False Rape Society Archives

2011-10-27T07:16:00.001-04:00

St. John's taxis leery of young women

2011-10-19T06:44:00.000-04:00

A taxi company official in St. John's says some of his colleagues are thinking twice about who they pick up downtown because they fear they'll be falsely accused of doing something wrong.

"It's unfortunate but today, young single females or even two females in the car... bad news. Especially if they're intoxicated," said Doug McCarthy, general manager and a driver with Co-Op Taxi in St. John's.

McCarthy said some young women are drunk and pass out on the way home.

He said that when the driver wakes them up, they can't remember where they are going. In some cases, he said they threaten to make false accusations against the driver to avoid paying their fare.

“You touched me or you did this or that or you made a proposition,” said McCarthy, describing what drivers have reported being told.

McCarthy said fear that they'll be the victim of a false accusation, such as assault of inappropriate touching, has left some drivers struggling with the decision to pick up a young girl and bring her home if she is alone.

"Rule of thumb used to be pick up young girls first, take them home, pick up couples seconds and last, pick up the guys and take them home. Now, it's reversed," he said.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2011/10/18/nl-taxi-women-118.html

Not a rape culture, just a PC one

2011-09-22T10:20:00.003-04:00

By Julia Fisher

Let’s make this perfectly clear: there is no rape culture at Yale.

If Yale had a rape culture, there would be students and faculty speaking in favor of rape. Rape would be a common practice; it would be routine to hear someone talking about raping or being raped by someone last weekend. People would discuss what styles or methods of rape they prefer. Obviously, the existence of a rape culture is a farcical idea. These things just don’t happen at Yale.

There are isolated incidents of rape, and that is surely a severe problem. Beyond the physical harm the victim suffers, rape erodes trust. Like any crime, it arouses fear.

Rape falls somewhere on a wide spectrum between murder and robbery. The number of people who commit rape is a tiny percentage of the population at large. The vast majority of people are not criminals.

When we talk about a rape culture, when we look at everyone as a potential criminal, and when we condemn different opinions as promoting rape, we create an environment of suspicion. This suspicion, like crime, erodes trust and arouses fear.

People are afraid to express opinions because they might be called sexist or even, as we have seen recently, supportive of rape. They may not fear bodily harm, as they would after a rape. Instead, this fear in the world of ideas is expressed more often as a dark, pervasive sense of irony.

We recognize our overwhelming need to identify poisonous views, but we couldn’t possibly live in such a tight, constricted world. If you want to say something seriously but know you’ll be labeled a bigot for it, you might say it as a joke. If you say it ironically, you might get away with it.

When all views are subject to condemnation, when an idea we disagree with becomes, in our newfangled, extra-sensitive language, a call for rape, we enter a world of farce. We’re ingrained in our views of what is acceptable and what is offensive. Regardless of what we say, we know what we will hear in opposition. When a person comes to expect to be called a bigot at every turn, reasonable discourse becomes a mockery. We cease to be able to take anything seriously.

On both sides of the perpetual debates about last year’s DKE chant, the Title IX complaint and Sex Week, people are quick to call their opponents hateful, dangerous or bigoted. None of this labeling is productive.

It’s about time we stop going out of our way to try to be offended. We live in a world and on a campus where open discussion is publicly encouraged, where every voice is considered equal, and where men and women are treated equally. As far as sexism goes, we’re doing pretty well.

As the News reported earlier this week, women at Yale hold many leadership positions. Was this supposed to come as a surprise? The vast majority of women quoted in that story didn’t think so — their comments were mostly about leadership in general, not specific to gender.

In The Atlantic this week, Thomas Chatterton Williams painted a portrait of “racism without racists.” The same case can be made about sexism; what Williams calls “the centuries-old residue of systematic … oppression” creates an internalization of the problem. We are taught that women are a historically oppressed class, so we look out for sexism. We want to correct the wrongs of the past, but we can’t — the past has already happened. Frustrated, we try to correct those past wrongs in the present.

It’s a genuine concern, then, that leads to today’s farce. It’s hard to realize that the world has changed. It’s especially hard because, on rare occasions, real sexism is still alive. It’s our job, though, to separate those cases from the general atmosphere of our world. Once we can tell the difference, we can devote our outrage to incidents that really deserve it — real acts of sexism and real acts of rape.

But when we can’t tell the difference, when we let our old expectations govern our current perceptions, we cry sexism and hate when what we really ought to do is have a civil conversation about divergent opinions. Sex Week does not encourage rape; neither does opposing Sex Week. That debate is a good one to hold, but it has nothing to do with rape or sexism.

We don’t have a rape culture at Yale, but we do have a politically correct culture. It’s time to recognize when an argument is really just an argument and not a call to violence. It’s time to let rest old fears. It’s time to give words their meaning back.

Julia Fisher is a junior in Berkeley College.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/sep/22/fisher-not-a-rape-culture-just-a-pc-one/

$25M lawsuit in rape case settled

2011-09-21T22:28:00.001-04:00

HARRISONBURG — A man once convicted of rape has settled a $25 million federal lawsuit that claimed his Fifth and Sixth amendment rights were violated by Waynesboro police officers who did not advise him about his right to remain silent before secretly taping conversations with him while he underwent medical treatment at a local hospital.

In 2003, after a judge allowed a jury to hear the tape, Engra M. Bellamy was convicted in Waynesboro Circuit Court of raping an 18-year-old woman. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, but not before lashing out in court at his accuser and Waynesboro police.

"The evidence is going to show that I'm innocent and that you lied!" he said during his formal sentencing in November 2003.

The woman testified she was job-hunting when she first met Bellamy at The News Virginian, where he worked in the circulation department. In August 2002, the woman — who admitted to making a false rape claim as a juvenile — claimed Bellamy raped her at a vacant Winchester Avenue home.

Bellamy claimed the sex was consensual.

Before the trial, but following his arrest, Bellamy was hospitalized after an asthma attack. A female officer from the Waynesboro Police Department was posted at his door, where the two spoke for about four hours. Bellamy was not read his Miranda rights but made incriminating statements, according to court records.

The following night the police officer, Alyssa Campbell Wells, wore a hidden recording device. Again, Bellamy made incriminating statements. Another officer involved in the case, Brent Uzdanovics, testified Bellamy was read his Miranda rights. However, there were no Miranda warnings on the tape, records show.

In 2006, the Virginia Court of Appeals tossed Bellamy's rape conviction and sentence after ruling police failed to read him his rights and also violated his right to an attorney. He eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of assault and battery.

That same year, Bellamy's accuser received 10 days in jail after giving conflicting testimony in an unrelated assault case.

In 2007, Bellamy filed his $25 million civil rights lawsuit.

In a Sept. 12 court filing, United States District Judge Samuel G. Wilson said the case against Wells and Uzdanovics, who has since left the force, had been settled. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

http://www.newsleader.com/article/20110921/NEWS01/109210328

Lake Arthur teen get jail time, probation for false rape claim

2011-09-21T21:58:00.002-04:00

JENNINGS, La. — A Lake Arthur teenager has been ordered to serve two years of probation after she pleaded guilty Sept. 7 in state court to falsely accusing a police officer of raping her.

The American Press reports (http://bit.ly/qjfACs ) 18-year-old Meghan Franks must serve 90 days in the parish jail and pay fines totaling $1,140 plus court costs.

District Attorney Michael Cassidy says all fines and costs must be paid within the first 18 months of probation.

Cassidy says Franks must admit herself to a mental health treatment facility for examination of her self-esteem and follow any recommendations and avoid further criminal trouble.

He says the district attorney's office recommended the sentencing based on Franks' age and the fact that she admitted her actions when confronted.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/9d495976db2347eab0f8a75017676c2b/LA--False-Claim/

Man found not guilty in drunken sex assault 33

2011-09-20T22:19:00.000-04:00

Was beaten by woman's family members
A Manitoba man has been found not guilty of an alleged sex attack that saw him beaten by the victim's family members.

Jurors deliberated less than two hours Friday before acquitting Ruben Bunn of one count of sexual assault.

Bunn was accused of sexually assaulting the then 18-year-old alleged victim at a Fort Alexander drinking party in June 2009.

Prosecutors argued the woman was too intoxicated after a day of drinking to consent to having sex with Bunn.

Bunn, testifying in his own defence, told jurors he asked the woman three times if she wanted to have sex with him and she said yes each time.

"I'm not a sexual predator," he told jurors.

Jurors heard the woman's aunt broke down a bedroom door and found Bunn on top of the woman with his pants around his ankles.

The woman's aunt and mother beat the man with a coin-filled "Texas mickey" bottle and kicked him out of the house. He returned a short time later to "apologize" and was attacked again.

Police found the man a short time later at his home, seriously injured.

Bunn told police he had been having consensual sex with the woman when he was "bottled."

Bunn was taken to hospital for treatment and then arrested.

The alleged victim told jurors she had been drinking all day and had no memory of having or consenting to have sex with Bunn.

