Rape and the "Civilized" World

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Tiassa, Mar 27, 2013.

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  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Piling On the Insult

    Piling On: When We Don't Care Who's Guilty

    Okay, the setup: Bob was unjustly convicted of rape thirty years ago. That much is obvious, since he was convicted according to an anonymous tip about two brothers with a different last name, and an unreliable witness identification; he received a seventy year sentence.

    By the end of the last decade, Bob and his family were ready to try one last-ditch effort; he filed a motion seeking DNA testing that wasn't available during his original trial. A judge refused, according to a technical detail. Two years later, Bob tried again. The same judge refused according to a technical detail. His sister called a court clerk trying to figure out what the problem was.

    The clerk went so far as to provide Bob's sister with a redacted copy of a DNA testing motion that had been granted. Bob and his sister tried a third time, this time modeling their motion after one that had been granted.

    Indeed, it worked. The motion was granted, and as a result, not only is Bob free, the DNA testing process also led to the actual guilty rapists.

    And now, the punch line: The court clerk has been fired by the judge who heard all three motions, for alleged violations of court canon against "the risk of offering an opinion of suggested course of action".

    Judge Byrn, it seems, really wanted to keep this innocent man in prison. I mean, we get the whole point about the court canons and why they're important, but justice is important, too. And think about it, what the judge was really pissed off about was that this convict found the right way to phrase a request that should have been granted the first time. The only reason Judge Byrn's court did not wish to free an innocent man and convict the guilty parties is ... er ... um ... well, yeah, what was his thinking, there?
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Hayes, Chris. "Court clerk fired for helping free wrongfully convicted man". All In With Chris Hayes. August 15, 2013. TV.MSNBC.com. August 18, 2013. http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/15/court-clerk-fired-for-helping-free-wrongfully-convicted-man/
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Having worked with a county justice system, I don't think that's it at all.

    Judges regard themselves as gods. As far as they're concerned they are infallible. They do not appreciate some peon telling them that they're wrong, and then proving it!

    And I don't really mean to include all of them; many of them are quite decent--people you'd be proud to have as friends or colleagues--and are as dedicated to correcting an erroneous decision as we are. But some of them really do have a divinity complex.
     
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  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    If the Request Has Merit ....

    Well, right, but if the request has merit ...?

    I mean, it would seem the request always had merit. It's kind of the reverse of what people complained about in the eighties; if a guy was guilty what does it matter if the officer broke the law to arrest him?

    If this request had merit, then why look for a technicality to refuse it?

    To the one, though, we see the value in the court canons. To the other, though, the underlying suggestion is that the court is disgraced and insulted, and would have been better off leaving an innocent man in prison, and two rapists unaccounted for.

    But, yeah, right now I'm just smoldering at the idea that proper justice should somehow be an offense to the court,
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Then it stands in opposition to the judge's pride.

    Not to all judges. But some of them have big egos. As far as they're concerned, THEY are justice.
     
  8. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Smith Isn't Dead ....

    A Father Challenges a Woman on Women's Issues ... Except They're Not Exclusively Women's Issues

    Blogger Mike Julianelle decided to challenge a mother's advice to daughters everyhere, or something like that. Flip a coin; heads, you celebrate Julianelle's post, tails, you smack your head against the desk in response to the proposition that this sort of retort is still necessary.

    I recently came across a blog post in which a mother of four (three boys, one girl) addresses The Teenage Girl and begs her to stop being a skank.

    That's not quite how she says it, but that's clearly what she means. Actually, what she means is something more like, "Boys can't control themselves, so you have to stop tempting them." Which sounds like something a Republican congressman would say ....

    .... I don't have a teenage daughter. I don't have any daughter. But if I did have a daughter, I would agree with this woman that it's not a good idea for her to post photos of herself naked or half-naked or three-quarters naked or fully naked on social media outlets. Because once the Internet has them, everyone does. But I have an almost 3-year-old son, and I will tell my son the same thing, once he's old enough to post photos online (probably next week).

