Rape and the "Civilized" World

And some wonder why rape victims are reluctant to come forward to report rapes...

A Minnesota nursing home ignored an 89-year-old rape victim's pleas for help, then branded her as a "flirt" who harassed her attacker "mercilessly," court papers charge.

The woman's caretaker, Andrew Scott Merzwski, admitted to raping her in January 2013. He was sentenced last month to 53 months in prison. But a lawsuit against the Edgewood Vista facility in Hermantow accuses a nursing home director of defending the rapist even after he admitted to his crime.

"Did she tell you that this was consensual?" Marilyn Moore, the home's clinical services director, reportedly told a nurse examiner who inspected the victim. "Did she tell you that she flirts with this boy mercilessly?"

The Star Tribune unearthed the shocking court documents, which go on to charge that the victim was locked in a psychiatric ward for almost three days after reporting the crime.

The New York Daily News detailed the attack:

Andrew Scott Merzwski was a caretaker in January 2013 at the home when he assaulted the woman. She told a nurse examiner Merzwski sat down to watch a movie with her, but then took his clothes off. She tried to repel the younger man’s advances by pointing to a picture of her husband.

“It’s not right,” she reportedly said. “This wouldn’t be right."

The woman told her daughter what happened the next day, and the daughter called police.​

Merzwski admitted to the assault, yet the victim underwent more embarrassment and bad treatment. Nurse examiner Theresa Flesvig said she was shocked when Moore suggested the sex was "consensual." When she performed a full rape examination on the woman -- days after the attack -- she found the "biggest tear" she'd ever seen.


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*Eye twitch*

53 weeks for raping a woman, a woman who was in his care no less... And the director victim shames her and blames her for her own rape.. And then locks her in a psychiatric ward after she reported being raped.. Sadly, such incidents not unusual, women are often blamed for their own rapes. Some are even jailed to make sure they testify against their rapists, because you know, imprisoning a rape victim is always a good idea...

 

The point beyond redemption..

A Republican state representative in New Mexico introduced a bill Wednesday that classified abortions for rape victims as "tampering with evidence," effectively requiring women to carry their pregnancies to term in order to prove their case in a sexual assault trial.

This bill will not pass, as Democrats control both chambers of New Mexico's state legislature, but there are plenty of other state laws that extend the nightmare for women who are impregnated through rape.

Of the 26 states that require a waiting period (usually 24 hours) for women seeking abortions, only Utah makes an exception for cases of rape or incest. Pregnant rape victims in some states must also undergo counseling about the negative effects of abortion before having the procedure.

If a woman who conceives through rape does go on to have the child, she can open herself up to being victimized by her rapist again and again. In 31 states, paternal rapists are allowed to sue for custody and visitation rights like any other father, as a Chicago woman who was served with custody papers from her rapist brought to the public's attention last summer after former Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) made his "legitimate rape" comments.


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Damned if she does, damned if she does not.

Restricted access to abortions and forcing women to wait to abort the pregnancies caused by rape. But if she goes on to have the child, you know, live the conservative right's dream for women, she can find herself being sued for custody and visitation rights by the man who raped and impregnated her.

You see, nine months after my rape, I gave birth to a beautiful little girl. You could say she was conceived in rape; she was. But she is also so much more than her beginnings. I blissfully believed that after I finally had decided to give birth to and to raise my daughter, life would be all roses and endless days at the playground. I was wrong again.

It would not be long before I would learn firsthand that in the vast majority of states -- 31 -- men who father through rape are able to assert the same custody and visitation rights to their children that other fathers enjoy. When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child. ​

Shauna Prewitt's baby was 6 months old when her rapist sued her for visitation and partial custody of the baby. While it is unimaginable that this could even happen, it can and it does and legally so.

Ohio's state legislature is attempting to address this issue.. In response to Ariel Castro asking for visitation rights to the child he fathered with one of the girls he had imprisoned in his home for so many years. That legislation is currently stalled while another is being debated which would require a rape conviction to prevent the rapist from having custody of the child. Considering how the majority of rapes are never reported, it becomes a point of being damned if she aborts and doubly damned if she keeps the baby that resulted from rape.

 

Shit, I'm 70 and I know this stuff. How old are these other assholes?

This happened in public??? Was the asshole arrested and prosecuted?

 

Too rich..

A Delaware man convicted of raping his three-year-old daughter only faced probation after a state Superior Court judge ruled he "will not fare well" in prison.