"The last thing I remember was sitting in there with everybody having a good time," she said. "When I came to I was sitting in a cop car."

http://www.winnipegsun.com/2011/09/19/man-found-not-guilty-in-drunken-sex-assault

Woman who alleged rape enters guilty plea

2011-09-20T22:09:00.000-04:00

Greenview Hospital fired tech

A Franklin woman pleaded guilty Friday to falsely reporting an incident after she told Bowling Green police in June that a hospital tech sexually assaulted her at Greenview Regional Hospital.

Lynn Kochenderfer, 41, was sentenced to 12 months in jail. In lieu of jail time, she will serve 60 days on home incarceration with the remainder probated for 24 months on the condition that she not violate the law. She must pay $176.55 restitution to the Bowling Green Police Department, pay court costs and stay out of Greenview Hospital except in emergency circumstances.

The restitution covers the cost of the investigation, Warren County Attorney Amy Milliken said.

Milliken pursued the charges against Kochenderfer because falsely reporting a sexual assault damages the credibility of women who have been legitimate victims of rape, she said.

“This type of crime undermines the true victim because when they present themselves to the police when things like this happen, it creates skepticism and that’s unfair and wrong,” she said.

Kochenderfer told BGPD Detective Brett Kreilein on June 1 that she was sexually assaulted by an emergency room tech during two separate visits to the hospital, according to police records. She first reported the incident to a Bowling Green attorney, who referred her to the police department.

She told police that during the first visit to the hospital May 14, the tech touched her and made a complimentary comment about her breast. The tech gave Kochenderfer his cellphone number and told her to text him if she needed anything. Kochenderfer said the tech sent her a text message making reference that they could have had fun together, according to city police records.

During Kochenderfer’s next visit to the hospital May 18, she alleged that the tech came into her hospital room and that the two had sex. She told Kreilein that she never resisted the tech’s advances or told him “no.” She said she was shocked about the incident and heavily medicated.

Police subpoenaed her Bluegrass Cellular telephone text messages, which revealed that Kochenderfer and the tech exchanged sexually explicit text messages in which they both discussed sex acts that they would like to perform with each other, according to police records.

When Kreilein confronted Kochenderfer about the text messages, she told police that she didn’t remember texting the tech any sexual comments and that it was unlike her, according to police records.

After learning of the allegations, Greenview Hospital conducted an internal review and fired the tech, hospital chief executive officer Mark Marsh said.

Greenview self-reported the incident to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services Office of Inspector General after learning about allegations.

Two OIG representatives reviewed the incident and the hospital’s response and found that the hospital acted properly, Greenview spokesman Alan Palmer said.

“The Bowling Green Police Department did a really great job following up on every possible lead in this case,” Milliken said.

That determination led police to learning that the rape allegations against the tech were false, she said.

“They always take rape cases very seriously, and we always appreciate their hard work and dedication,” Milliken said.

http://bgdailynews.com/articles/2011/09/20/news/news3.txt

Woman lied about burglary, rape attempt to cover up crash, deputies say

2011-09-20T22:02:00.004-04:00

Amanda Angelero, 19, called deputies to a Mobile station near her home about 7:10 a.m. Monday, reports state.

A 19-year-old Orange County woman was arrested early Monday, accused of wasting more than a dozen deputies' time as they investigated her false reports of assault, burglary and attempted rape.

Amanda Angelero called 911 about 7:10 a.m. Monday from a pay phone outside a closed Mobile station near the intersection of Valencia College Lane and Goldenrod Road, an arrest report states.

The report says Angelero described in specific detail the man who she said had assaulted her in her unit at nearby Jasmine of Orlando East apartments, before stealing her wallet, cell phone and car.

Investigators took her back to the complex, where they found the woman's red 1994 Honda parked in a parking spot. The car was heavily damaged, a deputy at the scene noted.

Angelero was in a patrol vehicle filling out a statement. When a deputy opened the car door to ask Angelero about the damage, he detected the "moderate to heavy odor" of alcohol, the report states.

She denied drinking, the report states, and changed her story: The man had tried to rape her, she now said, and after she fought him off, he crashed the car into a tree, fleeing on foot.

But a witness told deputies that it was Angelero, not an assailant, who crashed the car into a tree and a sign. Investigators noted that she continually changed her version of events, which never added up.

The report states that as many as 18 deputies were involved in investigating and searching for the man Angelero had said attacked her. They spent more than two hours, the report says.

"My investigation of the incident revealed that there never was a burglary to the defendant residence, no struggle or physical altercation had ever occurred," wrote an investigating deputy.

Angelero was charged with misusing the 911 emergency system and making false reports to law enforcement. She was arrested and booked into the Orange County Jail. Records show Angelero has since been released.

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2011-09-20/news/os-crash-lying-to-police-arrest-20110920_1_deputies-false-reports-investigators

F’ville police charge woman with false rape claim

2011-09-19T07:04:00.000-04:00

A South Carolina woman was charged by Fayetteville Police with making false statements in a Sept. 10 incident that occurred at the home of her boyfriend in Fayetteville. The woman told officers her boyfriend had raped her but was later arrested for making false statements during an interview with female detectives.

Fayetteville Police spokesman Steve Crawshaw said 40-year-old Angella Caprice Miller, of Hopkins, S.C., was charged with making false statements and writings after an incident that police reports said involved her boyfriend, a Fayetteville resident.

Crawshaw said police at 1:20 p.m. were dispatched on a 911 domestic call made by the boyfriend, asking for an officer to come to his residence. Upon his arrival and as he was walking up to the open garage door the officer heard people talking inside the home, Crawshaw said. The officer paused to listen to the conversation and heard Miller saying that when the police arrive she would, “tell them you raped me,” said Crawshaw.

The man in response replied, “Whatever. I just want you to get your things and leave,” reports said.

The officer reported that at this point the two began arguing with raised voices. That is when the officer stepped in, Crawshaw said.

Upon questioning the two, Miller said they had been arguing because the boyfriend had other plans and wanted her to leave, reports said.

The police report noted that Miller began making comments saying she did not want to say what the boyfriend had done to her, implying a sexual assault, officers said. At that point the officer asked if Miller was saying she had been raped, Crawshaw said. Miller responded by saying that she “did not want to get him in trouble,” according to reports.

The officer asked again if she had been raped and received no reply. A short time later Miller called the officer over and said she could not let the boyfriend get away with this and that she wanted to press charges because he raped her, reports said.

The woman subsequently told the officer she had spoken with a family member and did not want to get the boyfriend in trouble and did not want to press charges, according to reports.

Miller was asked by officers to come to the police department where she could meet with two females detectives. As a result of that interview Miller was charged with making false statements and writings. Crawshaw said the charge resulted from a significant number of conflicts in her statements in relation to the story she told officers.

http://www.thecitizen.com/articles/09-18-2011/f%E2%80%99ville-police-charge-woman-false-rape-claim

Sexual assault fabricated

2011-09-18T21:54:00.000-04:00

A fabricated sexual assault could lead to a culture of fear, said Staff Sgt. Rick Waugh.

"In this case, first of all, it's a waste of police resources. That's the secondary reason you shouldn't do it. The primary reason is the fear it creates in the community and the impact it creates," he said of a sexual assault complaint that turned out to be false.

On Wednesday, the Greater Sudbury Police Service responded to a sexual assault complaint in Minnow Lake. According to the police's initial press release, a female was walking on Second Avenue when she was grabbed from behind by a male with a knife. The release added that the male reached under the victim's shirt, ripping it in the process before the victim got away.

"When we arrived at the complainant's house, we obviously dealt with (her) needs, as we do in all cases like this," Waugh said, adding the woman was given medical care because a knife was involved, although she only had several minor scratches. Police also used a canine unit to track the suspect, who was described as 25 to 35 years old with a tattoo on his left hand.

"It wasn't until the next day, when we were following up with the initial complaint, that we had revisited the scene and revisited with the alleged victim," Waugh said. "The allegation wasn't adding up. The investigators determined that the story wasn't accurate."

The victim eventually admitted that the assault was fabricated.

"We're still investigating the reasons why. There was a reason, but it shouldn't have ever happened," Waugh said.

A case like this often becomes a balancing act. While the woman could be charged with public mischief, police must also work to avoid re-victimizing a victim.

"Sometimes people come forward and we may not get the total truth, but they're still victimized. You want to be careful when laying a charge like pubic mischief. You want to be careful we're not re-victimizing the victim," Waugh said.

"By no means does this police service, and I'll speak for the Crown (prosecutors) as well, by no means do we want to deter anybody from coming forward. If people have been truly victimized, we definitely want to hear about it."

Jennifer Johnson, Laurentian University's women studies chair, hasn't seen many fabricated cases of abuse.

"One of the things we know is that stories are often not fabricated, and I would say that this is a case (that's) uncommon and there's obviously something particular to this person's case that the pubic doesn't know about," she said.

