Yes, I mean the man who abducted those three women.
Is there a person in the land who honestly believes he only raped each once?
Personally, I think it’s enormously offensive to the women. I haven’t heard any explanation on the news, so I got to wondering.
Can anyone explain the reasoning to me?
One of the articles I read said that more rape charges might be added later. I don’t really know how they would calculate the total number to charge him with. Maybe they don’t know either and are still figuring it out.
I was a little bit relieved to see three charges instead of four, meaning hopefully he at least left the little girl alone.
The women are going to have to testify in depth to each and every rape that’s charged. If victims prefer not to testify more than necessary on the topic, and you can get life based on charges that don’t involve such painful testimony, it’s kind to the victims to do so.
I’d guess that they can establish the three initial counts but after that it gets hazy. I’d guess that there might be additional charges filed but the authorities are playing it by the book - better to try him on what you can prove rather than on speculation.
As as to adding charges, news reports indicate that they are currently considering multiple charges of aggravated murder for beating the women until they miscarried.
And it seems I was mistaken, they are also considering the death penalty in addition to life inprisonment.
In addition? That’d teach the fucker a lesson.
It’s also possible (but IANAL) that the entire period of confinement and multiple instances count as one extended rape. In a case where a victim is assaulted multiple times, it usually seems to be charged and prosecuted as a single instance. This might be an extreme interpretation but all they need is one conviction, with special circumstances, to lock him away without parole. No need to clutter up the proceedings with large numbers of counts that may or may not be provable. Then there’s the aggravated assault with extreme bodily harm, and brutality-caused miscarriages.
What’s Ohio’s preferred method again? Whatever it is, it’s too kind for this mucus wad.
LOL. I meant, they are considering both options and have not decided.
There is no legal reason they can’t charge as many of the rapes as the victims are willing to testify to; generally rape is a hard to prove case when there is not a lot of immediate physical evidence of rape so it comes to a victim testifying versus the defendant’s protestations of innocence. I would imagine as a matter of practicality, any charge of rape the victim’s testify to, Castro will be convicted of, as there is substantial evidence from multiple victims that he kidnapped the other victims for sexual enslavement as well as Castro having a written confession in his own house in which he labels himself a sexual predator as well as a child related to him that he fathered with a woman held against her will etc.
But just like with the Elizabeth Smart case (who testified she was raped 3-4 times a day for 9 months), there is a serious question as to going through the logistics of trying to prove so many rape charges and what good does it serve. Just on the four kidnapping charges and three rape charges put forth now, that’s “baseline” 77 years in prison under Ohio law. I often check the criminal statutes from other states when cases like this come out, and I can honestly say Ohio’s is the most unreadable and confusing I’ve read (Virginia’s for example I find easy to understand as a layman.) There are tons of potential aggravators that enhance the penalties above what I said, and all kinds of criteria that can insure you serve every day you are sentenced for or that might give you a chance at mitigating and etc. Basically assume Castro would get the maximum aggravation possible and would qualify for none of the mitigation allowed under Ohio law. If they even try to prosecute him on the fetal homicide charges (which they may not), that also adds substantially to the sentence as you can sentence those as you would murder.
No one in the United States is on death row for fetal homicide, but plenty of people are serving prison sentences for it; there are elements of the crime that make it harder to prove just on witness testimony so the prosecutors may not even pursue it. Plus trying to send someone to death row for it would probably mean instantly a long drawn out constitutional law case.
But in most heinous cases like this the prosecutors pursue as many charges as they need to get the desired result and no more. Most likely, after consideration, the prosecutors here will determine life in prison is both the most appropriate and most realistic sentence to seek. So they’ll charge him with however many first degree felonies (rape and kidnapping are both first degree felonies) they believe they will need to charge him with in order to insure an effective life sentence (and probably a few more for good measure just in case he beats any single individual charge.) But with all the potential aggravating factors for his crimes it’s possible just a few of the charges against him could carry a much longer sentence than what I’m speculating on, an ordinary first degree felony carries an 11 year sentence but apparently there are ways that can be increased in aggravated cases (I didn’t read into that).