    But I will also tell my son that just because he sees a picture of a naked or half-naked or three-quarters naked or fully naked girl or woman or boy or man online, and just because he can't "un-see" such a picture, that doesn't mean he has ownership over that person, or that he has the right to shame that person, or that he has any idea of who she really is based on a photo or that it's OK for her to be nothing more than a sex object to him. To borrow a phrase often used to justify this kind of sexism, she's not "asking for it."

    Most importantly, it doesn't mean that he suddenly sacrifices his own agency and self-control and morals and understanding of right and wrong and personal responsibility in the face of something that gets his hormones raging ....

    .... Here's the thing: It's not up to women to protect men from themselves. And it's certainly not The Teenage Girl's responsibility to help teenage boys, or college guys, or middle-aged men, control their basest instincts. Teenagers can hardly be responsible for anything, and just because a young girl didn't totally think through her decision to post a selfie that inadvertently titillated someone and gave them impure thoughts doesn't remove that someone's responsibility to not be a lecherous asshole and treat that girl like a whore every time they see her.

    No, it's up to this woman, and her husband, and me, and my wife, and parents everywhere, to teach our children—our boys and our girls—to respect others and take responsibility for their own actions. Why did this woman feel the need to write an open letter to someone else's children? Why didn't she write one to her own sons, stressing the need to respect the opposite sex, no matter how much they might disapprove of their actions?

    I suppose it's kind of like ... er ... well ... watching a sports injury. The arena grows quiet as the medical staff rushes onto the field and gathers around the motionless player. Teammates and opponents take a knee, alone or in knots; everyone watches the huddle around the player. The cart rolls out onto the field, and paramedics carefully secure the player to the board, then lift him up to the back of the cart. As the cart begins moving to take him off the field, the player moves one hand, giving a thumbs-up signal to whoever is watching: I'm alive, still in this.

    And everybody cheers. You know, hooray. Smith isn't dead; he's just gravely injured and possibly maimed for life.

    I mean, it makes sense in the moment, but it's kind of morbid when you stop and think about it.

    So hooray for Mr. Julianelle. Great post. Something like that. What could possibly have inspired such a ... er ... um ... oh.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Julianelle, Mike. "We Need to Parent Our Sons AND Our Daughters". The Huffington Post. September 5, 2013. HuffingtonPost.com. September 5, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-...ent-our-sons-and-our-daughters_b_3872493.html
     
  9. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    If I Skip the Story ....

    Anti-Prophet

    The Anti-Prophet is a joke I make about myself whenever I get one completely wrong. But enough about me, except to note that I passed on this story the first time because of a combination of fatigue and the expectation that nothing useful was going to happen.

    Then again, things are happening, and some of them might actually be useful.

    Let us start, then, with Cienna Madrid's summary:

    This week of assaults on the eyes and humorless dictators gets off to a depressing start in Billings, Montana, with news that a high-school teacher convicted of raping a 14-year-old female student would only serve one month in jail for his crime. In 2008, Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, was first charged with three felony counts of sexual intercourse without consent after the teen told a church counselor that she'd been sexually assaulted by a teacher, court documents reveal. But while the case was pending—and just a few weeks before her 17th birthday—the girl took her own life. As the Billings Gazette reports, prosecuting attorneys asked the judge to sentence Rambold to serve up to 20 years in prison, given that the victim's mother testified that her daughter's relationship with Rambold was a "major factor" in her suicide. But in explaining his insultingly lenient sentence, Montana district judge G. Todd Baugh said that he believed the teen was "older than her chronological age" and that she was "as much in control of the situation" as her middle-aged teacher. As the girl's mother would state after the sentencing, "I don't believe in justice anymore. She wasn't even old enough to get a driver's license."

    •• In slightly redemptive news, Judge Baugh's comments will spark an immediate backlash, including protests, calls for his resignation, and requests that his sentence be reevaluated, reports the LA Times. On Wednesday, Baugh will apologize for his comments in an open letter to the Billings Gazette, conceding that they were "demeaning of all women." Then he'll go ahead and demean women some more by arguing that while a 14-year-old "obviously" cannot give consent, "I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape... It was horrible enough as it is just given her age, but it wasn't this forcible beat-up rape."