"When we look at sexual assault ... we want to take people seriously when they're talking about it. In Canada, one in four women in their lifetimes experience some type of abuse."

Johnson acknowledged sexual assault and rape is an under-reported crime.

"There's still some shame associated with this. It's often difficult for people to leave abusive situations due to poverty or finances or manipulations of their abuser."

According to Waugh, a case like this could affect entire communities.

"When you hear something like that, it has a profound effect on some people, especially people who live in the area who have children walking to school, or who jog. When that's put out there, it's troubling. There's an element of fear."

John Lindsay, president of the Minnow Lake CAN, hasn't noticed any concern in his community.

"I haven't heard a thing ... Based on our seniors, I don't think that overall the population is really overly concerned," he said, adding that false claims could lead to a boy-whocried-wolf situation.

"It's not good to have people yell fire, because eventually you don't pay attention," he said.

rpoliakov@thesudburystar.com

http://www.thesudburystar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3302823

No charges in reported Purdue sexual assault

2011-09-13T17:38:00.002-04:00

No criminal charges will come out of an alleged sexual assault reported at a Purdue University fraternity house shortly after classes began for the fall semester.

Tippecanoe County Prosecutor Pat Harrington said Monday that his office has reviewed an investigation by the Purdue University Police Department into the possible attack.

"There's insufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges," he said. "Our office will not be filing charges."

The investigation began about 12:40 a.m. Aug. 31, when a 19-year-old student reported she had been assaulted inside the Delta Chi fraternity at 501 N. Russell St.

The woman was taken to the emergency room at St. Elizabeth Central for treatment.

Purdue sent an emergency text to students about two hours later, though police Chief John Cox later told the Journal & Courier that the report was believed to be an isolated incident.

According to university spokesman Chris Sigurdson, Purdue police finished its investigation and forwarded it to the prosecutor's office last Wednesday.

He said Purdue can pursue separate disciplinary proceedings against the accused student, if deemed necessary, regardless of the prosecutor's decision.

http://www.jconline.com/article/20110913/NEWS03/110913008/No-charges-reported-Purdue-sexual-assault?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cs

Woman Charged With Filing False Rape Report

2011-09-12T19:38:00.001-04:00

Decatur, AL - Decatur Police have arrested and charged a woman with False Reporting to Law Enforcement, and are warning others that they take this kind of crime seriously.

According to police reports, 21 year old April Buffkin went to Decatur General Hospital on September 2nd, saying she'd been raped by two black men. Buffkin then filled out a police report about the alleged attack.

After an investigation, Buffkin was questioned again and reportedly admitted she lied about the incident. A warrant was filed against her and she turned herself in for the crime on September 9th.

Police say that Buffkin's allegations wasted not only their time and money, but also that of Decatur General Hospital.

http://www.waaytv.com/news/local/story/Woman-Charged-With-Filing-False-Rape-Report/QUFjGZHjFE2AyU5lqLpsMg.cspx

"Birmingham hero soldier wrongly accused of rape spent seven months behind bars"

2011-09-12T18:06:00.001-04:00

A HERO soldier wrongly accused of rape has told of his ordeal to clear his name – after spending seven months behind bars on remand.

Private Sean Spooner, who serves with 2 Mercian regiment, has called for the legal system to be changed after he was charged with raping an 18-year-old he met through Facebook and forced to wait for his trial in prison.

The 21-year-old soldier, of Lakey Lane, Yardley Wood, was cleared by a jury at Warwick Crown Court in just one hour and six minutes.

Yet he said he had been remanded in custody for seven months.

He even spent his 21st birthday behind bars and said he was placed on a sex offenders’ wing.

Sean said he was told he could not be bailed because he lived less than ten miles away from his accuser.

During the trial the jury had heard that while serving in Afghanistan, Private Spooner had saved the life of Captain Guy Disney, one of Prince Harry’s ‘Arctic Heroes’, after a rocket-propelled grenade hit their vehicle, killing another soldier, in a Taliban attack in 2009.

Capt Disney was among the group of injured servicemen whose expedition to the North Pole was featured in the recent TV programme.

Sean is due to return to job with the army next week and will join his base in Belfast before heading back to Afghanistan.

Speaking of his ordeal to clear his name he said: “I could have lost everything.

“It has been dreadful. I have lost loads of weight because I couldn’t eat. I was placed in a sex offenders’ wing in prison.

“I was eventually moved after I asked, but then I had to lie about why I was in prison because I was worried the other prisoners attacked sex offenders.

“It has also been awful for my family. My mum has been having panic attacks and I have a young sister and younger brother who know I have been in prison accused of rape.”

Sean said he met the 18-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, after they became friends on Facebook.

He insisted during police interviews and throughout the trial that they had sex at her home which was entirely consensual. In fact, Sean said the couple had met purely to have sex. He said: “We first met when I was on leave in 2009 after becoming friends on Facebook. I did not know her before that. We went for a drink in Solihull and had sex in the toilets of a bar within an hour. We were kicked out of the pub.

“I got in touch again in February and she invited me round to her house.

“At no stage have I ever forced myself on a woman. It’s the worse thing to ever be accused of.

“I have no idea why she said I had raped her. I think it was one of those things that she started and had to continue with. My barrister described it as like being a snowball going down hill.

“I personally think that she felt guilty about having sex with me because she had a boyfriend. I just want the truth to come out. I never felt so scared in my life as when the jury gave the verdict. I think the system has to change. They refused to give me bail because I live less than ten miles away from her.”

Sean’s mum Tracey Bowman said: “We have had a terrible time as a family, but Sean can now get back to work and can get on with his life. She cannot be named, but everybody knows about Sean and that is not right. It has to change.

“She will now have to live with what she did.”

Before Sean returns, his family and friends will be holding a belated 21st birthday party after he spent his official birthday in May in prison.

http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2011/09/12/birmingham-hero-soldier-wrongly-accused-of-rape-spent-seven-months-behind-bars-97319-29404455/

Innocent man wrongly accused for three decades finally fulfils his dream to get married

2011-09-12T17:51:00.000-04:00

He was released from prison two years ago after being cleared of false rape charges and now James Bain has finally fulfilled his dream of becoming a husband.

The 56-year-old, who spent 35 years behind bars after being wrongly accused of the crime, became a married man on Saturday in Tampa, Florida.

Mr Bain, of Florida, said he had long dreamed of his wedding day from his cell and said: ‘You just think in your mind I wish it was me. Today it is.’

When he met his bride almost two years ago, he said he instantly knew Mallielin was ‘The One’.

He told Fox news: ‘We practically felt each other by site.’

Since being cleared and released in 2009, James has had a long list of firsts – from using a mobile phone, to ringing the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

He walked free out of Polk Court Courthouse in December 2009 when a DNA test proved he was innocent of the rape and kidnapping of a nine-year-old boy in 1973.

Bain was 19-years-old when he began his sentence, that saw him spend most of his life behind bars.

He was awarded $1.7 million in compensation from the US state after being found innocent.

And he is now looking forward to the rest of his life with his new bride, saying he feels ‘wonderful, very wonderful’.

Since being awarded the money, Bain has bought a house and a SUV, but is saving the rest of it he says.

The prosecutor of the original case, Edward Threadgill, who is now 79, told CNN when Bain was released that he was upset he had been wrongly imprisoned.

He said after Bain was freed: ‘It upsets me that an innocent man was in prison. It disturbs me greatly.

‘I think we did the best with the technology we had. We did the best we could with what we had.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2036418/Innocent-James-Bain-wrongly-accused-3-decades-finally-fulfils-dream-married.html?ITO=1490

Polk County police determine rape report as false

2011-09-12T17:41:00.003-04:00

ROCKMART, GEORGIA - Police have determined that a reported rape on Shiloh Road at Treat Mountain Road earlier this month was a false report, according to Polk County Police Chief Kenny Dodd.

Dodd said the incident reported Sept. 3, allegedly occurring around noon Sept. 2, was not credible.

Officials working the case said an investigation proved that a rape had not occurred.

The report lists false report of a crime as a possible charge, but officials said no charges are pending at this time.

http://www.cedartownstd.com/view/full_story/15485995/article-Polk-County-police-determine-rape-report-as-false-?instance=home_local_news

Coercion

2011-09-11T09:18:00.002-04:00

Couple seeks to clear their names

2011-09-10T23:10:00.006-04:00

VILLE PLATTE — The allegations were horrific, but apparently false, so Marla and Barry Giglio, a married couple and owners of the Pig Stand Restaurant, on Friday tried to clear their names and the reputation of their popular eatery.

The Giglios were among eight people accused of gang raping three prepubescent girls in a small trailer near Church Point last October.

The St. Landry Parish Grand Jury last week decided there was not enough evidence to indict six of the accused, including the Giglios — a rarity. An indictment is not a guilty sentence, but rather a move needed for formal charges to be filed so the prosecution can move forward with a trial.

