Law & Justice: March 2004 Archives
Via VC I see that Cathy Young has written an excellent article describing how Rape Shield laws can prevent men accused of rape from presenting the strongest possible defense.
In a much-publicized 1998 case in New York, Columbia University graduate student Oliver Jovanovic was convicted of kidnapping and sexually abusing a Barnard College student whom he had met on the Internet. While Jovanovic claimed that the encounter involved consensual bondage, the trial judge ruled that the defense could not use e-mail messages in which the young woman had told him about her interest in sadomasochism and her S/M relationship with another man. Jovanovic was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His conviction was eventually overturned by an appellate court that held he was denied the chance to present an adequate defense -- a ruling predictably deplored by feminist activists as a blow to victims. ...Rape is a terrible crime, but even more terrible is a false accusation of rape. If it can be proven that a rape allegation was intentionally false I think the accuser should face the same penalties she intended for her victim.For some feminists, the dogma that "women never lie" means that there is, for all intents and purposes, no presumption of innocence for the defendant. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim" -- forgetting that as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and his accuser are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law.
(More about rape accusations.)
Wendy McElroy has written another great article about the damage that can be caused by false and trivial sexual harrasment accusations, and says that the tide is turning against automatic belief in the alleged victim. She gives a couple of examples of how easily a man's life can be ruined; here's one.
Daphne Patai is one of the few feminists to demonstrate compassion for such wrongfully accused men. In her book "Heterophobia," Patai describes the savagery of sexual misconduct policies by which the accused has no due process or presumption of innocence but must prove his non-guilt to committees with the power to ruin his life.As I wrote before:One of the examples Patai cites is of an over-weight professor who was both well-liked and competent. One day, in the middle of a lecture, a female student called out a comment about the extreme size of his chest. He observed that she had no similar problem and, then, continued lecturing.
The student filed sexual harassment charges against him, based solely on the classroom incident. The ensuing witch-hunt was so extreme that the professor committed suicide. Thereafter, the university administration released a statement expressing its main concern: The professor's death should not discourage other similarly "abused" women from "speaking out."
Women who claim to have been raped make very sympathetic victims, and for good reason. There are few crimes more terrible than rape, but I would argue that a false accusation of rape is one of them. I advocate a system in which a perjurer/false-accuser would face the same penalties as their victim would have, had he or she been convicted of the crime they were falsely accused of. (Naturally, in many circumstances it may be impossible to prove that either a crime was committed or that the accusation was false, in which case no one should be prosecuted.)
It looks like civil servants in Maryland are keen on enforcing the law rather than re-inventing it.
Until the law changes, however, clerks said there will be no wedding bells for in their courthouses for gays.What a novel concept!"We can't perform a wedding unless it's a man and a woman, it's the law," said Montgomery Circuit Clerk Molly Q. Ruhl. "And I'm here to follow the law."
Although I'm not convinced Martha Stewart should have been prosecuted so vehemently for her relatively minor crimes, the accounts of how her jurors reached a verdict are renewing my confidence in the jury system. She really did break the law, the law itself is just, and the jurors convicted her even though they felt sorry for her predicament.
"I choked up and I felt my eyes tearing and I was very relieved that the judge read the verdict, because I wasn't sure if I would have to do that," jury forewoman Rosemary McMahon said Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America." ...As I said, I'm not convinced she should have been prosecuted, but I do think the laws are important for protecting the integrity of capitalism and the big fish should be at least as scared of violating them as the little fish are.Despite their sympathy for Stewart, the jury's decision to convict her of lying about a stock sale was made "after careful consideration of everything that we had," McMahon said. "We did what we had to do."
Martha Stewart obviously wasn't very afraid.
Prosecutors had offered Stewart a chance last April to plead guilty to just one of the four charges against her — making a false statement — in exchange for a probation sentence, Newsweek reported Sunday, citing unidentified sources close to the case. But a defense source told the magazine that prosecutors could not guarantee that Stewart would avoid jail time completely and Stewart refused the offer, Newsweek reported. ...The jurors also said they believed other key prosecution witnesses in the case against Stewart, including Bacanovic assistant Douglas Faneuil (search), and were puzzled that the defense spent less than an hour presenting its case after weeks of prosecution testimony.
The defense team told jurors, "don't believe it. It didn't happen, so don't believe it," McMahon said. "But we ... were sitting there going, but we saw this and we heard that. And, you know, we have evidence of this. And, you know, testimony of that. So it was like, we need more. You know? We were waiting. We were hoping."
Not a good day for rich liberals. I don't have a firm opinion on the Martha Stewart thing, but Baba got what she deserved.
That is, a jury has ruled that a mother who was aware her son had AIDS should have told his fiancee; she didn't, and now she owes the ex $2 million (the son is dead). Personally, I think anyone with a deadly disease who would purposefully endanger someone else without their knowledge is guilty of attempted murder, at the very least. The question is, should the mother be civilly liable for not intervening?
In my opinion, no, although the mother certainly had a moral responsibility to warn her prospective daughter-in-law. If the son had been plotting to kill his fiancee with a gun and the mother found out, would she have been legally required to intervene? No. Laws vary from state to state, but with few exceptions people are not required to help others even in cases of imminent danger (sometimes called Good Samaritan Laws, although that term is also used for other purposes).
Further supporting my position in this particular instance is the fact that medical information is generally allowed the strictest possible confidentiality.
"It would have been a violation of Illinois law for these parents to tell this woman of their son's HIV status," said Ann Hilton Fisher, executive director of the AIDS Legal Counsel (search) of Chicago.It's an awful circumstance, but the criminal here is the dead man, not his mother.
