She has a point, though. If you are only hearing evidence from one side, it is wrong to assume there is no evidence on the other side. Therefore, you shouldn’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other until you can say that both sides have presented their evidence. Can you say that?
[QUOTE=Huerta88]
Sexual penetration by the defendant is one of the elements too. If they had DNA sufficient to clearly establish sexual penetration, the prosecution’s case would indisputably be closer to being proved, because one of X elements, as opposed to zero of X, would be pretty incontrovertibly established.
[QUOTE]
You seem to have missed my point. I was showing that the defense attorney can say the DNA evidence doesn’t prove his client did it. That means nothing, since DNA never proves a rape. So you have no evidence for the accused, only a report by an interested party of what you ought to think of the evidence.
The frustrating thing is that we both probably evaluate the evidence about the same. And I doubt that either of us is saying the defendants definitely are or are not guilty, or the woman is or is not lying.
My rough-justice approximation is that the DNA results don’t move the ball forward for the prosecution, and don’t contain anything but good news for defendants. Does the prosecution have anything else? Of course it’s possible – in my mind, I do not know whether this woman had sex at all, or was sexually traumatized at all – but maybe definitive evidence will come out that she was. This is still only part of the way toward proving that these accused parties did it (if anyone did).
Do this thought experiment, though: For all his bravado, do you think that DA is as happy and confident today as he was this time last week? I feel quite sure he thought he’d find DNA, and would have been the world’s biggest fan of the probative value of DNA if he’d found it. He may brazen it out, it’s not impossible he’ll get a (warranted, or unwarranted) conviction. But regardless, nothing about the DNA can be said to help the prosecution or hinder the defense (if only because the defense doesn’t, though it often seems to, bear the burden of proof here).
[QUOTE=saoirse]
Unless you’re splitting a hair I can’t even see, DNA is often as a practical matter a dispositive (if not the only) factor in a conviction. I am pretty sure that people have been executed based on, say, not much more than their DNA being found on a dead body. Yes, the prosecution will also have to show that the victim didn’t willingly have sex with him, and refute the suggestion that she, I don’t know, auto-erotically asphyxiated herself. And, she is not around to testify to this. Yet a conviction for rape and murder can and has been proved, chiefly (as a practical matter) on the back of the DNA. Absent the DNA, conversely, such a conviction would be a lot less likely to be proved. Therefore (I infer) the defendants’ counsel’s statement (which I take as accurately reporting that the ME did not find sufficently-identifiable DNA of the accused) is a factor that makes proof of rape harder, not less hard, here (let’s not quibble about whether it’s defense counsel’s statement, or the ME report underlying it, that makes this so, we both know it’s the latter).
Or . . . so I understand you . . . is it your understanding/implication that the defendants intend to use the “I did it but there was consent” defense? If that’s so, of course, I agree that DNA is completely irrelevant either way, but that is not what I understand their defense to be.
This just jumped out at me.
bolding mine
000000000
If statistics for blond-on-brunette rape was low, you still can’t say that a given case is improbable because you don’t know what other factors at play. If a rape victim is young, at a party alone in a house full of drunk athletes, and is an exotic dancer, that certainly should carry a lot more weight than her hair color or her race when assessing the plausibility of rape.
By only looking at race, you miss out on so much.
But I’m not looking only at race. If it’s statistically less likely that propsition X is true on any basis, then I’m a priori more skeptical of X. The article suggesting that at two universities 50% of rape accusations were shown to be unfounded would, if given credence, make me, roughly, 50% less likely a priori to believe this particular university student (again, and always, in the absence of better evidence).
And you’d need to flesh out the nature and extent of the (possible) statistical corellations you posit for the other factors – while I believe that a gang rape report has more a priori statistical plausibility from a young woman than from an ancient crone, you would need to get those figures (rapes of young victims vs. old victims) to counter the dogma that rape has nothing to do with desirability of the victim but is a crime of pure violence.
I don’t know why you’d need statistics to determine what sounds reasonably plausible. Why do I needs stats on, for example, how many rapes have been perpetrated by Georgia Tech football players on a Friday night in March to be able to say that an allegation involving GT football players is plausible? You won’t find stats on most things. At some point you have to rely on common sense.
