Law student barred from school under no-contact order gets new hearing
An Illinois appeals court has ordered a new hearing for a University of Illinois law student banned from campus for two years because of his interactions with a female student.
The appeals court said the trial court improperly considered evidence outside the record in November 2013 when it barred law student Adil Ahmad from campus and ordered him to have no contact with the female student, the National Law Journal (sub. req.) reports. Both were third-year law students at the time.
The judge should not have considered a police report that referred to a courthouse mock trial competition in which Ahmad was allegedly removed from the building, the appeals court said in its July 17 opinion (PDF). The court said the police report had not been entered into evidence during the hearing.
Ahmad maintains he did not stalk the female student who turned down his offers for date. The student claimed Ahmad had sent her a series of emails seeking a date, and she found the content “insulting, offensive and scary,” the appeals court said.
The first email, sent on Valentine’s Day 2013, said the woman dates “old, balding rich Jewish men” and asked if he could “steal you away from your jdate boyfriends for a drink this weekend.” The second asked, “So, did you forget to pay your bills and can’t answer emails anymore?” The woman answered that she had “started seeing somebody.”
The third email to the woman read: “So you had a good excuse last time. What’s your excuse this time? I was going to talk to you after class but I had to call the devil. Is your number on the intranet the right one?” The woman replied that she hadn’t clarified before, but she “was not interested in [Ahmad] in that way.”
The woman said that Ahmad approached her in the law school cafeteria to discuss the emails in October 2013. When she said she wasn’t interested, the woman alleged, he punched her in the arm, though it didn’t hurt her very much.
Ahmad maintained his first email was intended to be a lighthearted reference to a conversation during a lunch and learn program, and his comment about the devil was a reference to a class discussion. He maintained he talked to the woman in the cafeteria to make sure there was no bad blood between them, and said his contact with her arm was a pat on the shoulder.
Ahmad represented himself on appeal.