Pieces of the story did not add up, attorneys said Friday after a news conference held at the Pig Stand. It was the first time the details of the allegation were discussed.

The girls, then 4, 5 and 7 years old, were in the custody of the Department of Children and Family Services at the time of the alleged incident and could not have been in the trailer, the Giglios' investigator Daniel Denoux, of New Orleans, said.

St. Landry Parish court-appointed defense attorney Ed Lopez was assigned the case. He said the date and location of the alleged incident did not mesh, the accused were not all acquainted and questioned whether eight adults and three children could have fit into a small trailer.

"All kinds of stuff was alleged to have happened in this itty, bitty bedroom with all these adults and three children," he said. "This was absolutely false. ... From the first minute — the first second — that I spoke to Mr. Giglio and his wife, I knew that these allegations were totally false. I knew it in my heart of hearts, and they were terrible, terrible allegations. I knew the Giglios were absolutely innocent of these things."

The Giglios will not pursue legal action in response to the apparently false allegations that led to their arrests, Barry Giglio, 57, said Friday. The two were incarcerated for 18 days, Marla Giglio, 51, said. The possibility of bond had been revoked, and it took that long for their adult children to find an attorney, have a judge set a bond and gather up the cash, she said.

Barry Giglio learned he was accused when he was awoken and arrested early one May morning by Louisiana State Police. Giglio later learned details of the accusation from Denoux, who showed him the probable cause affidavit drafted by police.

Giglio was appalled.

"He said, 'If we did this, they should give us the death penalty,'" Denoux said. One of the girls is the daughter of a former Pig Stand employee.

While the accusation hung over their heads, the Giglios decided to keep the restaurant open to assert their innocence, Barry Giglio said. His family ran the business and the employees were vigilant while and after the Giglios were incarcerated.

The Giglios called the news conference in an effort to repair their tarnished reputations.

"Our business has suffered severely because of the false allegations against us, but we're here today to clear my family name and my business," Barry Giglio said. "I hope we can be as strong in this community as we were before."

The Giglios will continue to live and work in Ville Platte and now Barry Giglio wants to "put all of these false allegations behind him so he and his family can move forward in being a good citizen of this wonderful town," attorney Chick Foret of New Orleans said.

"These false allegations have devastated his business. His business has dropped 75 percent as a result of these false allegations," Foret said. "The criminal justice system worked. Justice was served. These allegations were proven to be false."

In May, Lawrence Ricks Jr., 35, of Ventress; John Stelly, 57, and Alice Stelly, 55, both of Church Point; and Jennifer Stelly, 31, of Ville Platte were arrested on three counts of aggravated rape and three counts of aggravated incest each.

The Giglios, Marty Blood, 42, and Brandy Blood, 27, both of the Evangeline Parish town of St. Landry, all were arrested for aggravated rape.

The grand jury last week, however, said there was not enough evidence to prosecute in every arrest except John and Alice Stelly's aggravated incest counts.

They made "pretermit" rulings on those arrests, which is a determination that the evidence was not sufficient to warrant continuing prosecution nor does it stop future prosecution, but is a formal determination to not file charges at the present time.

"Any case can be investigated later. We never make any public pronouncement if any particular matter is going to be investigated or won't be investigated," First Assistant District Attorney Frank Trosclair has said.

The arrests were the result of a joint investigation by Louisiana State Police and the Department of Children and Family Services.

http://www.theadvertiser.com/article/20110910/NEWS01/109100309/Couple-seeks-clear-their-names?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE

Lemon Grove Man Fights Off Female Burglar: Richard Sowards Says He Fought Off Merlizeth Lescana In His Home

2011-09-06T23:04:00.000-04:00

LEMON GROVE, Calif. -- A Lemon Grove man said he ended up in a fierce struggle with a woman trying to burglarize his home.

Richard Sowards said he just went to the store for a few minutes to pick up some dog food.

When he returned, he said he found a strange woman in his house. She was carrying his laundry basket which was filled with a jewelry box and some computers.

The woman ran into the backyard but the fences were too tall for her to make an escape. The woman then ran back inside the home straight toward Sowards.

"[She] came back in and attacked me, trying to get out and as I'm trying to call the police, she keeps knocking the phone out of my hand," he said. "She's trying to call somebody on her phone so we're fighting but trying to make cell phone calls. I finally got my girlfriend on the phone and she called police."

Sowards added, "I was trying to hold her for police and she hit me with a flower pot over the head. She hit me and we were wrestling and she cut me across the leg with a broken piece of pottery."

He said the woman ran out onto the porch.

"I grab her by her belt as she tries to jump over my front railing," said Sowards. "I grab her by her belt and she just takes her pants off and slides out and keeps running so I get her by the shirt and she takes her shirt off and keeps running. She ends up leaving her phone and her shoes and was running down the street practically naked."

Several neighbors were outside and heard the struggle.

"She's in the front yard. I'm trying to hold her for the police but she's naked so she starts screaming rape and my neighbors… they know me but what do you do when somebody's yelling rape? So I kind of let her go," said Sowards.

The woman suspected in the burglary was traced by her abandoned cell phone.

Sheriff's deputies have an arrest warrant out for 24-year old Merlizeth Lescana, who is suspected in the incident. She is described as about 5 feet tall and 100 to 120 pounds. She has brown eyes, long black hair and tattoos on her upper shoulders.

Sowards said despite her size, she had tremendous strength.

"She had no problem lifting me up on her back and running me into walls," he said.

He said she was fast as well.

"She was running like Carl Lewis… didn't care that she didn't have shoes and wasn't wearing clothes. She was sprinting," said Sowards.

Odds of unwanted but consensual sex by gender

2011-09-04T11:12:00.000-04:00

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http://www.bookofodds.com/content/view/print/622811 from this site: http://www.bookofodds.com/

Criticisms of the Department of Education's April 4, 2011 'Dear Colleague' letter

2011-09-04T10:27:00.001-04:00

*AAUP, First letter to Department of Education

*AAUP, Second letter to Department of Education

*Mike Armstrong and Daniel Barton, A thumb on the scale of justice

*Hans Bader, Education Department Undermines Due Process and Accuracy in Campus Sexual Harassment Cases

*Hans Bader, Education Department “Dear Colleague” Letter Shreds Presumption of Innocence in Harassment Cases, Ignoring Supreme Court

*Hans Bader, Falsely accused teachers and students will be harmed by new Education Department policy

*Mark Bennett, Stanford and the loss of innocence

*Michael Barone, Feds crack down on campus flirting, sex jokes

*Cynthia Bell, Rape should be tough to prove

*Peter Berkowitz, College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

*Jennifer C. Braceras, Civil rights wronged on campus

*Tim Cavanaugh, Stanford so smart even its rapists are logical

*Harry Crouch, The death of due process for men in higher education

*Paul Elam, An urgent and rare opportunity to speak out

*FIRE, letter to Department of Education and FAQ for Students on New OCR Mandates and In Verdict Against Sewanee, Federal Jury Sends Important Message About Proper Handling of Sexual Assault Cases.

*Jeffrey Hadden, The feds' campus Keystone Kops

*Pierce Harlan, The Chances of Holding Your Son Responsible for a Rape He Didn’t Commit Have Just Skyrocketed

*Charlotte Hays, The pesumption of male guilt

*Sandy Hingston, The new rules of college sex

*Adam Kissel, Standing Up for Due Process on Campus = "Sticking Up for Penises Everywhere?" and Colleges Forced to Redefine Speech and Assault Codes, Destroy Civil Liberties

*Greg Lukianoff, Yale, the Department of Education and the looming free speech crisis

*Anna Rittgers, Sometimes, women lie about rape.

*Ilya Shapiro, Due Process stops at the campus gates?

*Robert Shibley, A warning to college parents and grandparents

*Harvey Silverglate, Yes means yes, except on campus

*Robert Smith, On Sexual Harassment and Title IX

*Christina Hoff Sommers, In making campuses safe for women, a travesty of justice for men

*Jacob Sullum, At the University of North Dakota, yes also means no

*Cathy Young, Sexual Assault on Campus--Is It Exaggerated?

Former teacher's 12-year prison sentence upheld: Binkley convicted in 2009 for having sex with student

2011-09-01T22:37:00.004-04:00

Former Portland High School teacher Sandy Binkley’s attempt to reduce her 12-year prison sentence for having sex with a 17-year-old student at school failed last week.

Following a four-day trial in Gallatin, Binkley, 39, was convicted Sept. 30, 2009 of two counts of statutory rape by an authority figure and was sentenced two months later to 12 years in prison, the maximum verdict possible. The convictions stem from a 2008 incident that occurred between Binkley and a teen in a girls volleyball locker room office at Portland High School. Binkley had alleged she was raped.

Binkley’s attorneys soon appealed the verdict. Judges at the Court of Criminal Appeals in Nashville reviewed the trial and evidence records and heard arguments from defense and prosecution attorneys on April 19 and upheld the verdict on Aug. 23.