Common sense tells me that if you take a young woman–regardless of race and hair color–put her in a room full of inebriated strangers–regardless of race and hair color–who are paying her to dance around naked, the risk of rape is relatively high. When determining plausibility, I’m far more likely to seize upon those details as opposed to the race of the parties involved. Common sense tells me that those are more important factors.
stretch, if there were a smoochey-face smiley, you’d get one!
Now you’re being deliberately obtuse. If the point you’re making is that one can rush to judgment without knowing even half the facts, then, certainly, you’re the poster boy. I will continue to believe that knowing the evidence, and asking questions about the story we’re being told, are valuable things to do. The “meaningless issue of hypothetical” evidence, indeed. :rolleyes:
Come on, tell the truth: when OJ’s lawyers said he didn’t kill 'em, you wrote down the phone number for the toll-free tip line, didn’t you?
Your determination that it is “relatively high” sounds to me very much like armchair theorizing, to which you’re entitled, but which would not (necessarily) have more predictive weight than a statistic showing that (e.g.) one researcher found that half of university student rape reports were unfounded, or that there were racial disparities in commission and victimization of rape.
Thousands of strippers strip for hundreds of thousands of guys every week (including many at private parties). If there were a “relatively high” rate of rape, I don’t know that this would be such a viable business. So where along the continuum of “greater than zero” (I will concede this arguendo) and “likely” does your “relatively high” risk of stripper rate actually fall?
Damn girl. It took you long enough to call me an asshole. Let me ask you this. Why does it seem to you that things are the way you say they are? Did you dream it? Or did something happen in the real world to make you feel that way? If so, did any of that have anything to do with the case at hand?
If you had read the whole thread you would have realized this many posts ago. Link. Try to keep up.
I linked this earlier. Did you read it? (My bolding)
Granted, we have no idea what the tests actually revealed. However, the bolded statement is unequivocal. What else might you want to know? It is extremely significant to me, as I said earlier, that Nifong has not refuted this claim. In fact, at the rally where he spoke at NCCU he said he would go on regardless. He is de facto accepting what the “defense” lawyers stated. (Sorry for the Latin. 
)
When I say “relatively high” I mean the risk of rape is greater than the norm. Common sense tells me that a young and unexperienced stripper is more likely to be a victim of rape than a sixty-year old librarian is, simply because of their of work environments and clientel. In the same way, a rich person who lives in a bad neighborhood is going to be more likely to be mugged than a poor person living in a good neighborhood. The latter is not impossible, but it is less plausible. I don’t need stats to tell me what makes practical sense.
People put themselves in risky situations all the time. So what?
Okay, so I was right, and you don’t have any specific data. “Common sense” tells me that a woman is more likely to be gang-raped by a bunch of Norwegian schoolboys chanting “Kill the pig!” (hey, they’re bilingual) on the streets of Oslo than in Tokyo, but if a woman made a report of such an event in either Oslo or Tokyo, and in the absence of any other definitive evidence, I’d say, hmm, that sounds pretty unlikely anywhere (i.e., the absolute incidence of either fact pattern is vanishingly low), so that your (perceived but not cited) statistical corellation need not be given much weight.
As race has been kicking around in here, I’ve finally gotten around to looking the specifics up, and there there do seem to be both absolute and relative statistical numbers that (always, in the absence of better specific proof) would make someone sit up and say “Hey, this fact pattern doesn’t arise very often, maybe it didn’t really arise here.”
To wit, in the Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2003, Statistical Tables (as provided by DOJ – http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cvus0302.pdf) we seem to learn that (Table 42, page 32 of my link) in a recent year in the United States, the percentage of black women (black people, actually, as it’s not broken down by sex) who reported a rape or sexual assault (or a mere verbal threat thereof), and who further reported that their assailant was (or appeared to be) white was . . . wait for it . . . zero (or so close to zero as to be statistically a rounding error – “zero percent” was listed if there were fewer than ten reports of a particular category of incident). And it’s not as though black women weren’t reporting a large absolute number of rapes – they reported 24,000+, the vast majority (~88%) of which they alleged were by black guys, the rest by “other than black or white”).