    If you managed to get through that without retching, well, either congratulations or go ahead and take the necessary moment to renegotiate your most recent meal.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Madrid, Cienna. "Last Days". The Stranger. September 4, 2013. TheStranger.com. September 6, 2013. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/last-days/Content?oid=17659079
     
  10. Bells Staff Member

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    Deborah Cruz was also very scathing of Mrs Hall's blog.


    Instead of writing a blog post letter to all these young girls that are not reading mommy blogs, hoping maybe their parents will see it and shame them into keeping their clothes on, why not teach her sons to unfriend these girls? Why not teach her precious boys to rise above it and just not look at the photos? Why blame the girls?

    Mrs. Hall threatens to exile these girls from her sons' social media pages if they don't cover up their breasts and stop popping out their hips, but at the same time she has a photo of her sons' topless on a beach, puffing their chests out. Double standards much?

    I also want to know, am I missing something, are these boys One Direction? I mean she wields the threat of social media exile as if her sons are God's gift to the world. Oh, wait, they are because they are boys and those topless girls are just sin waiting to happen.

    I wonder would Mrs. Hall be so understanding if it were her daughter who was being threatened to be booted off of someone else's online island? Boot away Mrs. Hall, I am pretty sure no girl in the country wants to be anywhere near that island if you are on it.


    Then again, a quick read through Hall's blog shows exactly what kind of person she is. A loon comes to mind. For example, her summer reading list.. 6th on her list.. What she describes as:

    Not a new book, and not exactly a typical beach-read, but very good. A thoughtful and helpful guide (for me) to better love, listen, counsel, care for, and support those in the church who struggle with homosexuality. Compassionate and uber-truthful at the same time…

    The book in question is about praying away the gay..

    Fun summer reading.

    As I said, she's a loon.
     
  11. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Sad Thing Is ....

    The sad thing is that I happened to notice the discussion of this open letter on Good Morning America, and made the mistake of stopping in my tracks to pay attention to what they were saying.

    Even the female hosts of GMA were all down with slut-shaming. And the web article from the show is ridiculous, going so far as to include a parent who protects her seventeen year-old son from the "dangerous" internet.

    And this will probably cause a household rift. I loathe GMA as it is, but this is too much—I have a daughter, and she needs to know these people are unacceptable.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Here in the (slightly more) civilized part of America, people are just rolling their eyes and saying, "Well what else would you expect in Montana? It's still the Wild West there. Their highways have no speed limit and they hunt wolves!"
     
  13. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Excuse me, please, while I blither

    Aye, indeed. A friend went back to see his estranged paternal nonparent some years ago, say, early-mid nineties; his early twenties. And I remember sitting around over beers one night as he explained a local Skull & Bones club in ... um ... some town we both knew for the presence of famous witches and a crystal shop ... oh, right, the aptly named (sort of) Kalispell. I think it was an S&B, which has nothing to do with the secret society of rich folk, as it involved gangs of midlifers digging up old graves, drinking heavily, and getting in fights involving—get this—drive-by shootings with sawed-off shotguns. I mean, yeah, it sounds like a joke, and maybe it wasn't Kalispell, as we were drinking plenty in those days (although we both do adore the name), but this was first a story told him by his paternal nonparent, and then witnessed to some degree, albeit peripherally.

    Still, though, even setting that aside as drunken legend, and whatever else we might say about the men being men and the sheep being scared, even in Montana it's a human toll.

    And, for the record, it was in Idaho, while on my way to Montana, that I encountered the phenomenal teenage pastime of driving vehicles up impassable grades until the thing toppled and rolled back down the hill. And I adore that story because, once upon a time, in the Ford years, I actually lived in that town. In Montana, incidentally, the phenomenal teenage pastime seemed to be driving Japanese coupes—bought damaged on the cheap and slowly, panel-by-panel, put back together—through the mountains at modestly high but not suicidal speed, and gathering at rest stops, where the guys all stood around on the sidewalk, smoking and chewing and jawing with one another, and in each of the fifteen cars down the row sat a pretty li'l thing that apparently didn't want to talk to any of the other pretty li'l things, so they all just sat there looking pretty in the passenger seats of Acura and Nissan coupes about which the best thing to be said was at least the panels were straight and they were all down to three or less colors on the body, and oh, yeah, the pretty li'l things, some of whom were of no proper age to be out cruising with the guys, sitting in the passenger seats.

