ASHE SCHOW: Updating the cliche that it’s better to let ’10 guilty men go free.’

The old liberal cliché that it’s “better 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer” has been upended in recent years — at least when it comes to accusations of sexual assault.

The cliché has been replaced by: “It’s better 10 innocent persons suffer than one guilty escape.”

The push to reduce campus sexual assault has bred this new sentiment, as policies purporting to make colleges and universities safer actually increase the likelihood that innocent students will be accused and punished. The new policies broaden the definition of sexual assault while narrowing the definition of consent, and remove due process protections for accused students while severely limiting what constitutes “evidence” in their defense.

We can see the destruction of the above cliché in last month’s Washington Post survey on campus sexual assault. Students were asked whether it was “more unfair” for an innocent student to get kicked out of college based on an accusation or for a guilty person to get away with it.

Forty-two percent of respondents (including 49 percent of men but just 36 percent of women) said that it was “more unfair” for an innocent student to be expelled. Conversely, 49 percent of students (including 42 percent of men and 56 percent of women) said that it was “more unfair” for the guilty to get away.

The question itself is absurd, as both options are terrible. No one should be playing “victim Olympics” — deciding whose victimhood is more legitimate.

Actually, there’s a lot of power in doing that, and a lot of people who want to wield it.