Archive for the ‘Rape’ Category
Violent Crime Continues to Decline, Though Rape and Sexual Assault Levels Off
In August, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of the 2002 National Crime Victimization Survey. Crime rates from the latest NCVS survey were the lowest ever recorded since the survey began in 1973.
The number of rapes and sexual assaults remained largely unchanged from 2001, however, at 0.4 per 1,000. Comparing the two year averages from 1999-2000 to 2001-2002, rape and sexual assault were slightly lower in the latter period. Although rapes and sexual assault seems to have stabilized (in part because the rate is so low that it is difficult to detect changes), the rape and sexual assault rate in the United States has fallen 56 percent since 1993.
Moreover, the level of reporting of rape and sexual assault to police has steadily risen during the same period.
Sources:
Criminal Victimization, 2002 August 2003, NCJ 199994.
US crime hits 30-year low. The BBC, August 25, 2003.
Nigerian Man Avoids Death By Stoning for Rape
A man who plead guilty to committing rape in Nigeria recently had his death by stoning set aside after his lawyers plead insanity.
Salimu Mohammed Baranda admitted that he committed the rape of a nine year old girl and apparently refused to defend himself against the charges. According to the BBC, though, family members convinced him to appeal the death sentence and his lawyers claimed that he was insane at the time he committed the crime.
An Islamic court of appeal in Nigeria overturned the conviction and ordered the man committed to an asylum for evaluation.
The BBC story on the overturning of the sentence noted that human rights groups had not exactly jumped all over Salimu’s sentence,
Salimu’s case was a particularly important one for those opposed to such strict Islamic punishments on moral grounds.
In all other cases of stoning punishments being handed down by the Sharia court it has been for those, almost all of them women, who had committed the consensual act of adultery.
Defending a rapist — and worse, one that had admitted his crime — was not something most human rights groups have gone out of their way to do.
But it is the system of justice that is being used here that is the problem. Stoning someone to death for rape is just as barbaric as stoning someone to death for having consensual sex. Both outcomes are the product of a corrupted vision of justice.
Source:
Nigeria stoning verdict quashed. Dan Isaacs, August 19, 2003.
Nigeria stoning verdict quashed. United Press International, August 19, 2003.
Tags: Nigeria
Conviction in False Rape Case Yields 9 Month Sentence
Jacqueline Barkely, 38, had hired a lawyer to help her bring a lawsuit against a woman whom she accused of sexual misconduct.
That accusation was false. When Barkley’s lawyer, Steven Anderson, 45, spurned his client’s cards and letters professing her love, she then made false allegations that Anderson had raped her on the floor of the lawyer’s office.
Barkley went so far as to send text messages to one of Anderson’s legal partners that appeared to be from Anderson and contained a “confession” to the rape.
Barkley was found guilty of wasting police time and breach of the peace, but only received a 9 month jail sentence for her lies. That’s a relatively light sentence for charges that could have ruined Anderson’s career and left him facing legal proceedings if the charges had been believed.
Source:
Woman in false rape claim gets 9 months. Ausian Cramb, Daily Telegraph (UK), August 2, 2003.
Bizarre False Rape Claim
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on a bizarre false rape claim lodged by a woman apparently in an attempt to prevent a divorce that might have caused her to lose some of the family’s assets.
The Sydney Morning Herald can’t publish the woman’s name thanks to Australian law, but describes her as a “university lecturer” whose marriage to her classical musician husband was in trouble.
So the woman decided to concoct a heinous story,
The woman told police at the Caulfield station that her husband entered the house through a living room window on January 13, threw her to the ground and raped her in front of the children. She said he then pointed at their daughter and told her: “Next time it will be you.”
Except, as the man pointed out, the daughter was out shopping with friends at the time the alleged incident occurred. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “police listening devices captured the woman rehearsing the rape story with her children, including mock court scenes where she cross-examined them.”
The woman plead guilty to attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Source:
Children coached in rape lie. Dan Silkstone, Sydney Morning Herald, July 11, 2003.
Tucker Carlson and False Rape Accusations
CNN’s Tucker Carlson recently wrote a book, Politicians, Partisans and Parasites, which includes an account of Carlson being falsely accused of raping a woman. Carlson’s reaction to the false accusation is illustrative of how even a patently false accusation can potentially ruin a man’s life, especially thanks to the nonsense touted by advocates that such false accusations are so rare as to be negligible.
Tucker writes about learning of the accusation,
For an hour I sat on the front steps thinking about my life, my wife and my three children, my job, and how it was all going to end because of something terrible I didn’t even remember doing.
In the end, Carlson spent thousands of dollars defending himself against the accusation. Fortunately for him it turned out that the woman who had accused him was not only had a chronic mental disorder, but she accused Carlson of raping her in a city that Carlson had never even visited.
The sad part is that Carlson not only felt he couldn’t talk about the accusation, but also did not take legal action against the woman’s lawyer because of the effect that even word of a false accusation might have on his career. As Carlson admits,
I always assumed, like every other journalist does, that all sex scandals are rooted in truth, period. You may not have done precisely what you’re accused of, but you did something.