    (Can you tell I was Rocky Mountain High on that drive? With one of those Ford Taurus ovals, metallic sand colored, I managed to achieve exactly zero G on an arcing leftward curve in the mountains, with the suspension desperately searching for the badly cambered road as we all floated at some eighty-seven miles an hour. Damn near a time-warp to the other side of the river, so to speak, but holy shit that was cool. I loved the Taurus. Great car.)

    But, yeah. Montana or not, it just really sucks. I was so trying to not let that story get to me, but it just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. Montana or not, these are the United States of American, damn it! What the hell is wrong with us? Oh, right. Civilized. I guess it's just not satisfying.
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Wacko Waco?

    Of Course It's Waco ....

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    Miscalculation? Apparently, Brad Kolb wasn't expecting the negative reaction.

    What you're looking at above is ... well, Matt Howerton tries to explain:

    A tailgate decal suggesting that a woman is bound and tied in the back of a truck is raising some eyebrows in the Waco community.

    At a glance, the decal is extremely convincing and acts as an optical illusion to make someone think there is an actual woman tied up in the bed of a truck.

    But a closer look reveals that the optical illusion is simply a decal, and there is no woman in distress.

    The decal is the handy work of Hornet Signs, a marketing and advertising company in Waco.

    According to Brad Kolb, the owner of the company, the sticker was put on an employee’s truck to gauge how realistic their decals are.

    "I wasn't expecting the reactions we got, nor do we condone this by any means,” Kolb said.

    “It was more or less something we put out there to see who noticed it."

    But, you know, it's okay, right? Because his employee volunteered to play the captive. And he apparently had no idea that people would react so poorly. Oh, and by the way, he doesn't condone this sort of thing.

    Which is why the question on everyone's mind in Waco, at least according to Howerton, is, "Poor taste, or good business?"

    All of which reminds us, "Oh, yeah. It's Texas."

    (No, seriously, how is this remotely appropriate?)
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Howerton, Matt. "Provocative Tailgate Decal Stirs Controversy". KWTX. September 5, 2013. KWTX.com. September 6, 2013. http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Controversial-Tailgate-Stirs-Community-222620911.html
     
  15. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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  16. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,884
    Thus Wept Columbia

    Thus Wept Columbia

    I ... um ...

    No.

    I mean, please, someone tell me this isn't real.

    The Air Force has dropped a recommendation to discharge a senior airman at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., who had accused three superiors of sexual harassment and assault.

    Senior Airman Ciera Bridges, who had been facing discharge under other than honorable conditions, was featured in an Oct. 7 recent Air Force Times report on three airmen who claim they were retaliated against after accusing superiors of assault and harassment. Bridges was cited repeatedly for minor misconduct after she began making complaints against superiors for the harassment, which she said began soon after she arrived at Nellis in November 2009 and persisted for nearly three years.

    Bridges alleged her chain of command retaliated against her by issuing letters of counseling and reprimands instead of handling the problems. In January, she learned she had been recommended for the discharge, which she appealed.

    Bridges sought the help of advocacy organization Protect Our Defenders, which learned Wednesday the discharge has been dropped.


    (Davis)

    So ....

    I would say it's funny how that works, except it's just not funny at all. In any context or by any definition.

    Why should it ever go so far that the Air Force needs to be embarrassed out of doing the absolutely worst possible thing it could under the circumstances?

    And they're not even embarrassed into doing the right thing.

    So, yeah, come on, please? Tell me I'm hoaxed? This isn't happening? Please? I mean, this isn't really how it goes, is it?

    Right?

    Please?
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Davis, Kristin. "Discharge dropped for airman who claimed retaliation". Air Force Times. October 9, 2013. AirForceTimes.com. October 10, 2013. http://www.airforcetimes.com/articl...charge-dropped-airman-who-claimed-retaliation
     
  17. Bells Staff Member

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    24,270
    What is it with rape, douchebaggery and towns ending in "ville"?