If false rape allegations are (as the FBI statistics earlier cited) are running at 8% or greater, then I guess some of those black women accusing black men were fibbing and maybe (if false reporting applies to false negatives too), some black women were refraining from reporting actual rapes by white men. But those are marginal issues in the face of a number like “zero percent rapes of black women by white men.”
The suggestion that white men very rarely rape black women these days thus appears borne out by this data, and any way you slice it, though, the government figures make it appear that white men have little interest in (or competence at) doing so. I do not know why this is so, and we needn’t determine that; the fact is, it’s a statistically vanishingly improbable fact pattern, as rape fact patterns, today, in the U.S., go. Any given white guy could jump up and rape any given black woman, and if he did, I’d say, punish him, and if we were investigating and she had evidence, I’d consider it. But we’re not there yet, so we go with what we have.
Iit is thus not illogical to consider the statistically disproportionate extreme rarity of inter-racial (at least as to white-on-black) sexual violence in considering (with no other definitive evidence) a particular unproven allegation thereof.
I would want to know what the test results showed, not the conclusion that an attorney would argue results from what the test results showed. Shaky Jake’s post, if truthful*, goes some way to illuminating the situation. Sometimes foreign matter is found but in amounts not sufficient to test. If that’s the case, it would still be a truthful statement to say, “none of the players’ DNA was found on the woman, on any of her clothing or possessions, or under artificial fingernails that were found by the police.” But while truthful, such a statement might not tell us the whole story.
One of the reasons that we refer to cross-examination as the greatest method devised by western civilization to determine the truth is because of the human tendency to tell only the helpful facts. Cross-examination means that all the facts, including those that cut against you, have to come out. I can’t understand how anyone would read a newspaper article without coming up with a dozen or more questions that need to be answered.
Heh. I have no objection to Latin per se ( 
). I object to big or foreign words that don’t contribute to the discussion but are, instead, simply there to demonstrate how smart the person is. I agree that your reading of the situation is rational, but it seems to me that there are still questions to be answered, Shaky Jake’s interesting post notwithstanding.
*I have no basis to believe or disbelieve that Shaky Jake is accurately reporting what’s in the report. From an evidentiary standpoint, of course, the post is not reliable – there’s no assertion of personal knowledge, nor any kind of foundation laid upon which we could rely. Moreover, as poor Pierre Salinger learned, the internet, she is a crazy place.
Answer me this: Would you need to see some data to believe that a naked woman standing on the street at 3:00 in the morning is more at risk of attack than a clothed woman standing on the street at 3:00 in the afternoon? I don’t think there’s any documented evidence that bears this out, but feel free to test it with some loved-ones if you’re skeptical. You shouldn’t be worried.
I’m shaking my head. Not at you, mind you. I’m disappointed that I and a few others are the only Dopers in this thread challenging your stupid inferences. This bothers me because if we were talking about any other subject it wouldn’t be this way. Regardless of how one feels about the case in question, wrong is wrong. And you are wrong.
I don’t care if the reported crime rate for white-on-black rape was in the negative, let alone low, that doesn’t change the plausibility of this particular allegation. White men are not incapable of raping black women. There’s nothing remotely inconceivable about a white man forcing himself on a black woman. A white man’s dick doesn’t automatically go limp at the sight of a black woman’s naked body (trust me, I know this). There’s no reason to believe that a white rapist would pass over a black woman if the opportunity to rape presented itself. There is nothing special about black women that makes them immune to rape. The ability to rape is not a function of race, therefore it has as much relevance to the discussion as shoe size, hair color, birth sign, or high school GPA.
Using crime stats to tell you whether or not this case is plausible is wrong. It’s like concluding that simply because avian influenza (H5N1) has yet to be documented in the US that a chicken outbreak over here is an implausible scenario. But it isn’t, because there is nothing special about the US that makes us immune to that disease. Likewise, there is nothing implausible about a rapist who happens to be white raping another person who happens to black.
