[Sara Palin]I said “No thanks” the rape to nowhere[/SP]
…by order of the state government, over the objections of Ms Palin’s appointee.
The disgrace is that her appointee objected to ending the policy. She’s responsible for that (unless she wants to take the position that being a mayor is, after all, exactly like being a community organizer).
Who lobbied for and against the bill in the legislature preventing cities like Wasilla from charging victims for rape exams?
“Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.”
Did Mayor Palin have any response to this comment?
Yes.
Although as I think about this, there is a nuance I hadn’t considered.
It has to do with restitution.
When a criminal is convicted, part of his sentence may include restitution – that is, repayment of the monetary portion of damages he caused. If someone is arrested for a burglary in which a TV is stolen, he may, in addition to his imprisonment, be ordered to pay money to recompense the victim for the loss of the TV.
However, costs incurred by the police in the course of investigating the crime are not generally permitted to count in the restitution amount – we can’t add up the lab hours spent analyzing the fingerprints on the doorframe that led the police to the TV burglar.
You see where this is going?
It’s insulting – abominable, even – to the victim to assess the costs of a rape exam against her. But it might be impossible to include such costs in restitution orders if they’re not. So there ought to be a way to somehow avoid one and accomplish the other.
I don’t know for sure how Alaska works in this regard. But now that this wrinkle has occurred to me, I’d sure like to hear the objecting chief explain his rationale fully.
Ok. So the municipal government can extend an interest free loan to the victim with repayment contingent on a successful conviction. The state can recoup its costs without adding insult to the victim’s injury.
I have no objection to making it more common to impose fines as well as prison time for criminal convictions, and determining the former based in part on the costs incurred by the state.
However, that’s a different issue.
According to the website of the Alaska State Legislature, the bill passed both House and Senate without opposition.
In the House, there were 37 yeas, 0 nays, and 3 absent.
In the Senate, there were 20 yeas, 0 nays, and 0 absent.
That page also lists the sponsors of the bill.
Yes, she bears some responsibility. But every leader has appointed bad apples. Bush has “Good Job” Brownie; Clinton had Mike Espy; Bush 41 had Lauro Cavazos; Reagan had James Watt – and the list goes comfortably backwards. So far as I know, Millard Fillmore might be exempt.
It sounds reasonable.
If I were a defense attorney, I’d probably challenge it as a smokescreen, since the victim actually suffers no monetary loss.
Naah. I’ll bet you have to go back to William Henry Harrison.
Is that how you figure it? Well, let me see, from the victim standpoint, I’ve just been raped, state refuses to pay for the cost of the rape kit, my choices are:
- pay the cost (so, in addition to the pain of the crime, the indignity of the exam itself, I get to incur the financial cost)
or 2. Let the unpaid debt sit, affecting my credit rating.
There’s any number of fines, costs, fees, restitutions ordered by the courts to be paid by the criminals, and it makes folks feel real good about making sure the criminal pays financially (including the costs of incarceration), but before you go too far down that road, why don’t you check out how often the criminal actually pays? (and in the case of rape, it’s at least possible that a lenghty incarceration will happen, in which case the actual repayment may -if it ever happens- occur decades later).
It is a smokescreen, because if the state wanted to recoup its expenses, it should just impose a fine as part of the sentencing. The entire issue of restitution is, in my opinion, a smokescreen to conceal a particularly loathsome policy.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? That’s the most dispicable thing I’ve heard, well, today anyway. I know this ended in 2000 and I have no comment on Palin’s views about it because we don’t know enough, but just hearing about the general policy made me want to throw up. My heart goes out to the women who were affected by this barbaric policy, in Wasilla or anywhere else. My mind boggles at the scenario of after the horror of being raped, and suffering through the humiliation of a rape kit, then receiving a BILL for it in the mail? That could push someone on the verge of suicide right over the edge. I wonder how many women just flat-out refused to pay (or absolutely couldn’t), and if they did, what then? Did the city of Wasilla (or anywhere else) then send bill collectors after them? Start garnishing wages?*
About those (seeming low) rape statistics, if poor women knew they would get charged for being raped and reporting it, that would be a damned good incentive to not report it. As if there aren’t enough incentives to not report rape.
Wow, that was my WHAT THE FUCK?? moment of the day. I’m not focusing on Wasilla as such, because it seems that this went on elsewhere too. Is it still going on anywhere?
ETA, I see others have talked about the financial aspect on victims in abstract terms, but I want to know what actually happened.
I think so. Was rape the only crime in Wasilla that the victim was expected to pay for the investigation? Or did the police treat victims of all crimes equally when it came to paying for investigations?
Excellent question.
The objection of the chief sounds to me like the words of a bureaucrat who lives in constant low-level fear based in his budget, and it would appear that she was in part responsible for that state, and encouraged it. She certainly did not seem against spending by the city. But at most, this comes down to an unintended effect of the way she ran her shop, not OMG she hatez rape victims. Seems like the sort of criticism that will backfire politically.
It is kind of hard to do any reasearch since the net is now flooded with duplicative Wasilla stories. I dug this up from February:
Also from February:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/941202.html
There is one more thing I do not understand about the Wasilla case. Fannon claimed that the town paying for rape kits will cost $5000 to $14000 per year. Rape kits cost $300 to $1200 a pop.
Assuming the maximum forensic cost, there would need to be 12 rapes in Wasilla to justfiy the high end of the range. Assuming the minimum, 47 rapes are required. Wasilla gets what, 3 rapes per year. Assuming a high kit cost, 3 rapes is only $3600.
Why does this trivial figure not add up?
The parts are cheap. It’s the labor that adds up.
What a strange conversation.