night all because of instances that happened to him at the beginning of last semester."

Murphy did not name campuses but made a point of saying she was not referring to Gainesville or Tallahassee.

"May I note that all of these boys were intoxicated," she said. "The problem with this is that these boys, who were also beaten and sleep-deprived, have no way of reporting this because they'll just be tattletales and the university will take care of it, no big deal."

Hasner said hazing "is a nationwide epidemic" in high schools and on college campuses. His bill is named the Chad Meredith Act, for a University of Miami student who drowned Nov. 5, 2001, in a hazing incident.

In a civil case, a Miami jury last year awarded $12.6 million in damages against two fraternity members for Meredith's death.

A Tallahassee jury last November gave a $1.8 million judgment to a Florida A&M University Marching 100 member who said he suffered kidney damage because of paddling by five band members.

The FAMU board of trustees agreed to pay $50,000 to another former Marching 100 member in February. In the same month, five wrestlers at Deltona High School were accused of hogtying a teammate and zapping him with sparks from a grill ignitor.

Hasner's bill (HB 193) outlaws hazing in high schools and colleges. It defines the practice as "pressuring or coercing the student into violating state or federal law, any brutality of a physical nature such as whipping, beating, branding, exposure to elements, forced consumption of any food, liquor, drug or other substance" or other activities likely to cause injury.

Hazing would be a felony if someone is injured. If no one gets hurt, making someone perform risky stunts would be a misdemeanor.

Hasner, an attorney who serves as a chapter adviser and province president for the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, said he was never hazed at the University of Maryland "but I saw some things that could have gotten out of hand." He said his bill would apply only to dangerous forced acts, not harmless pranks or shouting commands at pledges.

"The reason it's important to get this kind of a criminal act on the books is because in so many instances, students and members in social organizations actually use consent as a defense to an act of battery," Hasner said. "This legislation would provide state attorneys with another tool to go after the perpetrators of these acts."

Hasner said prospects for passage of his bill look favorable. The House Justice Council, a panel of representatives from several House committees, approved the bill Monday.

A companion bill (SB 782) by Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale, has made it through substantive committees and is in the Senate Justice Appropriations Committee for an evaluation of its potential budget impact.

Tallahassee Democrat | 04/19/2005 | Anti-hazing bill seeks to curb violence