Yes, it is illogical if you are using that statistic to determine whether or not something could happen or not. Especially if race is the only thing that you are looking at. If there’s much more important factors at play ( athletes, alcohol, stripping, wild partying, stupidity, etc) then it makes absolutely no sense to form your preliminary conclusions around the kind of statistics you’re talking about.
That is, unless your goal is to find any and every reason to dismiss something without waiting to hear all the facts. If that’s your intent, then I understand why you cling so tightly to those numbers of yours. It is consistent with your username. I just hope our scientific community doesn’t have the same attitude towards avian influenza.
Now I’ve gone and caused Avian influenza. And what do you have against Hispanics?
I’m sorry you don’t have data. I’m sorry I do, and that you don’t like what it says (or are you challenging the third parties who provided it – and if so, on what basis?).
Don’t take it out on me.
In the absence of other evidence, patterns from past statistics of course have predictive value of what will happen or what will be likely in the average case. The concept of an “average case” is of course notional. That does not make it irrelevant when there is no other dispositive data available. We all make (and must make) first-cut assumptions (until more evidence is available).
What my approach has on its side is that it’s reflective of how life, and the justice system, and investigations are, and must be, lived. In allocating time and resources, we simply can’t (and would disserve ourselves if we did) give no weight to the past as prologue – which is nothing like affording it dispositive weight in the face of other, non-makeweight evidence in a paritcular case.
Statistical corellations are one way of doing this, even in particular cases. If $150,000 turns up missing from my particular company, and the CTO tells me “the payroll guy did it,” but the payroll guy tells me “the CTO did it,” I am not debarred from looking at (and I would be an idiot not to consider) Detective X’s advice that in 99 out of the last 100 embezzlement cases he’d investigated, the payroll guy had been involved – and this is true even though we can readily imagine scenarios in which (in this particular case) the CTO had the means and opportunity to be the embezzler. No one says give the CTO a free pass, no one says crucify the payroll guy even when evidence comes up that clearly exonerates him – the point is, until that evidence shows up, you are not unjustified in giving less credence to the accusation that (in the absence of definitive proof either way, a point I keep making and you keep willfully ignoring) has less statistically-frequent precedent. CTOs aren’t stealing too much, based on history, for cultural/economic reasons that who the Hell knows. A given accusation against a CTO doesn’t (until proof comes in) strike me as having the prima facie (oops) credibility that one against a payroll guy does. White guys aren’t (generally, based on recent history) raping blacks much (this says nothing about white or black character, necessarily; but some cultural pattern is obviusly exerting a force on lots of white rapists (mind you, the white guys are raping a goodly number of white women, so I’m hardly absolving them) leading them on a group-wide basis to have an identifiable non-tendency to rape black women (in recent years, in the U.S.). And, gang rapes are absolutely rare (in recent years, in the U.S.). A given accusation against of white gang rape of a black woman would be a huge statistical anomaly – this does not mean (and I have not, as you can’t seem to get through your head, suggested that) it can’t have happened – just that, till some better proof shows up, that won’t be my default assumption in the face of the statistics.
Another way of putting it is that I’m arguing for applying Occam’s Razor, sort of, to this situation just as we would elsewhere. As I have repeatedly said, I don’t know what happened here. But if there got to be a sufficient number of discrepancies that would have to be overlooked or explained away in order for hypothesis A to be true (the improbable racial angle being only one of them), and fewer assumptions that need to be made in order for Hypothesis B to be true, then sure, in rape allegations as in any others, I’m not willing to rule out Hypothesis B (e.g., this could be one of the 50% of campus rape allegations that are (according to one study) unfounded). I am not saying we are to the point where any prosecution theory would be literally untenable because of any individual or combined “discrepancies” or “oddities” in the story. I’m saying the subject is not closed to discussion.
By the way, the feminists may not like your imputation that a naked woman’s more likely to be raped than a clothed woman. Rape is a crime of violence, not lust, and it doesn’t have ANYTHING TO DO with what she wore, and you’re blaming the victim, you are.
Hey, I managed to do all that without calling you or your (cite-free) theories “stupid.”