    Some background to this story..

    After a tragic accident that saw the death of her husband, Mrs Coleman decided to relocate her family to Maryville, for a fresh start. She had a very pretty little girl, named Daisy, who was growing up to be an even prettier teenager. Her daughter had caught the eye of a footballer in her school and they had begun to send each other texts.

    Nothing wrong with that. It is normal nowdays.

    One night in January a few years ago, Daisy, then 14 and a friend she had known since she was a small child, who was staying with them, had a few drinks Daisy had stashed away in her wardrobe. After texting the footballer, he and his friends came to her house and Daisy and her friend decided to sneak out of the house and they went to a party at said footballer's home. Normal teenage behaviour.

    This is where things get twisted.

    When they got to his house, the girls were plied with more alcohol and other substances, given to them by the boys at the party and encouraged to drink it. She does not remember anything that happened after that. But what happened after that is what leads us to this point today.

    The sun hadn’t yet risen the next morning when Coleman, groggy from a sleep interrupted, made her way toward the living room.

    She had woken moments earlier to the sound of scratching at the front door — the dogs, she figured, had gotten out — and grudgingly went to investigate.

    Instead, she found Daisy, sprawled on the front porch and barely conscious.

    The low temperature in the area that day was listed at 22 degrees, and the teen had spent roughly three hours outside, wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants. Her hair was frozen. Scattered across an adjacent lot were her daughter’s purse, shoes and cellphone.

    Coleman tried to process what she was seeing. Daisy had a history of sleepwalking — years earlier, she had wandered outside. Had she done it again? In her daughter’s bedroom, Coleman found the 13-year-old asleep. She, too, seemed confused.

    Still struggling to make sense of it all, Coleman carried her daughter to the bathroom, to be undressed for a warm bath.

    That’s when she saw the redness around her daughter’s genitalia and buttocks. It hurt, the girl said, when Coleman asked about it. Then she began crying.

    “Immediately,” Coleman says, “I knew what had happened.”

    Coleman called 911, which directed her to St. Francis Hospital in Maryville, where, according to Daisy’s medical report, doctors observed small vaginal tears indicative of recent sexual penetration. The 13-year-old also ended up at St. Francis.

    It wasn’t until a captain of the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the hospital for one-on-one interviews with each girl, however, that the full picture of the night’s events began to emerge.

    While the last Daisy remembered was drinking “a big glass of clear stuff,” the 13-year-old’s recollections proved more useful.

    The younger girl, who admitted drinking that night but denied doing so after arriving at Barnett’s, said she went into a bedroom with the 15-year-old boy, who was an acquaintance. He is unidentified in this article because his case was handled in juvenile court, but sheriff’s records include his interview, in which he said that although the girl said “no” multiple times, he undressed her, put a condom on and had sex with her.

    When the two returned to the basement’s common area, the 13-year-old said, Barnett emerged from another room and asked if the girls were ready to go home. She said Daisy was unable to speak coherently and had to be carried from the bedroom.

    Around 2 a.m., the girls were driven back to the Coleman house, where, the 13-year-old said, the boys told her to go on inside, saying they would watch over Daisy outside until she sobered up.

    The younger girl also offered a significant detail, one later reiterated in the interviews of at least three of the boys.

    As Daisy was carried to the car, she was crying.


    That's right. After raping her, they left her outside in freezing temperature in a tshirt and track pants, unconscious... And they did this deliberately.

    The police were called, the boys involved rounded up. There was video footage of the rape. Police then obtained a search warrant and they found further evidence of what happened that night. Daisy's 17 year old footballer boyfriend, Barnett, was arrested, along with a few others for the events of that night.

    You would think this was a done deal. Medical tests performed on Daisy support the allegations that she was pretty much comatose, because of the amount of alcohol and other substances she was plied with. They have video footage and evidence gathered from the room where her rape and that of her friend occurred.

    It seems not.