“I’m glad the Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, because there’s nothing more serious than a teacher trying to have sex with a student at school,” Sumner County District Attorney Ray Whitley said. “When parents send their children to school, they have to have the confidence their children are there to be educated and protected and not that they’ll have teachers trying to have sex with them. We cannot have that at our schools.”

Three boys alleged having sex with teacher

Binkley, who taught math at Portland High at the time of the incidents, was initially arrested on Sept. 25, 2008, for charges stemming from alleged sexual incidents involving two students that occurred in March of that year. Allegations involving another boy resulted in more charges Oct. 1. Police say she frequently called and sent text messages to the victims.

“They had a very good textual as well as sexual relationship,” Whitley said during the trial of Binkley and one of the victims.

Whitley alleged Binkley had sex with students in a school office, in the closet of her classroom and in her vehicle. He also accuses Binkley of having intimate contact with a student at her home while her family was at church. Three students testified during the trial of having had mutually consensual sex with her.

Binkley’s attorneys, however, claim there was only one incident – a rape by one of the victims – and that all the other allegations made by the other victims are lies intended to cover the act.

“It was not a consensual act,” said David Ridings, Binkley's attorney. “It was a forcible rape.”

Binkley had been charged with six counts of rape by an authority figure and three counts of sexual battery by an authority figure, the latter meaning that she used her position of power as a teacher to obtain sex. The charges involve three alleged victims, two of whom are brothers. She had pleaded not guilty to all charges and remained on administrative leave without pay pending the resolution of the trial. Binkley was found not guilty of seven of the nine charges.

Binkley's attorneys argue sentence too severe

The defense attorneys appealed Criminal Court Judge Dee David Gay's verdict with the argument that during the trial Gay improperly sentenced Binkley to the maximum punishment based on her offenses. The defense also opposed Gay’s decision to not allow the testimony of one of her expert witnesses, a psychologist, to explain why Binkley did not report the alleged rape until after she was arrested, and why at times a rape victim may not resist forced sex. During the trial Gay said the psychologist’s testimony would be speculative and is therefore inadmissible.

After thoroughly reviewing all records, the appellate judges agreed with Gay’s latter judgment. Citing evidence, the appellate judges also wrote in their opinion that after the March 2008 incident — the one Binkley alleged as rape — she continued communicating with the victim, enticed him to her house, where sexual activities took place, after which she told him he “owed” her one. Facebook communication confirms Binkley’s words.

“One what?” Whitley had asked during the trail. “Another rape?”

12-year sentence 'is not out of line'

The appellate judges reaffirmed in their decision Binkley would have likely continued sexual activity with the victim if she hadn’t been arrested.

“(Binkley) cultivated a relationship with the victim,” appellate Judge Robert W. Wedemeyer wrote in the opinion. “She sent him sexually charged texts, discussed his sexual attractiveness with her peers, and she made sexual advances toward him. (The victim) admitted that he had wanted to have sex with (Binkley) but agreed that doing so changed things for him for the worse. He went on to talk about the severely negative impact (Binkley’s) false accusations of rape had upon his life…the 12-year sentence is reasonably related to the severity of her offenses, and (Binkley’s) sentence is not out of line.”

Binkley, who is currently in the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, can appeal her conviction to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Unlike the Court of Criminal Appeals, Tennessee's highest court can choose whether to hear the case.

Police investiate alleged sexual assualt at fraternity

2011-09-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

By KIRSTEN GIBSON

City Editor

Purdue Exponent

An alleged sexual assault occurred at an unregistered Delta Chi fraternity function late Tuesday night.

The incident occurred between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday night and the police were notified at 12:45 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to Purdue spokeswoman Jeanne Norberg.

Norberg said what happened remains unclear but that police have spoken with both the alleged victim and a person of interest. The alleged victim was sent to the hospital for tests.

“We won’t have anything definitive until we get the lab tests,” Norberg said.

The incident occurred at an unregistered function at Delta Chi, which means the University was not notified prior to the event between Delta Chi and a sorority.

Caliber, an organization consisting of fraternity and sorority members, is required to go to registered functions to make sure that functions are in line with fraternity and sorority life regulations and fire codes.

Michael Oakley, president of Caliber and a senior in the College of Science, said the only registered function Tuesday night was at Sigma Chi fraternity.

“By registering the parties, it encourages the parties to be safer,” Oakley said. “Having unregistered functions – like Delta Chi did – is obviously increasing their risk.”

Pablo Malavenda, associate dean of student activities and organizations, said at this point, his office will wait until the police finish their process before getting involved.

“We wouldn’t want to get engaged at this stage for fear that it would jeopardize police work,” Malavenda said.

He did say, however, that his office is there to support fraternities and will do whatever it can to help.

“We’re very concerned about the individuals involved and the chapter,” he said.

Once the matter is settled, his office will look into having a conversation with the fraternities and sororities about hosting safe events.

“That’s something we always do, but it might be a good time to focus on that again,” he said.

Chief of Purdue Police John Cox could not be reached for comment.

http://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_6393c213-69eb-534e-8289-41e8d0f9bba4.html

NCHERM

2011-08-28T20:15:00.000-04:00

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

2011-08-21T22:55:00.000-04:00

Pressured by the Obama administration, universities abandon any pretense of due process in sexual assault cases.
By PETER BERKOWITZ
Wall Street Journal August 20, 2011

Late August and early September bring recent high school graduates, bright and eager, to campuses around the country. Carefully planned orientation sessions will impress upon freshmen the paramount importance of sensitivity, of avoiding offensive words and ideas, and—notwithstanding that in recent years approximately 55% of matriculating freshmen nationally have been female—the urgency of maintaining a campus atmosphere friendly to women.

But parents who might expect this orientation to include an introduction to the moral and political purposes of liberal education—including respect for liberty of thought and discussion, and due process of law—will be sorely disappointed.

The neglect at freshmen orientation of the aim of liberal education and how it undergirds and is undergirded by the principles of freedom is not an accident. It is emblematic of college as a whole. Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.

The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."

At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

OCR's new interpretation of Title IX "strongly discourages" universities from permitting the accused "to question or cross-examine the accuser" during the hearing. In addition, if universities provide an appeals process, it must be available to both parties—which subjects the accused to double jeopardy.

Most egregiously, OCR requires universities to render judgment using "a preponderance of the evidence" standard. This means that in a rape case, a campus disciplinary board of faculty, administrators and perhaps students serves as both judge and jury. Few if any of these judges are likely to have professional competence in fact-gathering, evidence analysis or judicial procedure. Yet to deliver a verdict of guilty, they need only believe that the accused is more likely than not to have committed the crime.

This is the lowest standard. It is much less demanding than "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is used in the criminal justice system, and the intermediate standard of "clear and convincing proof." Yale, Stanford and many other universities have rushed to comply with OCR's directives.

On campus, where casual sex is celebrated and is frequently fueled by alcohol, the ambiguity that often attends sexual encounters is heightened and the risk of error in rape cases is increased. The consequences for a wrongly convicted student are devastating: Not only is he likely to be expelled, but he may well be barred from graduate or professional school and certain government agencies, suffer irreparable damage to his reputation, and still be exposed to criminal prosecution.

OCR directives reducing critical due process protections on campus carry forward the work of extensive university bureaucracies built to ensure compliance with Title IX. These bureaucracies churn out materials on sexual harassment and sexual violence to train students, faculty and administrators to behave and think properly and to prepare those who serve on disciplinary boards. The materials are likely to include dubious statistics about the incidence of sexual assault; vulgar generalizations that men are controlling, angry and deceitful; and assurances that women neither lie nor make errors in alleging that they have been sexually assaulted.

In short, universities are institutionalizing a presumption of guilt in sexual assault cases. This implements the doctrine developed in the 1980s and '90s by postmodernists, radical feminists and critical legal studies scholars that inspired the ruinous campus speech codes. That doctrine teaches that the American political order is designed to oppress the weak; that racial minorities and women, whether they realize it or not, are victims; and that the truth, except for the first two propositions, is infinitely malleable.

These teachings—and the disdain for the rights of the accused and liberty of thought and discussion that they sustain—are animated by illiberal convictions shared by many faculty and administrators, as well as the Obama administration Department of Education. Notwithstanding their selective appeal to the relativity of truth to neutralize alternative views, they are convinced that in practice all the hard questions about right and wrong have been finally settled and that faculty and administrators are uniquely in possession of the correct answers. Such dogmatism and imperviousness to evidence are hallmarks of the authoritarian mind.

One might have hoped that in response to OCR's reduction of due process protections some professors and high university officials would come forward to object.

Where are the professors of literature who will patiently point out that, particularly where erotic desire is involved, intentions can be obscure, passions conflicting, the heart murky and the soul divided?

Where are the professors of natural science who will declare that OCR-dictated hearings are antithetical to the spirit of the scientific method, which depends on respect for the facts and testing claims through rational procedures?

