Well, if they get really really mad, I guess we’ll just have to accept their surrender. That’ll teach us.
You’re right. I should have written “doesn’t prove”.
That’s a big stretch. Rape shield laws, however flawed they might be, exist because there is a fear that social pressure would shame rape victims into staying quiet and allow the perpetrators to get away with it. The converse is “people say mean things about people who get accused of being rapists!” They do, but they also say that about accused murderers, thieves, corporate criminals, drunk drivers, violent spouses and parents, and so on. I don’t want to see people falsely accused of any crime and great care should be taken in pressing charges against anyone, but we don’t need to be specially concerned about accused rapists.
One incidence of false accusations is not the same as another. On the face of it, the allegations against Straus-Kahn seem much more plausible than the Brawley case and the Duke case. Whether he assaulted her or not, they appear to have been in the same place at the same time and there was evidence of some kind of sex. Brawley apparently made up a crazy story to justify her being absent from home, and there were never any witnesses or evidence other than her word. She never named anyone as far as I know, although her attorneys later did. Nifong did abuse his authority in the Duke case and he screwed up majorly. The problems with that case were more obvious and he didn’t see it because he was on a crusade. It’s true that there are similarities in those cases because they both played into social and racial divisions.
The Condit case really doesn’t have any similarity to this. He got himself in trouble by lying to the police to cover up his affair, which is the single biggest thing you don’t do when you’re trying to convince the police you’re innocent of a crime. From there, the public and the press just had a field day with him. I don’t think the police ever considered him a suspect. He was a slimeball who decided he’d rather protect his job in Congress than help police searching for a missing woman (although in point of fact she was already dead). Again, not much of a similarity to Straus-Khan. He wasn’t a killer but deserved some significant ridicule and criticism.
Yeah, and you’re safest from actual rape if you don’t dress sexy and drink heavily at parties.
The victim’s lawyer is currently claiming on CNN that Klaus’s defense is
that the sex was consensual. He is still asserting that there is a shoulder injury and documented vaginal bruising before the prosecuter’s office…
The press originally condemned him but some press reports seem to be now acquitting him.
I don’t think the story has fully panned out yet.
Considering the frothing mania that is a common response to such accusations, yes we do. People just don’t react towards accusations of sex crimes the way they do to other accusations. Being accused of murder doesn’t cause anywhere near the kind of damage that being accused of a sex crime does.
In fact, to my surprise, I heard twice on main TV channels ( when the case was all over the medias) an explanation of how an American trial worked that included the statement that the accused will have to prove his innocence. I intellectually understand where this way of presenting things comes from, but I was very surprised that a French major media would fall into this misrepresentation. I used to think it only worked the other way around (citizens from countries with an adversarial system thinking that an inquisitorial system required one to prove one’s innocence).
Especially surprising given that the French public would be somewhat familair with the American criminal system thanks to detective stories (Law and Order, etc…), which, regardless how many details they can get wrong, provide an acceptable depiction for a lay and foreign audience.
Dunnow. Are experienced American LEOs gifted with mind-reading abilities?
Africa is a big place. I don’t even remember at the moment where this woman comes from, but rape by military forces might be totally credible or very unlikely depending on her citizenship. And I assume an immigration official would know by merely looking at the name of the country of which it is.
Same for genital mutilation, by the way. It’s not like it’s done in all, or even most of, Africa.
That’s disingenuous at best. The reason there is such reaction and legal apparatus aimed specifically at sex crimes is because they do provoke harsher reaction from the public. Dont tell me you’ve just discovered that today.
Being accused of rape is one of the most damning accusation there is. If a judge or police officer doesnt pay attention to the stigmas associated with certain crimes, they should resign on the spot. They’re obviously not qualified.
Yeah, sorry. I skipped past your question. The wiki page on perp walk is rather well made (though unnecessarily long on the DSK case and the reaction from the French to it). Perp walk wouldnt even be considered in France. Not only it is illegal, but it is seen as what it is: pillorying. That has no place in a state of law. It’s the same in the UK and most of Europe. I fact, I doubt any Western nation uses it apart from the US.
