SEATTLE — The U.S. Justice Department’s decision to open a civil-rights investigation into the handling of sexual-assault cases in Missoula, Mont., follows months of efforts by city officials to deal with escalating complaints about rapes at the University of Montana.
The Justice Department said it would look at 80 reported sexual assaults in the city over the past three years. Many of the cases appear to involve young women at the university who said they were victimized — sometimes gang-raped — in attacks that often involved drugs and alcohol.
An investigation last year by a former justice of the Montana Supreme Court found at least nine incidents of reported sexual assaults in 2010 and 2011 at the university. Most were apparently committed by students; few were prosecuted. Two more cases have been reported since then.
The extraordinary step of a Justice Department investigation comes amid suggestions that the campus police force, the Missoula Police Department and the Missoula County attorney’s office may have violated federal gender-discrimination laws by repeatedly failing to adequately investigate and prosecute alleged sexual assaults, federal officials said.
County prosecutors said they couldn’t say how many cases had been prosecuted. Only one of the assaults reported at the university has been publicly identified for prosecution: Beau Donaldson, running back for the Grizzlies football team, was charged this year with rape after a student complained she had awakened to find him having sexual intercourse with her.
Missoula County Prosecutor Fred Van Valkenburg said Missoula had no more rape complaints than any other city of its size and that all cases are considered for prosecution based on whether there is a chance of winning a conviction.
