Such are the facts, although I should well have used the qualifier ‘alleged’ before rapist in the topic heading. In any case the following is my reason for putting this in GD. (Please move it, mods, if you think another forum more appropriate).
Say what? What would that chilling message be? Don’t have your rapist killed because it’s against the law? Rape is certainly one of the most heinous of offenses but is that enough to justify vigilante methods of requital? I think the woman received an appropriate sentence.
I think vigilantism is not justifiable and that she knew her accusation alone uttered to certain people would get the man killed. She should have been sentenced for far longer than six years imprisonment.
Let’s not forget that there is absolutely no evidence that he actually raped her. There is no credible evidence that this was an act of vigilantism, rather than a simple act of murder. The only evidence we have is the testimony of a convicted murderer, testimony that was only given to avoid that murder conviction. It’s worthless.
The only certain fact is that she wanted a man dead, and she told her ex-boyfriend that the man in question had raped her, knowing that her boyfriend would murder the man. and with that intention.
There are about a million other reasons why she may have wanted this man dead. In any one of those scenarios, telling a jealous and infatuated ex boyfriend that the man had raped her would be the most obvious way of manipulating him into committing murder.
Based on the reliable evidence, this was murder, pure and simple. No reason to believe it was an act of vigilantism.
This is why we have courts of law. If we allow this sort of vigilantism, then we have to accept, a the very least, any murder of a man, whether the murder is a man or a woman. Anybody can make up a story after the fact alleging that the perpetrator raped them, and it’s impossible to prove otherwise.
A more honest way to phrase the OP would be “Murderess accuses victim of rape to avoid jail sentence”.
Those are the universally accepted facts. We all know that the man was a victim of this murderer. The murderer then accused her victim of rape to avoid going to jail. The man is, as far as I can tell, an innocent victim of a murder conspiracy.
Even putting the word alleged there is an attempt to shift blame from the criminal on to the victim.
Would we be equally happy if every time a man is sentenced for rape that he claims was consensual, it was reported as “Man sentenced for having consensual sex with woman?”
What evidence is there that Esperanza pointed the alleged rapist out for the purpose of having him murdered. That seems to be the assumption, but the article doesn’t substantiate that.
I don’t know about criminal law, but is this distribution of punishment consistent with other “mob boss calls a hit on a guy” deals? I mean the lady “mob boss”, Patricia Esparza, that told the others who raped her, took a plea deal and got 6 years. Gianni Van was her ex-boyfriend that she initially told, he got life without parole. The two others who helped kill the guy were Shanon Gires -got 25 to life. And Diane Tran got 4 years but spent no time in prison for time already served?? Why did she get off so light when she was 1/3rd of the people who did the actual killing? It sounds like she got a plea deal as well, and testified against Shanon.
Regardless of the sordid details, punishment 21 years down the line is dodgy as hell, ethically speaking. What’s the point of sending her to prison at this juncture ? She’s demonstrably not a menace so the “segregation of dangerous people from society” argument doesn’t apply, she doesn’t need rehabilitation neither. As for her victim’s family, if they haven’t moved on from their grief over the past 21 years, nothing will do it.
That would be a good arguement if she had been a petty thief or small time pot dealer. Not a murderess.
If a man committed a rape back in 1996, and was only caught now, in the meantime having been a pillar of the community, would you not want him punished.
I find this shockingly unempathic. If this woman had been deeply implicated in the butchering of your son or brother, would you be willing to let bygones be bygones? I know I wouldn’t.
I don’t know that it follows that she necessarily knew what her boyfriend and his accomplices would do. She may have thought they would merely threaten the guy or maybe beat him up, but I doubt she knew they would kidnap him and kill him with a meat cleaver.
However she most certainly knew what they did end up doing and she kept quiet about it for all these years while she pursued a successful life of her own. So I think that lacking evidence she intended these guys to kill him, six years sounds about right. You can’t expect to let vicious murderers escape punishment for years and years and not expect some kind of punishment in return when it comes to light. Her silence was a crime that she was committing the entire time she allowed the killers to remain unidentified.
The fact that she is guilty of murder seems pretty damning.
The fact that she saw the victim being beaten and tortured while suspended by chains from a garage hoist and did nothing seems pretty damning. If she didn’t specifically intend for them to torture and kill the man, she was certainly willing to witness it happening and happy to let the man die without making any attempt to prevent it.