If you’re innocent until proven guilty, it isnt the privilege of the State to rip that to shreds before due process has even started.
Actually it would be a good idea too in low-profile cases. If DSK is cleared, everybody will know it, along with every single detail about the case. And he’ll have the means to fight efficiently remaining doubts (will be intertviewed by medias, pay PR specialists, etc…). Joe six pack making the headlines when he’s arrested won’t get as much publicity when he’s cleared. He will also have much more trouble getting his life back to normal (finding a job, a place to live, etc…).
Hopefully the French are a little more forgiving than Americans and the guy will be OK.
Note that in fact, barring the medias from publishing pictures of handcuffed people (and taking extra steps to make sure that they generally wouldn’t be in a position to take these pictures in the first place) is a quite recent evolution in France.
Although previous threads showed that you and me have different perception of what “recent” means. In any case, I’ve seen many alleged criminals (including rapists) in handcuffs on French TV and in French newspapers in my lifetime. Even though this one is old even by my standards, I picked it because both the case and the picture are famous (Patrick Henry was almost lynched in front of the medias during his arrest).
You must be older than me. The only guy I remember which did not have a coat or a hood to mask his face was that guy that got falsesly accused in the “Petit Grégory”'s case and was subsequently shot by Grégory’s father. But the behaviour of the crowd in Henry’s case is a good reminder why France did away with the death penalty.
That said, there’s a difference between taking extra precautions to prevent the media from taking pictures of a suspect and not staging up perp walks.
And then there’s a difference between staging them and forbidding them.
It does seem strange from this side that France would take the accused’s right to privacy seriously but not that of the (alleged) rape victim, already traumatized in a deeply non-private way, herself. Is there a cultural attitude there that arrests are typically unjustified, and that accusations are typically lies?
This is one the weirdest tendencies I see time and again on posts on the DSK case here and on other forums. This is assuming that the infamy of the crime involved is proof in itself that the act happened.
The cultural attitude of the French is that you dont make damning accusations without serious proof. I dont think this is so much the cultural attitude of the French as that of most of the planet.
That’s what I was hinting at. I’m 46.
The habbit of covering the arrested man’s face with some garnment is much older than the law I was refering to. But nothing prevented medias from showing “stolen” pictures of the arrest. And a number of publications kept doing it when they could, until it was formally forbidden.
The Gregory case is about as old as the Henry case. I guess you saw footages because it’s still an unsolved crime (and a dramatically botched case) we hear about from time to time. But it happened more recently than that.
True that.
As an aside, I often wondered if, if I were arrested, I could demand that my face wouldn’t be hidden. I guess I might change my mind if it actually happened, but I find somewhat ashaming to leave one’s home hidden as…welll…as a criminal.
Mme. la Capitaine: It isn’t about proof, that’s for the court case to decide, but it *is *about likelihood. Our experience, and I think most of the planet’s since you invoke it, is that the police normally do a good job, and that most people arrested for crimes are, in fact, guilty and will be found so at trial. Presumption of innocence is a legal concept, not a cultural one. Is France different that way?
The strangeness I refer to is that France apparently has so little regard for the privacy of rape victims that their identities can be casually spread without their permission, and most especially that they get much less protection than the accused. Is that inaccurate?
Straus-Kahn has been released from house arrest, and the prosecutors did not oppose it. We’re now seeing details on what specifically the accuser lied about:
The prosecutors say they still believe in their case but aren’t sure a jury will believe the accuser. Who knows if they mean that. The attorney general is a newbie - Robert Morgenthau had been the AG in the city since the Precambrian - and I wonder if this will leave him vulnerable at the next election.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Rape shield laws exist because of the attitude toward victims of sex crimes. They don’t have anything to do with the attitude toward the accused.
No, I’m just musing about it at the moment.
I’m sure at least one of you can support this assertion with some kind of cite. So far I’m just seeing assertions that accused rapists are treated worse than accused murderers, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was based on nothing whatsoever.
There rarely are accusations by the victim of a murder. And there are even less retracts of such accusations by the murdered victim, I guess.