    As many of the town rallied around the athletes involved, with the prosecutor alleging it was just a few teenagers getting up to what teenagers apparently do, drinking and having sex, the prosecutor, Rice, dismissed the charges against Barnett and his friends, apparently before the results of the rape kit even came back. And this is where it becomes even more insidious:

    When a reporter visited Maryville police to obtain copies of Zech’s arrest record, for instance, the department employee who pulled the file was the mother of one of the five boys at the Barnett home that night.

    “It’s a big town in a rural area, but it’s still a rural area,” says author Harry MacLean, who spent four years living in Nodaway County while researching “In Broad Daylight,” his best-selling book on the murder of Skidmore bully Ken McElroy and the town cover-up that followed. “…They do tend to revolve around the influence of several families. All of those small towns are like that there. There’s four or five or six families that carry the weight.”

    And in Maryville, the Barnett name carries a good deal of weight.

    Rex Barnett served 32 years with the Missouri Highway Patrol’s Troop H before embarking on a fruitful political run. In 1994, the Republican was elected as a state representative, serving four terms before leaving the House in 2002.

    He also has political ties to prosecutor Rice. Barnett’s granddaughter worked as a volunteer on the campaign of U.S. Rep. Sam Graves, who also employs Rice’s sister as an aide in constituent services.




    Rex Barnett is the grandfather of the alleged rapist.

    Mrs Coleman was fired from her job and she, Daisy and her other children harassed and abused and quite literally, run out of town.

    And amazingly enough, the issue becomes even uglier.

    Mrs Coleman put her house on the market after she left Maryville to protect her family and especially her daughter. What happened next is, well..

    There wasn’t much left by the time she arrived, just a burnt-out structure and the haze of smoke that lingered around it.

    The siding and gutters had melted. The roof was gone. Inside, piles of ash filled the rooms that had once bustled with the pleasant sounds of a family.

    That morning last April when Melinda Coleman received word that emergency vehicles were gathering around her Maryville house, she had hoped for the best.



    Yes, the Coleman house mysteriously burned down, the cause of the blaze remains unknown.

    Because that's not suspicious at all, is it?

    As for Barnett?

    Well he is having a grand old time at university and gloating about his popularity with the ladies.

    Daisy has attempted suicide twice, been hospitalised numerous times and treated for severe depression. Her 13 year old friend has not fared any better.


    Anonymous have become involved and are threatening to expose the whole town, and the prosecutor, Rice, who is now facing scrutiny and demands to release details of who funded his campaign, has decided to re-open the investigation in the case.

    As you can imagine, Barnett's family are none too pleased. They have today come out and stated that their son was now struggling with the negative publicity and they felt he was being assassinated. She then blamed Daisy for a conspiracy against her son and her family.. She has obviously ignored the fact that Daisy and her family were run out of town after being threatened, abused and harassed and the family home burned down.

    And Fox News take on this case now being re-opened? Well Shep Smith invited a guest on his program to discuss it...

    “What did she expect to happen at one in the morning after sneaking out?” attorney Joseph DiBenedetto said on Shephard Smith Reports. “I’m not saying — assuming that these facts are accurate and this did happen — I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, but knowing the facts as we do here including what the prosecutor has set forth, this case is going nowhere and it's going nowhere quick.”

    Shep Smith immediately jumped in and refuted his claims.

    “What you’ve done, Joseph, is taken an alleged victim of rape and turned her into a liar and a crime committer,” he said. “That’s a far jump from a 1,000 miles away."

    No shit Shep...
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    These are paid professional killers. You can't possibly expect any shred of morality in such an organization.

    These are the people who sit in safe, comfortable offices in front of a computer console and deploy drones to kill a houseful of innocent civilians because there might be one bad guy among them.

    Rape and murder go together. The two most barbaric, unforgivable, irreversible one-on-one crimes.

    Duh?
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    What Counts as Justice in Alabama

    Alabama Justice

    Via Kelly Kazek, of AL.com:

    Judge Jimmy Woodroof made what was, to her, a surprising announcement: The man convicted of raping Courtney would serve no jail time. Courtney, who is now 20, testified that her former friend and neighbor, Austin Clem, 25, sexually abused her at age 13, then raped her twice at age 14 and once at age 18.

    The jury agreed, convicting Clem on Sept. 11 on one count of first-degree rape for the forcible rape when Courtney was 18 and two counts of second-degree rape for the incidents when she was not old enough to consent.