Where are the professors of history, political science and law who will insist clearly and in public that due process is a fundamental component of American political institutions and culture, a cornerstone of our legal system, and indispensable in a free society to the fair administration of justice?

Where are the professors of moral philosophy and practical ethics who will stand up and declare that the presumption of innocence rightly gives expression to both the belief in the dignity of the individual and the awareness of human fallibility?

And where are the deans, provosts and university presidents who will explain in no uncertain terms to their campus communities and to the wider public that weakening due process and freedom of speech protections erodes the framework within which free inquiry flourishes?

So far such professors and high university officials are nowhere to be found.

Who then is welcoming our nation's freshmen to campus? And who, for the next four years, will be presiding over the cultivation of their minds?

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

2011-08-20T14:17:00.000-04:00

Pressured by the Obama administration, universities abandon any pretense of due process in sexual assault cases

By PETER BERKOWITZ

Late August and early September bring recent high school graduates, bright and eager, to campuses around the country. Carefully planned orientation sessions will impress upon freshmen the paramount importance of sensitivity, of avoiding offensive words and ideas, and—notwithstanding that in recent years approximately 55% of matriculating freshmen nationally have been female—the urgency of maintaining a campus atmosphere friendly to women.

But parents who might expect this orientation to include an introduction to the moral and political purposes of liberal education—including respect for liberty of thought and discussion, and due process of law—will be sorely disappointed.

The neglect at freshmen orientation of the aim of liberal education and how it undergirds and is undergirded by the principles of freedom is not an accident. It is emblematic of college as a whole. Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.

The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."

At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

OCR's new interpretation of Title IX "strongly discourages" universities from permitting the accused "to question or cross-examine the accuser" during the hearing. In addition, if universities provide an appeals process, it must be available to both parties—which subjects the accused to double jeopardy.

Most egregiously, OCR requires universities to render judgment using "a preponderance of the evidence" standard. This means that in a rape case, a campus disciplinary board of faculty, administrators and perhaps students serves as both judge and jury. Few if any of these judges are likely to have professional competence in fact-gathering, evidence analysis or judicial procedure. Yet to deliver a verdict of guilty, they need only believe that the accused is more likely than not to have committed the crime.

This is the lowest standard. It is much less demanding than "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is used in the criminal justice system, and the intermediate standard of "clear and convincing proof." Yale, Stanford and many other universities have rushed to comply with OCR's directives.

On campus, where casual sex is celebrated and is frequently fueled by alcohol, the ambiguity that often attends sexual encounters is heightened and the risk of error in rape cases is increased. The consequences for a wrongly convicted student are devastating: Not only is he likely to be expelled, but he may well be barred from graduate or professional school and certain government agencies, suffer irreparable damage to his reputation, and still be exposed to criminal prosecution.

OCR directives reducing critical due process protections on campus carry forward the work of extensive university bureaucracies built to ensure compliance with Title IX. These bureaucracies churn out materials on sexual harassment and sexual violence to train students, faculty and administrators to behave and think properly and to prepare those who serve on disciplinary boards. The materials are likely to include dubious statistics about the incidence of sexual assault; vulgar generalizations that men are controlling, angry and deceitful; and assurances that women neither lie nor make errors in alleging that they have been sexually assaulted.

In short, universities are institutionalizing a presumption of guilt in sexual assault cases. This implements the doctrine developed in the 1980s and '90s by postmodernists, radical feminists and critical legal studies scholars that inspired the ruinous campus speech codes. That doctrine teaches that the American political order is designed to oppress the weak; that racial minorities and women, whether they realize it or not, are victims; and that the truth, except for the first two propositions, is infinitely malleable.

These teachings—and the disdain for the rights of the accused and liberty of thought and discussion that they sustain—are animated by illiberal convictions shared by many faculty and administrators, as well as the Obama administration Department of Education. Notwithstanding their selective appeal to the relativity of truth to neutralize alternative views, they are convinced that in practice all the hard questions about right and wrong have been finally settled and that faculty and administrators are uniquely in possession of the correct answers. Such dogmatism and imperviousness to evidence are hallmarks of the authoritarian mind.

One might have hoped that in response to OCR's reduction of due process protections some professors and high university officials would come forward to object.

Where are the professors of literature who will patiently point out that, particularly where erotic desire is involved, intentions can be obscure, passions conflicting, the heart murky and the soul divided?

Where are the professors of natural science who will declare that OCR-dictated hearings are antithetical to the spirit of the scientific method, which depends on respect for the facts and testing claims through rational procedures?

Where are the professors of history, political science and law who will insist clearly and in public that due process is a fundamental component of American political institutions and culture, a cornerstone of our legal system, and indispensable in a free society to the fair administration of justice?

Where are the professors of moral philosophy and practical ethics who will stand up and declare that the presumption of innocence rightly gives expression to both the belief in the dignity of the individual and the awareness of human fallibility?

And where are the deans, provosts and university presidents who will explain in no uncertain terms to their campus communities and to the wider public that weakening due process and freedom of speech protections erodes the framework within which free inquiry flourishes?

So far such professors and high university officials are nowhere to be found.

Who then is welcoming our nation's freshmen to campus? And who, for the next four years, will be presiding over the cultivation of their minds?

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516232905230642.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#printMode

2011-08-19T20:54:00.000-04:00

The Noble Lie, Feminist Style, by Cathy Young

2011-08-01T08:25:00.001-04:00

The Weekly Standard: The Magazine: Aug 1, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 43: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/noble-lie-feminist-style_577309.html?page=1

False accusations of rape are more common than you think.

We will probably never know for sure what really happened between former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the chambermaid who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan hotel room on May 14. In the days after the French politician’s arrest, media commentary was strongly on the side of the alleged victim, and any attempt to question her credibility was met with indignation.

This month, reports that the case against Strauss-Kahn is near collapse after revelations cast serious doubt on the woman’s truthfulness have produced an equally swift backlash. Connections to French politics, meanwhile, and charges of sexual misconduct against Strauss-Kahn back home further complicate the picture. But whatever the outcome, the unraveling of the prosecutor’s case has revived the inflammatory issue of false accusations of rape.

The phenomenon of false rape allegations is an ultimate feminist taboo; indeed, leading feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon has stated that “feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.” In some instances of political correctness run amok at universities, students and professors have been accused of “harassment” for so much as raising the possibility of false accusations in class or in online discussions. While orthodox feminists grudgingly admit that women sometimes make false reports of rape, they insist that such cases represent a minuscule share of all complaints and that to give them much attention is to perpetuate misogynistic “rape myths” and revictimize real victims.

There is no question that the subject of women “crying rape” tends to bring the misogynists out of the woodwork (as a look at Internet discussions of Strauss-Kahn’s travails will easily confirm). It is also true that the “women don’t lie about rape” myth arose in reaction against a history of often suspicious and demeaning attitudes toward rape victims: As late as the 1970s, juries in rape trials in California and several other states were instructed to treat the complaining witness’s testimony with special caution and to view “unchaste character” as a strike against her credibility.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that women do lie about rape much more often than the feminist party line allows. Advocacy literature typically claims that about 2 percent of rape complaints are found to be false, the same rate as for reports of other violent crimes. But that figure seems to have no basis in research. According to the FBI, about 9 percent of rape reports are dismissed as “unfounded,” without charges being filed. While advocates claim that this is often because the authorities lack proof or distrust reports of acquaintance rape, dismissals due to insufficient evidence usually occur further down the pipeline. Generally, an “unfounded” complaint is one in which the accuser recants or her story is contradicted by available evidence.

Gauging the true prevalence of false accusations is extremely difficult, particularly since rape reports are handled and recorded differently from one jurisdiction to another. But what reliable information is available suggests that the figure is not insubstantial.

In a particularly controversial study published in 1994, now-retired Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin found that 40 percent of rape reports filed in an Indiana town over a 10-year period turned out to be false by the “victim’s” own admission. Kanin (ironically, a pioneering researcher on sexual assault in dating situations) has been widely criticized for using data from a police department that subjected rape complainants to lie detector tests, which many believe are likely to mislabel anxious or agitated victims as liars and pressure them to recant. He found a similar pattern, however, in police records from two state universities where lie detectors were not used and all victims were interviewed by female officers.

While Kanin has cautioned against generalizing from his research, his conclusion that “false rape accusations are not uncommon” is supported by other evidence. Some years ago, a Washington Post investigation in Virginia and Maryland found that nearly one in four rape reports in 1990-91 were rejected as unfounded, and many of the women in those cases admitted they had lied when the newspaper contacted them. In several surveys of prosecutors and law enforcement officials, estimates of the share of rape complaints that turn out to be false have ranged from one in eight to one in five.

Yet the “women don’t lie” dogma is entrenched in popular culture. False accusations of rape are virtually nonexistent in films or in television crime shows, and male victims of rape hoaxes such as the three Duke University students accused of raping stripper Crystal Gail Mangum in 2006 are unlikely to be featured in sympathetic TV movies of the week. To some extent, this dogma has also gained a strong foothold in the legal system. When Congress passed the 1994 Violence Against Women Act expanding federal protections for rape complainants, congressional reports justifying the legislation cited statistics on the low rate of convictions in rape cases—based on the assumption that every rape report was true and every man accused was guilty.