I remember when they tried the Beltway Sniper here some people wondered why they were only charged with a few murders and why Virginia tried them but not Maryland. It came down to they only need a few murders to get their death penalty and Virginia executes people pretty regularly whereas Maryland did not at the time (and abolished it recently.) Further, since they had over 10 murders on them if they charged a small number and somehow lost, the other murders being totally separate crimes could be charged in subsequent trials.
Let’s get Hedley LaMarr to clear this up.
In general, when there are multiple possible charges of the same crime, prosecutors will go after the cases they think they have the best case of winning. Thus, if there’s a serial killer, they will pick one or two cases with the most evidence. This makes conviction more likely and, if the defendant is judged not guilty, they can still charge him with other instances of the crime.
Martin Hyde writes:
> I remember when they tried the Beltway Sniper here some people wondered
> why they were only charged with a few murders and why Virginia tried them
> but not Maryland.
Besides Virginia and Maryland, the two snipers also apparently killed people in Washington DC, California, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Washington State, and Louisiana.
I understand the points made about, not making them to relive every rape, the no need he’s gone for life anyway, I suppose. But what judge or jury would believe his denial, if made, to whatever the women claim? Can’t the women support each others claims? I would think so. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
On the same track - why four kidnapping charges? The three women are obvious, but I’m surprised that there is a kidnapping charge for the kid.
I mean, I know it’s sick, but the child never lived anywhere else - how could it be kidnapped?
It might be that, for the moment at least, there are only 3 instances of rape where they can pin down sufficient information to make a charge. For instance, what were the dates of each rape? I’m gonna make a WAG that these women were each raped the same day they were kidnapped, which is a specific date that CAN be pinned down. But if the women say things like, “He raped me hundreds of times over the next ten years, but I really couldn’t tell you the dates they happened” – well, perhaps that’s too vague a charge to prosecute on.
But I’m just guessing – IANAL.
Proving every element of every single incident of rape that occurred over a 10 year period would be extremely difficult. Sometimes in cases where mutliple sexual assaults occur over an extended period of time (typically with children), prosecutors will charge offenses that occur on or around dates that have significance to the victim, like birthdays or holidays, such that the victim can testify that they remember that the defendant sexually assaulted them on or around their 11th birthday in X location and X manner, or on or around Christmas Eve 2012 in X location and in X manner, or on or around the day the vaccum cleaner got delivered in X location and X manner, and then after guilt is established for those offenses the fact that the defendant also sexually assaulted them weekly for a year comes in for consideration at punishment.
Must be because the child was not allowed to leave.
In most states, kidnapping statutes specify that any unlawful detention or physical movement of a child, other than that performed by a parent or guardian, constitutes kidnapping. An abduction of a child thus need not be accompanied by some other circumstance, such as Extortion or physical injury, to qualify for the highest level of kidnapping charge. In the absence of an aggravating circumstance, an unlawful, non-consensual restraint or movement is usually charged as something less than the highest degree or level of kidnapping.
I wonder if - and this is just sheer conjecture - because the child has no birth certificate with a father listed and he hadn’t, one assumes, filled out an affidavit of paternity, that they can charge him with kidnapping because the one known and affirmed parent at the time the child was being held didn’t want him holding the child. If she could have taken the child out of the home, she would have, so the child was being held captive as much as a snatched child, only from the moment of her birth.
What difference does it make when the penalties are the same?
Seems to me the guy did things which our justice system really has no way of punishing. Whether he gets one life sentence or a hundred life sentences, the end result is the same.
Same thing with a man who kills one person, kills 100 people, or kills millions of people: we can’t do anything more to him than we can do, which is extremely trivial in comparison. Punishment is the same.