It’s not, as I’ve said in as many ways as I know how to in English. ¿Debemos intentar en español?
Cite for their being “much more important” (believing that it ought to be so is not citation).
The numbers are what we have for the moment. And if you review the state of play, the OP was prompted to his immoderate attack (I suspect) by the fact that neither the DA nor the mobs calling for the blood of the lax team seem to have “wait[ed] to hear all the facts” before tarring these dumb jocks and impinging on their personal privacy.
So if that’s all you’re advocating for (and tossing in the tiebreaker of the legal presumption of innocence), I assume you’ll join me in condmniing any hastiness by the DA or the mob, and in subjecting the theories of the prosecutor (and the accusations with which the accuser has the potential to imprision three young men whom the law presumes for the moment innocent) to the most punctilious of scrutinies. So we’re on the same page?
You know what part of your username I’m alluding to.
And I’m sorry you don’t have common sense. You probably need data before you go out on that limb and say not eating makes you hungry, don’t you?
I never challenged it. I didn’t even bother looking at it, to be honest. Its not relevant, as I said back on page 4. The fact that you think it is relevant reveals a lot about you, though.
What’s the “average case”? That’s the million dollar question.
To address another stupid inference you made earlier about the 50% false reporting rate at college campuses: in order to conclude that a given charge has a 50% likelihood of being false based on that statistic, you have to assume that all reports of college rape are essentially the same. But they’re not. You have date rape, acquaintance rape, gang rape, jumped-by-a-man-in-an-alley rape. You have rape in which drugs played a role and you have rape in which it did not. You have false accusations that are made as acts of revenge and some made for other reasons, like to cover up “naughty girl” behavior. No two reports are likely to be exactly alike.
To say that 50% of these allegations are false is not wrong, if the data bears this out. What is wrong is using that information to conclude that any given allegation has a 50% chance of being wrong. Allegations in which drugs are involved may have only a 20% rate of being false, while other types of allegations may have a higher rate. Therefore, if a given allegation has drug involvement, it is inaccurate to conclude it is 50% likely that the accuser is lying. A closer look at the specifics of the case may reveal other data that lends credibility to the allegation, which renders even the 20% statistic irrelevant.
Your inferences, in other words, are stupid. I wish I wasn’t the only Doper with the balls to point this out.
bolding mine.
Well, it shouldn’t be. “Innocent until proven guilty” and all that. But this has nothing to with all your correlation crap and all to do with burden of proof. If the evidence is there to link someone to a crime, the statistics about that crime in the general population are immaterial. If there is no evidence, then the stats are just as immaterial. The same kind of evidence that sends a poor person to jail for shoplifting should be the same kind of evidence that sends a rich Winona Ryder type to jail. Of course, in practice, it doesn’t work that way. But it should.
Who the fuck cares what “the feminists” think? If “the feminists” are anything like “the protesters” you talked about back on page 4, then I’m certain neither one of them will care what I think either.
I’m curious as to what data led you to this conclusion. Since you’re big on data, I’m sure you’ll let me know.
No, because I don’t think you are really taking the reasonable “let’s wait and see the evidence before we call anyone a liar/rapist” stance that you seem to think you are. Your insistence on using a faulty statistical inference to support your particular views is what gives me that impression.
Wow, statistics are being used. Awesome.
Currently, the “black” population in the U.S. stands around 12%. Without the historical incidence of white men raping black women, what would that number be? 5%? 3%?
Attempting to apply broad statistical variables to a single incident isn’t just folly, it’s dishonest.
Well at this juncture the following scenario appears to be shaping up
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All white members of the team give up DNA withtout a peep - Lawyers declare adamantly (prior to results) that nothing will be found
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No DNA evidence (at all) found despite clams of gang rape
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Purported photographic evidence of her arrival prior to entertaing that she was “impaired” and her legs were banged up before she even started dancing.
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Supposedly “grinning” while trying to get back into the house
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History of conviction for stealing a car and almost running down a policeman several 6 years ago - did some time for it
Unless there’s some stone cold evidence that she was actually raped that hasn’t been presented yet this case really doesn’t appear to have much traction