The old biases against victims have given way to new ones that often stack the deck against the accused: Under rape shield laws, it is often difficult to introduce even relevant information that challenges the credibility of the accuser, including a history of making dubious or outright false accusations.

In a much-publicized 1998 case in New York, Columbia University graduate student Oliver Jovanovic was found guilty of assaulting and sexually abusing Barnard College student Jamie Rzucek in an encounter that he claimed involved consensual bondage. Email messages from Rzucek to Jovanovic in which she professed interest in sadomasochism and discussed engaging in such activities with another man were ruled inadmissible by the trial judge. The conviction was eventually overturned on appeal on the grounds that Jovanovic was not allowed to present an adequate defense—but not until he had spent 20 months in prison and suffered an assault from another inmate. (Rzucek was denounced as a habitual liar by some members of her own family.) Feminists deplored the reversal of the case as a blow to victims.

No one knows how many men spend time in prison after being falsely accused of rape and either convicted or held without bail. In 1985, a Maryland woman named Kathryn Tucci was sentenced to a $150 fine and 1,000 hours of community service for a false rape charge that put her former boyfriend, Mark Bowles, behind bars for over a year on a charge that she later told the Washington Post stemmed from unrelated “traumatic events.” In 1996, Los Angeles police officer Harris Scott Mintz spent five months in jail after being accused of rape by two different women: first a resident of the neighborhood he patrolled, then his own wife. Eventually, Mrs. Mintz admitted that she’d made up the story because she was angry at her husband over the first charge. Then the original case fell apart after Mintz’s attorneys discovered that the woman had told an ex-roommate she had concocted the charge to sue the county and that she had tried a similar hoax before.

Even without prolonged imprisonment, an accusation and arrest can be costly. Just ask the three Duke students—Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans—who had to leave school and were vilified in the national media because of Mangum’s rape hoax.

The Duke saga made it abundantly clear that feminist orthodoxy on rape is radically hostile to basic principles of justice. Former sex crimes prosecutor and law professor Wendy Murphy, who emerged as a leading TV commentator on the case with frequent appearances on CNN, Fox News, and other channels, repeatedly referred to the accused men as “rapists” on the air. On one occasion, she fumed: “I’m really tired of people suggesting that you’re somehow un-American if you don’t respect the presumption of innocence, because you know what that sounds like to a victim? Presumption you’re a liar.”

Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, who reportedly bragged in a recorded conversation with a jailed drug dealer about the money she hoped to reap from the case, may well be the victim of a sexual assault. But Strauss-Kahn, however unappealing his behavior in even the most favorable version of the events, may also be the victim of a devastating hoax who no more “deserved it” than a promiscuous woman deserves to be raped. And, just as Strauss-Kahn’s high status does not mean he is innocent, the woman’s underprivileged status as a Guinean immigrant does not mean she is telling the truth. Nor does her “credible,” distraught demeanor reported by the police constitute proof: In virtually every known rape hoax, the false accuser was described at some point as “very credible.”

In 2004, discussing another highly publicized sexual assault case involving basketball star Kobe Bryant, Murphy decried misogynistic myths about rape accusers—“that women are mentally ill and vindictive.” But the fact is that some women do make false claims of rape, for these and other reasons, just as some men commit rape because they are mentally ill or violent sociopaths.

In 1977, when feminists were waging a nationwide battle for legal reforms to improve the treatment of rape victims, Columbia University law professor Vivian Berger—generally a supporter of these reforms—cautioned against “sacrificing legitimate rights of the accused person on the altar of Women’s Liberation.” Today, that warning remains as relevant as ever.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.com.

Why we should protect those accused of rape by Roy Black

2011-07-27T23:00:00.002-04:00

Salon: July 27, 2011: Link: http://www.salon.com/news/crime/?story=/mwt/feature/2011/07/27/dsk_kobe_assange_flatley

DSK, Kobe, Assange, Flatley: Did they deserve to be smeared before a verdict? A legendary trial attorney argues no

As the Dominique Strauss-Kahn media circus continues, we stopped to consider some of the complaints about U.S. criminal justice bubbling up across the pond. Were charges too hastily filed before Strauss-Kahn was forced to make his perp walk? Has the legal system so far let everyone -- the alleged victim, DSK, and the public -- down? We asked famed trial lawyer Roy Black, possibly best known for his successful defense of William Kennedy Smith on rape charges, for his views, and he offers the bold proposal that follows. We'll be following it with other views as well.

What do David Copperfield, Michael Flatley, the Duke lacrosse team, the four Hofstra students, Rene Angelil (Celine Dion’s manager-husband), Rick Pitino, Kobe Bryant, KBR/Halliburton and Julian Assange have in common? All were accused off rape, and will, in all likelihood, be remembered for that association, regardless of what ultimately happens (Assange's case is ongoing; none of the cases have led to a conviction). It is time for a modest reform in rape jurisprudence; the accused should be granted anonymity unless and until found guilty.

Ray Donovan, Reagan’s treasury secretary, after he was acquitted of trumped-up corruption charges, famously asked: "Where do I go to get my reputation back?" Before Dominique Strauss-Kahn knocks on that door, the short answer is: Nowhere, not possible, it is a permanent stain. President of France? Forget it. Even the French cringe at a man with a damaged reputation representing their country.

Why should we be surprised? We did all we could to make a public spectacle of him. Dragged him off his Paris flight; interrogated him all night to look suitably haggard; paraded him, handcuffed between two beefy cops, through a scrum of tabloid cameras; then plastered the seedy photographs worldwide. He was hounded out of his apartment; shuttled from place to place like nuclear waste; an electronic nanny clamped on his ankle and suffered the ignominy of paying $200,000 a month for his own prison guards.

We are relentless at public shaming and humiliation.

This type of abuse is routinely suffered by lesser-known rape defendants. They are terrorized by the media circus, and turned into carnival freaks. Unruly crowds rally in front of their home. They are followed, spat on, chased through the streets, forced to move, lose their sanity and some even commit suicide to end the abuse. They are the new victims of modern technology: Google, Twitter, Facebook and cable news. The accusation is forever imprinted in cyberspace, only a keystroke away. Reputations are smeared, finances eviscerated, careers destroyed; jobs, businesses, friends, wives and children lost forever. All of this regardless of the verdict.

Does this have to happen? Newsrooms self-regulate to cloak the identity of a rape accuser. Editors understand that the potential harm of naming putative victims outweighs any journalistic reason to publish. But apparently journalist ethics don't extend to the presumptively innocent. We grant the accuser name suppression due to the stigma attached to rape but, after a gradual, and justifiable shift in our collective consciousness, there now is a far greater stigma for men accused of rape. The Supreme Court called rape "highly reprehensible, both in a moral sense and in its almost total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy of the female victim." It is a powerful and repulsive charge, and the accused should have their identities protected by law.

Critics will assert that democracy demands that all defendants be equal before the law, and there is no reason rape defendants should get a pass. It would create a double standard. So why take that step? Simple -- equality. The person who levels an accusation is sheltered through anonymity. Doesn’t it violate equality to treat the accused differently?

For decades, there has been a unique, growing disparity between the way we treat accused rapists and their accusers. It's grown because of a relentless pressure to manipulate the rules to increase arrests and convictions in rape cases. The protections against false accusations have been whittled away one by one to make it easier to charge and easier to convict, with the unintended consequence of making it easier to make a false accusation.

In order to more easily file criminal charges, these basic protections have been eliminated:

•A required corroboration of a rape taking place; now, the accusation alone is sufficient

•Evidence of a clear element of force or the threat of force

•The classic element of mens rea (guilty mind)

And in pursuit of convictions, rolled back protections have included:

•The ability to cross-examine accusers about past conduct. Rape shield laws insulate an accuser's past while creating rules to greatly broaden evidence of the accused's past conduct. (see Fed. Rule Evid. 413 for the most outrageous example.) Even evidence of the accuser’s prior false allegations of rape is inadmissible because it is considered sexual conduct within the meaning of the shield statute.

•Intoxication as a defense -- while consent by an allegedly intoxicated victim doesn't matter.

•The cautionary jury instruction that rape is a charge easily made but not easily defended.

We need a modest reform to mitigate these changes. This is not a zero-sum game where a benefit to the accused is detrimental to the accuser. There is an obvious benefit to discouraging false charges and denying the ability to use them as blackmail or as a weapon in domestic disputes.

False accusations of rape appear far higher than false accusations of other crimes. One study, conducted over nine years in one Midwest city, found that 41 percent were false; a study of two state universities over three years found 50 percent to be false. Meanwhile, the FBI reports the number of unfounded rape accusations at 8 percent, while the average rate of all unfounded crime reports is at 2 percent. We don’t know the precise figures because rape statistics are unreliable or misleading, and much depends on how police categorize false, unfounded, insufficient evidence, etc., but we know the rate is high.