In her decision, Judge Jan Jurden suggested Robert H. Richards IV would benefit more from treatment. Richards, who was charged with fourth-degree rape in 2009, is an unemployed heir living off his trust fund. The light sentence has only became public as the result of a subsequent lawsuit filed by his ex-wife, which charges that he penetrated his daughter with his fingers while masturbating, and subsequently assaulted his son as well.

Richards is the great grandson of du Pont family patriarch Irenee du Pont, a chemical baron.

According to the lawsuit filed by Richards' ex-wife, he admitted to assaulting his infant son in addition to his daughter between 2005 and 2007. Richards was initially indicted on two counts of second-degree child rape, felonies that translate to a 10-year mandatory jail sentence per count. He was released on $60,000 bail while awaiting his charges.

Richards hired one of the state's top law firms and was offered a plea deal of one count of fourth-degree rape charges -- which carries no mandatory minimum prison sentencing. He accepted, and admitted to the assault.

In her sentence, Jurden said he would benefit from participating in a sex offenders rehabilitation program rather than serving prison time.

Delaware Public Defender Brendan J. O'Neill told The News Journal that it was "extremely rare" for an individual to fare well in prison. "Prison is to punish, to segregate the offender from society, and the notion that prison serves people well hasn't proven to be true in most circumstances," he said, adding that the light sentence for the member of the one percent raised questions about “how a person with great wealth may be treated by the system.” (Though perhaps it provides more answers than questions.)

According to the The News Journal, several attorneys claimed treatment over jail time was a deal more typically granted to drug addicts, not sex offenders.


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So, he admits to raping is daughter and sexually molesting his son and was convicted as such, but is given probation because he would not fare well in prison? So much so that the Judge held that a prison sentence would adversely affect Richards. Because heaven forbid a child rapist and molester feel adversely affected by the punishment of raping and molesting his own infants.

Those in the legal circles are considering whether this was because he was a rich white man, and a child sex offender who could be a target in prison. But prison systems do have protective custody in place, so that he would be kept away from the general prison population. Instead of focusing on his colour and his wealth, perhaps the legal system should consider the crime he committed against his own children.

 

In the U.S., that qualifies as adulthood. At 17 he would more likely be tried in juvenile court and, if convicted, incarcerated in an institution for minors. I have no idea where the breakpoint is in British law.

BTW, the juvenile detention system is almost exactly as effective as the adult version. Send a fellow to a place where he's surrounded by tough criminals, and he'll come out as a tough criminal.

Not clear how that would have worked out in the U.S. If they let you go home and come back at an appointed time, it's usually because they plan on charging you with a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

Wouldn't most people benefit more from treatment than prison time? Prison is about the worst thing that can happen to a person without doing physical harm to him or his family. Contrary to its euphemisms, it almost never actually performs correction or rehabilitation. It's just a place to put people that you don't want out in the community doing more bad shit, yet, even in the trigger-happy United States, they don't quite qualify for execution.

Our legal system is quite schizophrenic about sexual abuse of children. Some accused people are railroaded into convictions based on evidence that would never be accepted for any other charge. Yet others are just slapped on the wrist despite incontrovertible evidence.

I'm sure the press will go after this aspect of the case like a hyena going after a wounded piglet. The government, the churches, the corporations, the banks and the Moose Lodge may overlook a "lapse in judgment" if you're wealthy enough to do them a big favor. But the reporters won't. They busted President Nixon.

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Nothing remarkable about that. Plea bargaining happens every day. If the state isn't sure it can get a jury to convict based on the evidence they have, they'll happily settle for convicting any defendant on a lesser charge. At least it goes on his record and so will have an impact on his life. Well shit, that makes the whole system sound like nothing more than a glorified tool for extracting revenge, the most primitive, uncivilized and destructive of all human instincts!

Rape is a hot button in the USA. I don't even know what "fourth-degree" rape is, but if it's on your record, you'll have a very hard time getting a job, your wife will be scorned for not leaving you, twice a year some agency will petition the court to take your children to a safer home, and your neighbors will put a SEX OFFENDER sign on your lawn.

As I said above, almost anything that is not medieval in nature will probably be of more benefit than prison time, which has a very good chance of simply making him worse.

Well duh. A government employee who understands how government works.

So I guess he doesn't need a job if he can actually live off of his trust fund. Nonetheless, the way "a person with great wealth is treated by the system" is surely the least surprising aspect of this case.

Because treatment has a reasonable success record for drug addicts. The "treatments" that have been developed for sex offenders are not as successful. Since rape is, 99 times out of 100, a crime of violence rather than a crime of sex, even castration has an amazingly poor record of rehabilitating rapists. They just do it with a broom handle. The only reason they use their penis in the first place is that it is the one weapon that they can take with them everywhere, even if they're searched.

