MMMkay? It’s a ten-year-old case, rick, and evidently the original piece wasn’t archived on the web. That’s what I got from Lynn Hecht Schafran herself, who was kind enough to send me the original piece. I had to ask her for her notes on the interview, and those are harder to locate.
Based on your remarks in the other thread, I’m eagerly waiting for you to define how not being able to find a ten-year-old document makes one a liar. By that standard, not being to find my house keys makes me a thief. One wonders what that standard would be like were it applied to sexual matters.
I’m also curious as to the apparent contradiction between these statements of yours.
But here you do.
The Good Victim is the Madonna half of the double standard. How, exactly, do you explain saying that sexism is a thing of the past and then shrugging it off as inevitable. I'm also puzzled by these two remarks:
Well, there’s this, too.
I realize I have brought a quote from the Pit here, but this is the thread in which you said I lied. Perhaps we can agree on a definition and simplify matters.
Gee, I’m impressed. You can in fact read minds. How that must eliminate doubt for you; after all, it doesn’t matter what people say, you can divine their motives and intent. Fascinating.
If a person claims to be a pacifist, and totally against violence in all circumstances, while she is punching out a little orphan boy for accidentally bumping into her, I need not be a mind-reader to determine that the pacifist’s claims are untrue.
The general principle is that I’m entitled to assume that you intend the ordinary results of your words and actions.
In this particular case, you made a definite accusation of jury tampering and improper conduct against a person, and you are unable to back it up with any citation to authority. That’s reckless.
So I guess you should be impressed. What would be better than my impressing you with my acumen is if you learned from your mistake, and in the future conformed your actions to the more prudent approach of accusing people of wrongdoing only when you have actual evidence to present in support of such an accusation.
I’m impressed by your arrogance and condescension yet again, Bricker, but little else, because I found the quotes, and they do indicate that the jury discussed the defendant’s family and the effect the rape trial was having on them.
Unfortunately, it was a different trial. I guess that explains why it took so long.
In A Woman Scorned, Peggy Reeves Sanday discusses two similar cases more or less side by side. One of them is the Smith case. On Page 221, the author states that, "Interviews with jurors after the acquittal shoed that while Patricia Bowman’s past history probably made a difference, nothing that might have been brought out about William Kennedy Smith would have changed the strong feeling of sympthy the jurors felt for him and his family. Four of them wept after the announcement of the verdict. Foreman Thomas J. Steans,Jr., a former army paratrooper who had earned seven Purple Hearts in Vietnam and who cited war heroes as his idols, burst into tears the moment the verdict was accounced. For Samuel Celaya, one of the alternate jurors, the high point of the trial was Ted Kennedy’s testimony. Demonstrating how much sympathy can play a role, he expressed how deeply moved he was by Kennedy’s testimony and be being so close to him physically. " She notes Lea Haller was one of those jurors who wept at the verdict as well.
The other case is one of acquaintance rape involving a young black college student and several white college boys. In the Smith case, sympathy for the defendant and contempt for the 'Bad Victim Patricia Bowman went side by side. In the St. Johns case, the exact same thing also applied. In *Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, author Helen Benedict details the eight myths about rape, and the stereotypes about wome which underlie the crime. I won’t list them here, but they’re instructive to study. In both these cases, each of these women had the majority of those myths lined up against them, and had the crucial final catalyst: a nice white boy rapist. /sarcasm. The result was that they got bashed, and the guy got sympathy.
In the St. Johns’ case one woman juror dominated discussions, according to statements made by juror Thedore Lynch in an interview with the author. According to page 45—the case and trial are woven throughout the book and amongst other trials—"Sympathy for the defendants was expressed from the very beginning of the trial. Contrary to Judge O’Dwyer’s daily instruction not to talk about the case, the jurors started discussing it from the beginning, expressing a fear of ruining the lives of the defendants. “They weren’t concerned about justice,” Lynch observed.“They were more concerned about makinga mistake than about listening to the evidenced and going by what the law says.”
Juror Denise McDermott became convinced that Angela was a woman scorned from the time Angela got on the witness stand, Lynch told the author. Even before Angela took the stand, McDermott talked about how when women are hurt they will do anything to get revenge. Lynch remembered her saying, “When a woman is scorned she’ll do anything for revenge. Anything.”
Lynch also remembered juror Kathleen Finn talking about how much the trial was costing the parents. Lynch noted that Finn seemed to know a great deal about the financial status of the parents. Once she told everybody that the parents had to take out a second mortgage on their homes to pay their lawyers and one of them had to take out a ‘second mortgage on his boat.’ Lynch never found out where she got her information, but was amazed at the degree to which sympathy for the defendants and their families came into play * during the deliberations.*
Uh, yeah. Except that was never the case here, was it? To use your analogy, I claimed to be a pacifist, then didn’t notice the boy bumping into me and got accused of being violent. I’m impressed all right.