    Courtney was in court to hear the sentence, although she now lives in Mobile and is a student at the University of South Alabama. "I moved to get as far away as possible from him," she said ....

    .... When she first heard the sentence, she said she did not understand the legal jargon, but when Chief Deputy District Attorney Jim Ayers explained, she was "livid."

    "I thought, 'How is this even possible?'" She said she is concerned for her family's safety if Clem remains out of jail.

    Woodroof has not returned a call placed to his office today.

    Prosecutor Ayers declared in court that the sentence wasn't legal; the question there is whether a Class A felony conviction is eligible for this kind of sentencing.

    Ayers questioned, though, whether the sentence for the Class A felony could be split as Woodroof did. He asked Woodroof to reconsider, Courtney said, but Woodroof reaffirmed the sentence today.

    "We expected him to go and change it and make it legal, at least," she said. "But he submitted the same exact sentencing. The judge still chooses to send him home to his three little girls. I don't understand that. I can't fathom that."

    Richard Andrews said on Wednesday, "We were somewhat relieved to find out that the sentence was actually not within legal mandatory sentencing guidelines as pointed out to the judge immediately by the assistant DA." When he heard the judge did not change the sentence, Andrews said he felt, "sickened, confused, wronged."

    Because in Alabama, what? Men are men, women are women, and a child predator shouldn't have to go to prison if he's raping females?

    No, seriously, what is the rationale here?

    Jane C. Timm of MSNBC notes:

    Scott Berkowitz, a spokesman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said light sentences are "extremely frustrating" for victims. "It suggests that the crime itself wasn't that serious," he said, adding rape "is the most violent crime that a victim lives to remember."

    "A sentence like this is more akin to littering than a sentence you would expect on serious charge like murder or rape," Berkowitz said of Clem's punishment ....

    .... "Incredibly light sentences like this tend to be indicative of individual problems more than systemic problems," RAINN's Berkowitz said. "The good news is that when a sentence is this light and inconsistent with the seriousness of the crime is it attracts national attention."

    To simply say, "Well, it is Alabama, after all," is insufficient.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Kazek, Kelly. "Victim says she's 'livid' rapist convicted in Limestone County will serve no jail time". November 14, 2013. AL.com. November 17, 2013. http://blog.al.com/breaking/2013/11/victim_says_shes_livid_rapist.html

    Timm, Jane C. "Teen's rapist not going to jail". MSNBC. Noveber 16. 2013. MSNBC.com. November 17, 2013. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rapist-sentenced-probation-no-jail-time
     
  20. Randwolf Ignorance killed the cat Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,201
    Let's take rape preventionists to a new level:

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    New rape-resistant underwear, yoga pants and shorts promise to keep women safe and unwanted sex predators at bay.
    The garments work by creating a barrier that even the most determined rapists can’t break, rip or cut, “so that women and girls can have more power to control the outcome of a sexual assault,” according to AR Wear’s Indiegogo campaign, launched to raise funds to produce the line.

    Wow. And I catch hell on this forum for suggesting you check the back seat of your car, practice situational awareness and take a self defense class. Just wow...

    Ruth and Yuval have raised more than $52,000 on Indiegogo — enough to start producing their line. They expect the pieces to sell between $50 and $60 online and are experimenting with plus-size and men’s lines.​

    At least they aren't discriminating as to gender...

    (Edit) Sorry, forgot link: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/anti-rape-wear-save-women-article-1.1515379
     
  21. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,253
    Just wow is right! And the subtle (maybe not so subtle) implication is...the onus is on the woman if she is raped or not. That's why we're reading about such outrageously lenient jail sentences and punishments for rapists, because some of these male judges still believe women 'asked for it,' or somehow 'deserved it,' or were 'in control of the situation more than they let on.'

    Disgusting.

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  22. Randwolf Ignorance killed the cat Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,201
    Well, ya know... Y'all cute gals shouldn't "ask for it", right?
     
  23. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,253
    Well, as long as there are rape-resistant panties to save us...we needn't worry, anymore. It's all good.
     
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