Carlson is quite correct that this is the stigma attached to even false rape accusations. Another conservative journalist, John Fund, has seen his career derailed after also being falsely accused of assault by a mentally unstable woman.
Unlike Carlson, Fund was unable to keep the accusation from hitting the press, and his career has suffered notably from it.
An important, and still unresolved, question is just how common are false accusations of rape. On the one hand are the radical feminists who repeat the claim that making a rape accusation is so serious that women rarely lie about it. They typically use Susan Brownmiller’s claim that only two percent of reported rapes are false, although they rarely point out that there is a paucity of evidence to back up this claim.
In a column about the Kobe Bryant case, Wendy McElroy pointed to a study by a Purdue researcher who examined reported rapes at a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987 and found that fully 41 percent of all reported rapes were later determined by police to be false accusations.
Sources:
‘Crossfire’ Co-Host Dishes Liberally. Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, July 16, 2003.
False Rape Charges Hurt Real Victims. Wendy McElroy, iFeminists.Com, July 22, 2003.
An alarming national trend:
False Rape Allegations. Eugene J. Kanin.
UK Considers Guaranteeing Alleged Victims in Domestic Violence Cases Anonymity
The British government is considering a change in its laws that would guarantee alleged victims of domestic violence the same privacy granted to individuals in rape, divorce and sexual abuse cases. In the United States legal guarantees of privacy are only afforded to minors in such cases, but in Great Britain apparently the courts extend privacy to adults in such cases as well.
The change in the law has an odd motivation — the Home Office is concerned about the number of women who withdraw their allegations of domestic violence before the case against the alleged perpetrator can go to trial. An unidentified Labor Party source told The Independent (UK),
We need to address the problem of women who have suffered abuse and want the police to act but don’t want all their family and sexual history put on display. People in the family courts or who have been sexually abused don’t have their identity revealed but in many cases the same personal information will be disclosed in domestic violence cases.
But, of course, in the case of a marital domestic violence case it’s going to be difficult to hide the identity of the alleged victim unless the identity of the alleged perpetrator is also going to be made private.
Second, it seems to be a dubious contention at best that women withdraw their allegations of violence because of fear of publicity over the case. This assumes that victims of domestic violence always perceive their interests as best served by a legal prosecution of their victimizer but are being thwarted by an invasive media. The Labor government should be called to provide some evidence for that sort of claim.
That being said, the practice of granting anonymity to individuals involved in legal cases should be done only with great care and when the damage likely to be done to the individuals far outweighs the need for transparency in such processes. It’s hard to imagine, for example, how British citizens are served by having divorced proceedings hide the identity of litigants. Similarly, although the press in the United States generally chooses not to run the identity of alleged rape victims by custom, making it illegal to do so is an unnecessary limitation on the transparency of such legal actions.
Source:
Battered women may get right to anonymity in court. Marie Woolf, The Independent (UK), June 11, 2003.
Michigan Man Released After Spending Nine Years in Jail for Rape He Did Not Commit
Kenneth Wyniemko, 52, was recently released from a Michigan prison after DNA tests exonerated him of a brutal rape for which he served more than nine years in jail.
Wyniemko was sentenced to 40 to 60 years in jail after being convicted of an extraordinarily brutal rape. A 28-year-old Clinton Township woman was raped repeatedly for three to four hours and then stole of several thousand dollars.
Although less-sophisticated tests of blood, semen and hair showed at the time that Wyniemko was not likely to be the suspect, he was convicted largely due to the testimony of the victim who made what police and a jury believed was a strong identification. In addition, when he was arrested Wyniemko had $3,000 in cash without a good explanation of where the money came from.
But new tests show that none of the blood, semen or hair samples collected at the scene of the crime matches Wyniemko’s DNA. One main lesson that has emerged from the 128 DNA exonerations of convicts nationwide is just how unreliable eyewitness testimony often is.
Macomb County Prosecutor Carl Marlinga apologized to Wyniemko for the near-decade he spent in jail for a crime he did not commit. Of course Macomb County has another problem on its hands — a brutal rapist who is possibly living in the community. Police submitted the DNA samples to a nationwide database of convicted criminals, but came up with no matches.
This case also highlights the need for laws that allow convicted criminals to use DNA tests to challenge their convictions even if their appeals have already been exhausted. Wyniemko’s case was taken up by the Thomas Cooley Law Schools’s Innocence Project after Michigan passed a law in 2001 allowing for new DNA testing in rape convictions where the identity of the assailant was not established through scientific tests.
Sources:
DNA tests exonerate man. Kim North Shine, Detroit Free Press, June 12, 2003.
Man who spent nearly a decade in prison for rape freed after DNA evidence clears him. Associated Press, June 17, 2003.
Man cleared of crime by DNA likely to be freed. Associated Press, June 12, 2003.