I smell money in action. Children don't vote or contribute to political campaigns.

If not, we're left with the rather large question, "Then what the hell IS it for?" Given that most ex-prisoners end up committing more crimes (even the truly remorseful ones quickly discover that there aren't many jobs open to them--especially if their crime had anything to do with children), incarceration certainly doesn't do anything for society. Sure it keeps the guys off the street for a while, but during that time they're being tutored by the experts.

They could be. It's all in the details.

It's been pointed out that American politics is much more money-driven today than it was in, say, the 1950s.

Humanity is undergoing its seventh Paradigm Shift: agriculture, civilization, bronze metallurgy, iron metallurgy, industry, electronics, and now information technology. Each paradigm-shifting technology fundamentally changes the way everything works--in totally unpredictable ways.

Who would have expected the Bronze Age to be the catalyst for the invention of the wheel (flint blades aren't precise enough to make a large one) or writing (metal made the economy so much larger and more complicated that transactions simply had to be recorded)? Who would have expected the first commercial telegraph to kick off a revolution that would end up turning entertainment into one of the world's richest and most important industries?

So who knows what the Information Revolution will do to the law and lawbreakers?

 

It isn't that the death penalty is cruel; the point is that it is uncivilized.

To paraphrase your point, if you come home and find an intruder attempting to harm your wife, and due to his superior size and strength (or other factors such as armament) the only way you can get him to stop is to stab him to death with a butcher knife that happens to be nearby, then you are justified in using lethal force in defense of self or others. The moment a person decides to kill another human being for any reason except self-defense, he has voluntarily seceded from civilization, and our rules no longer apply to him.

But if you and your wife manage to overpower him, tie him to a chair, call the police, wait for them to arrive, spend a hundred hours talking to police, attorneys, and finally a jury, while the assailant remains in custody and can no longer harm anyone, and the shit-for-brains government kills him anyway, this is not justice, this is revenge, the most primitive, evil and pernicious of all our Stone Age emotions. They're not punishing the criminal, because he's now dead and feels no shame or remorse. Instead, they're punishing his spouse, children, parents, friends, teachers, preachers, coaches... everyone who's ever loved him and/or tried to teach him to be a good boy.

These people don't deserve this treatment. They've done nothing wrong and in fact have probably put a lot of effort into reforming him. His children, in particular, will grow up with only one memory of this entire event: You're the bastard who got their daddy killed. This is how the Middle East works: People are still killing each other over things that happened so long ago that they can't even describe them coherently. We really don't need to turn America back into a land where the Hatfields and the McCoys are still killing each other.

Put the bastard in prison. Let his children come visit him there, where they'll see for themselves why it's not a good idea to go around killing people.

Spoken like a true Bible-thumping, Dixie-dwelling Republican. Democrats shifted justice to a state where people accused of crimes have rights. Not all of them are guilty--which may come as a surprise to you, who may well live in a place where lynching is still practiced--or at least wish it were.

DNA evidence has been springing people off of Death Row since it came into use. Even people who are convicted are sometimes innocent. Do you want to kill these people too?

Two reasons:

• They already swore an oath in order to be allowed to practice law.
• They are forbidden by law to do anything that jeopardizes their client's case. In many cases defendants confess to their lawyers, and it would be illegal for the lawyer to reveal that information in court.

Apparently you haven't been reading your memos. Eyewitness accounts have been found to be about as reliable as astrology. You could get 12 people to agree on what happened and they could still all be wrong. Even police, who are selected for certain cognitive skills and subsequently trained to use them, don't always get it right.

"'Tis better to let 100 guilty men go free than to execute one innocent man." Didn't they teach you that in school?

Or would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is and be that one wrongly executed innocent man? How 'bout if it were your wife, father, best buddy or one of your kids?

Prison is expensive and has lots of flaws, but so far it's the best system we've got.

In Mexico, there's no capital punishment and the maximum sentence is 20 years. The rationale is that 20 years in a Mexican prison is worse than death.

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Just sounds like you're making excuses.

 

You're the guy who talks about "finding a female" as if you're a Klingon anthropologist just visiting our planet. I don't think you can count on anybody ever taking you seriously--especially regarding relations between men and women.

As I pointed out earlier, in most cases rape is a crime of violence, not primarily (if at all) about sexual gratification. Men who have been castrated still go out and assault women sexually, using a stick or any other object that works. The reason they prefer to use their penis is that they can take it anywhere they go without appearing suspicious.