Aggressive feminist lobbying in the legislatures and courts since the 1970s redefined rape to make it indistinguishable from consensual sex. Over time, a woman no longer had to prove that she was forced to have non-consensual sex, but a man had to prove that sex was consensual (or prove that no sex had, in fact, happened). Non-consent was gradually eliminated as a definition, and consent became simply a mitigating factor for the defense. By 1989, the Washington State Supreme Court openly shifted the burden of proving consent to the defendant when it argued that the removal of legislative language requiring non-consent for rape “evidences legislative intent to shift the burden of proof on the issue to the defense” and approved this blatantly unconstitutional presumption of guilt. The result, write Weiss and Young, was not “to jail more violent rapists — lack of consent is easy enough for the state to prove in those cases — but to make it easier to send someone to jail for failing to get an explicit nod of consent from an apparently willing partner before engaging in sex.” ...Most discussions of the Duke lacrosse incident blame the prosecutor, but I blame the judge much more. The boys had iron-clad proofs of innocense -- ATM receipts across town, negative DNA tests, and failure of the accuser to identify them or tell a consistent story -- and yet the judge still denied a motion to dismiss the charges.
In the infamous Duke University lacrosse case, prosecutor Michael Nifong suppressed exculpating evidence and prosecuted men he knew to be innocent, according to Taylor and Johnson.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Feminist Gulag: No Prosecution Necessary
Stephen Baskerville has a new article on crime and feminism:
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4 comments:
"... but I blame the judge much more. The boys had iron-clad proofs of innocense -- ATM receipts across town, negative DNA tests, and failure of the accuser to identify them or tell a consistent story -- and yet the judge still denied a motion to dismiss the charges."
Judge Stephens was Nifong's mentor and friend. They ate lunch together at least once a week; and it was assumed that Nifong could follow Stephens into a judgeship.
(Stephens became the Durham DA after his predecessor as DA, James Hardin, was appointed a judge. When Stephens was appointed a judge, Nifong took his place. That's the "cursus honorum" in Durham--the judges and the DAs are "all in the family".)
There is a long list of questionable rulings and actions by all of these--the Leon Brown case, the Tim Malloy case, etc.; all of which need to be put under a federal microscope...
wow, thanks for the info. It seems in almost any other field/profession you can pretty much get a hearing when something is wrong and try to correct things. And of all endeavors the legal (and thus political) arena is the one most ripe for abuse. Even in healthcare you at least have something of a shot at reeling in quacks. Bet this situation happens in a lot of other locales as well. Seems so here here in CA.
I did not even know the judge's name until now. I have read many articles on this subject, but none talked about the culpability of the judge or included the above info.
When Judge Stephens was DA, he once permitted the police to use pre-signed blank suboenas.(News and Observer, May 19, 1994)
That's about the same period that the Durham police were accused of operating a prostitution ring out of their own HQ (News and Observer, Feb. 1, 1992)
An investigation of that was quashed, but you can check the FBI crime statistics for 2000-2005, and see almost nil arrests for prostitution in Durham (which should have had at least 100 a year, given the size of the city).
(See the first chapter of "The Duke Lacrosse Case: A Documentary History and Analysis of the Modern Scottsboro", by R. B. Parrish, for some more details.)
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