It’s always impossible to know for certain what a killer intended to happen. But when the results are predictable and the killer watches the victim being slowly killed and does nothing to prevent it, the intent seems pretty clear in my mind.
She then went on to lie about the event for years, even going to the extent of marrying the man she saw torturing the victim to deaths so that he couldn’t testify against her.
And when caught, she has such a complete lack of decency that she accuses the innocent victim of raping her to avoid punishment.
An utterly disgusting human being. To suggest that she is no threat to society is ridiculous. She’s the worst kind of sociopath imaginable. She has only been caught once, but most murderers are. That doesn’t mean she is no threat.
I’m not unempathetic. But the victims of rape or the parents of raped children would likely want their rapists to be drawn and quartered in the public square, and we don’t grant them that wish on the basis of their grief, do we ? Justice isn’t about revenge, or even about the victims of crime per se. Justice is (or should be) an utilitarian social construct. It’s about punishment, in a way, but only insofar as said punishment is a dissuasive element rather than an eye-for-an-eye one.
I do agree that what she did was wrong, and needs redressed - but six years in prison is going to destroy the entire rest of her life. Seems harsh for a very old deed she didn’t even commit herself (nor do we have evidence that she egged on) and has had to live with on her conscience for 20 years already. She’s not the same person she was twenty years ago either, philosophically speaking. Fining her for the victims’ family’s benefit and/or giving her tons of community service would seem fairer to me. And again, the victim’s relatives have had 21 years to deal with a grief they now have final closure on. What does the prison sentence change in their lives ?
As a related anecdote, here in France the statutes of limitations for murder only extends as far as 20 years for the most heinous of crimes i.e. sexual acts on kids, murder with torture, or treasonous/terrorist acts. Crimes against humanity are the only ones without any limitations.
What the fuck is the deal with “murderess”? The -er suffix is only for dudes now? She’s a murderer, we don’t need a separate suffix to point out her vagina.
So, *exactly *the same argument that’s used for not jailing college “boys” who commit rape.
First off, 6 years in jail won’t destroy anyone’s life when they are already an established professional. The average professional woman takes off longer than that to have children. 6 years isn’t even a blip. Nobody’s life is destroyed by a 6 year jail stint. I suspect that, as a famous psychologist specialising is abuse and minorities, she will in fact be further ahead in 20 years as a result of this.
Secondly, if it destroys her life, that;s what it’s meant to achieve. That’s part of the deterrent factor. She watched a man being tortured to death, at her behest, and did nothing for 20 years. She literally destroyed her victim’s life. Not just figuratively. She literally took that away from him. She also figuratively destroyed the life of his family. His mother, his brothers, his sisters. All destroyed knowing that their loved one was slowly tortured to death while begging for his life.
Then when caught she accuses the man she murdererd of raping her to avoid going to jail, causing his family more pain and sullying his memory forever more.
Meanwhile she went on to live the best years of her life exactly as she wanted. She didn’t do some form of penance by donating all her wealth to charity or working pro bono as a psychologist with the families of murder victims. That might indicate some sort of contrition. Instead she fled the country, accrued a lot of wealth and fame and married a rich and handsome young man.
She isn’t supposed to get away with that. She is supposed to suffer ling term negative effects for what she did. not live out her fairy tale life of wealth and success. As a society we have decided that 6 years in jail is the minimum deterrent. If it “destroys her life” then that is part of the punishment.
I wonder how much actual jail time she will serve. FME across various jurisdictions unless specifically mandated otherwise, a good rule of thumb is to divide the years awarded in half and then take off as much more time as incarcerating authorities think they can get away with. So actual time served can be considerably less.
At the risk of a thread hijack, I’m getting really sick of victim’s advocates who always assume the victim is 100% truthful. You see them protesting and saying that rape victim’s “deserve to be believed.” And I can recall some high profile cases (such as the Duke lacrosse team case) where the lynch mob mentality took over despite the fact that the accused was factually innocent. I think the tendency to be sympathetic to the victim blinds people to questions of things like “evidence” and “facts.”
No worries, Chihuahua, in my opinion as the thread-starter it’'s no hijack at all as I intended the debate to be about both the attitude of the victim advocacy groups and the sentence itself. I do agree that these groups are sometimes way too extreme in their positions, as most certainly is the case here.