Absurd Prison Sentence for Couple in False Rape Extortion Scam
Jessica Langshaw, 20, and her boyfriend, Raul Umana, 28, had a neat little scam that left them with more than $500,000 in profits before they were caught. But it was what happened after they were caught that was just as outrageous.
The scam worked like this. Langshaw would get to know men whom she’d meet over Internet chat room (and a few she knew personally). Then she’d tell the marks that unless they gave her money, she would file sexual assault charges against them.
Over a period of 8 months, Langshaw targeted 8 men in this way and she and her boyfriend collected more than $500,000 from this blackmail scheme.
She was finally caught during a routine meeting of different California law enforcement agencies. Langshaw’s name was mentioned and several law enforcement officials realized they all had rape reports filed by the young woman.
According to Ed Ward, Langshaw was charged with 6 felony counts of extortion, 5 felony counts of postal threats, and 3 perjuries and false reports of rape. Her boyfriend was charged with 9 counts of extortion, 8 threats, three counts of perjury and 3 false reports of rape.
Rather than go to trial, District Attorney Jan Scully reached a plea bargain with the couple which isn’t surprising. But the plea bargain involved Langshaw spending only 1 year in jail and Umana spending less than 2 years in jail. For filing numerous false reports of rape and extortion for material gain that is a ridiculously low sentence. Surely the District Attorney could have obtained a better plea bargain that for attempting to subvert the criminal justice system for personal profit.
The result is just mind boggling.
Source:
It’s almost official: Abuse U.S. Courts for power and profit. Ed Ward, NewsWithViews.Com, April 28, 2003.
Bite-sized items from here and there. KnoxNews.Com, April 22, 2003.
Sexual Assault Against Prisoners of War: Female and Otherwise
Women’s ENews ran a lengthy article in early April about the risks of sexual assault against prisoners of war. Much of this tends to focus on what is perceived to be the special risk of sexual assault against female soldiers, with some opponents of women serving in the military going so far as to suggest that women shouldn’t be put in front line positions precisely because of the risk of sexual assault.
The single best comment on that I’ve seen was by Rhonda Cornum, a flight surgeon who was captured during the first Persian Gulf War and sexually assaulted by her Iraqi captors. When asked on a news program whether the risk of sexual assault was a major concern of female soldiers should they be captured, Cornum didn’t miss a beat when pointing out that sexual assault was not gender-specific, but also a very real possibility for men captured in war.
In fact, the reader who makes it to the 17th paragraph(!) of the Women’s ENews article will learn that, “most [sexual assault victims] Veteran affairs deals with are male as they make up the majority of the military population.”
The story quotes Capt. Lory Manning of The Women’s Research and Education Institute as suggesting that male victims of sexual assault in the military may be afraid to come forward due to the “male-dominated military culture”, but how is that any different than the feminist-dominated culture at Women’s ENews that spends 16 paragraphs focusing on sexual assault among POWs as if it is a female-specific condition and then almost as an afterthought included a section about oh, by the way, “Men Are Victims Too”?
Source:
POWs likely to endure sexual assault. Gretchen Cook, Women’s ENews, April 6, 2003.
Female Prisoners File Suit Against New York Over Investigations of Sexual Assault by Guards
New York’s Legal Aid Society recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of 15 female inmates against the state of New York over how investigations into alleged sexual assaults by guards against female prisoners are investigated.
At issue is the state’s Department of Correctional Service policy that will not apparently not initiate an investigation into claims of such sexual assaults based solely on allegations made by prisoners. Women’s ENews quoted Dori Lewis of The Legal Aid Society as saying,
As Department of Correctional Services regulations exist now, an inmate’s word is not enough to convince authorities to investigate allegations of sexual abuse. Nor is the word of a second inmate. A Department of Correctional Services guard or staff person has to come forward and corroborate the story, and you can imagine how often that happens.
Otis cites as an example of this sort of policy the case of Lucy Amador, 42, who was imprisoned in New York for robbery. Otis reports that Amador sent letters to correctional services officials and even the governor of New York alleging that a guard was routinely sexual abusing her. Only when the guard left a small semen stain on the Amador’s shirt sleeve were the allegations investigated, however, and the guard subsequently fired and prosecuted. (Ironically, Amador herself was convicted of bank robbing on a similar oversight — she posed as a loan applicant before robbing a bank of $10,000. When she fled the bank, she left behind a loan application which gave her real name, address, and other details — apparently she was willing to steal from the bank but not lie on the loan application!)
Named in the lawsuit are 10 guards whom the 15 plaintiffs claim sexually assaulted them, as well as several correction officials whom the lawsuit maintains helped cover up the assaults. The lawsuit asks for monetary damages as well as an overhaul of how the corrections department investigates alleged sexual assaults by guards.
Sources:
Female prisoners sue state for guards’ sex abuse. Ginger Adams Otis, Women’s ENews, March 17, 2003.
Women Sue State Prison Guards. New York Newsday, Graham Rayman, January 29, 2003.
Prison rapes ‘routine.’ Joanne Wasserman, New York Daily News, January 28, 2003.