There are legitimate objections to anonymity. An argument could be made that a grand jury, whose proceedings are private, should offer innocent suspects some protection. But there is a lot of truth in the legal cliché that any prosecutor worth his salt can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. And it certainly appears that the woman who accused DSK convincingly lied under oath at the grand jury about at least part of her story.

It is also against the public’s interest for anonymous trials. As Judge Damon Keith observed: "Democracy dies behind closed doors." The public has a right to know what goes on in its courts. The open administration of justice is fundamental to democracy. An ancient legal maxim commands that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done. The press should therefore continue to have access to rape cases. But the identities of the accused should, by law, be granted the same rights as those of the accusers, and their identities should be kept private unless there is a conviction.

The British twice tried this remedy. There were reporting restrictions for both the claimant and defendant in rape cases in the 1976 Sexual Offences Act but this was abolished in 1988. In 2010 they tried again with a modest provision granting anonymity only between arrest and charge but it was abandoned because of vigorous objection from feminists, who worry that women are less likely to accuse if the suspect is not named. I don’t think that is true and there is no evidence of it. In fact, I think there's a more logical case to be made that a reduction in publicity might raise the number or actual rape cases being reported.

And in that scenario, the parties who deserve to benefit, do: The victims, the public and the falsely accused. The bigger question, though, is whether the country even has an elected official with sufficient backbone to suggest this be done.

Rape Investigation Handbook, 2d Ed. 2011, by John O. Savino and Brent E. Turvey (pages 286-87)

2011-07-26T07:09:00.003-04:00

The Trouble With Rape Prosecutions, by Alan M. Dershowitz

2011-07-01T23:00:00.010-04:00

Published in The Daily Beast, July 1, 2011: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/01/alan-dershowitz-on-the-dominique-strauss-khan-case.html?om_rid=NsgRzO&om_mid=_BOEcHCB8cMRL5D

There are important ideas to be gleaned from the wreckage of 'People v. DSK.' Alan Dershowitz on reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence, perp walks, and singing indictments.

There are a lot of lessons in the Dominique Strauss-Khan case (/articles/2011/07/01/dominique-strauss-kahn-rape-accuser-s-african-connections.html) about how rape investigations and prosecutions should be conducted. The most important is, don’t assume anything until all the evidence is in. The story is almost never what it appears to be on first impression. Everyone should have anticipated the possibility that evidence would emerge suggesting that a) the alleged victim might be in it for the money, and b) she might have her share of skeletons in the closet.
Despite that big oversight, the prosecutor did the right thing at first: he waited to get the forensic evidence before he brought charges against Strauss-Kahn based on the hotel housekeeper’s account of her alleged rape. But then the prosecutor messed up in speaking to the press, publically vouching for the truth of the woman’s account and for her character. Not that the defense team didn’t make mistakes of their own—they should have conducted a thorough investigation before suggesting that Strauss-Khan had an alibi because he had lunch with his daughter (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/nyregion/strauss-kahns-lunch-demeanor-may-play-role-in-trial.html) .

But prosecutors of sex cases need to do some major housecleaning—not only in District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s office in Manhattan but also in prosecutors’ offices all across the country. Special sex prosecutors and special rape prosecutors are often agenda driven. Too often they believe they’re on a mission and treat the alleged victim in a way that’s different from how they handle any other crime. They’re zealots; I call them Nancy Grace prosecutors (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/) . She behaves on her TV talk show as if there’s no such thing as innocence; everybody arrested is guilty. I believe there’s been a Nancy Grace aspect to this case. The prosecution presented its case in public as if there were no doubt about the alleged victim’s credibility or the complete guilt of the alleged offender.

In fact, one very important implication of the Strauss-Kahn case was this: the press is dead wrong not to publish the names of alleged rape victims. It is absolutely critical that rape be treated like any other crime of violence, that the names of the alleged victims be published along with the names of the alleged perpetrators, so that people who know the victim or know her reputation can come forward to provide relevant information. The whole manner in which this case was handled undercuts the presumption of innocence, and the same goes for many other cases like it. By withholding the name of the alleged victim while publishing perp photos of the alleged assailant, the press conveys a presumption of guilt. The next time I have to defend a case where there’s any chance of a perp walk, I’m going to federal court to demand an injunction against it.

In general the Strauss-Kahn case reflects well on Vance’s office. They did the right thing by conducting a vigorous investigation – and then disclosing the results. I’ve been involved in too many cases where investigations produced similar information and the prosecution sat on it or buried it. So, two cheers for Cy Vance’s office. Just two cheers. They shouldn’t have presumed him guilty from the beginning. A good professional prosecutor never tries his or her case in the press. Rudy Giuliani specialized in doing that, and he got burned on several occasions. And then he became mayor, which sent a message across the country that prosecutors benefit by perp walks and what I call “singing indictments.” That’s an indictment so florid and with so many details that you don’t even have to give a press conference, you just hand the thing out like a press release. It’s written in journalese, not legalese. Like Giuliani’s indictments – I’ve heard he used to run the text of some high-profile indictments past his press people before issuing them.

I knew it was all over as soon as Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers refused to comment on the latest revelations about his accuser’s background. It’s clear they believe they have it won, and they can only make things worse if they speak up. It’s even possible that the prosecutors implicitly offered them a deal—“We’ll drop the case if you don’t badmouth us.” I know these two defense attorneys, and they’re usually very active in presenting their case in the court of public opinion. But a good lawyer knows how to shut up when he’s won his case.

Reject proposed SaVE Act absent amendments to protect the presumptively innocent

2011-04-27T17:05:00.000-04:00

To the Members of the United States Congress:

The proposed Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (SaVE Act) (S.834) should be rejected unless it is amended to adequately protect the interests of the presumptively innocent who are accused of sexual assault and related offenses.

Although as a scientific matter, the frequency of false complaints of sexual assault and similar offenses to police or institutional authorities varies widely depending on the study and is impossible to state with precision, false reporting of such offenses is a significant problem to a distinct segment of the population.

The goal of holding sexual offenders accountable for their misconduct is one that is universally shared by all civilized people. However, the SaVE Act, in its present form, should be rejected because it unduly enhances the risk of holding innocent persons responsible for such offenses in furtherance of the objective to hold true offenders accountable.

The proposed SaVE Act should be amended in the following particulars:

(1) Eliminate Requirement to Apply Preponderance of Evidence Standard:

The proposed SaVE Act would impose requirements on proceedings for institutional disciplinary action in cases of alleged domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking. Among other things, it would require that hearings regarding such alleged offenses "use the preponderance of the evidence standard."

It is a hallmark of the American experience and a universally accepted tenet of the common law tradition that it is better that persons responsible for offenses not be held accountable than to hold innocent persons responsible for wrongs they did not commit.

Many institutions that would be subject to the proposed SaVE Act currently apply a standard of proof higher than “preponderance of the evidence” in such hearings. These institutions have made a policy determination that to hold someone accountable for an alleged serious wrong that is typically subject to conflicting evidence where there is only a slight probability that he or she actually committed it, as the proposed SaVE Act would require, unjustly enhances the risk of holding the innocent responsible for wrongs they did not commit.

A student’s interest in obtaining a college degree, with all it entails, is of such weight and gravity, and the damage attendant to a determination that a student committed sexual assault or a similar offense is often so severe, that institutions of higher learning should have the right to impose a standard of proof greater than a mere “preponderance of the evidence.”

(2) Hearing Process Must Respect Rights of Presumptively Innocent:

The proposed SaVE Act would require that disciplinary proceedings for alleged sex offenses "be conducted by officials who receive annual training on the issues related to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking and how to conduct an investigation and hearing process that protects the safety of victims and promotes accountability."

The proposed act fails to include any requirement that officials be trained to respect the critical interests of the presumptively innocent in the investigative and hearing processes.

At a minimum, the proposed act should contain a requirement that officials receive annual training to conduct such investigations and hearings with impartiality, fairness, and fidelity to the evidence, and free from even the appearance of bias.

The proposed act should also provide that the institution has the duty to advise the accused of his right to consult with counsel and to have counsel represent him in all phases of the proceeding, including the disciplinary hearing.

The integrity of the hearing process, and fundamental notions of fairness to the presumptively innocent, demand nothing less.

Conclusion

We, members of the American community concerned about the rights and dignity of those who have been wrongly accused of sexual assault and related offenses, call upon the members of the United States Congress to reject the proposed SaVE Act (S.834) unless it is changed to provide critical protections for the presumptively innocent by: (1) eliminating any requirement that institutions utilize the "preponderance of the evidence" standard; and (2) requiring that officials who investigate and conduct hearings into sexual assault and related offenses be trained to honor the critical rights of the presumptively innocent in the manner spelled out in this petition.

[Your name]

Top Villains in the Duke Lacrosse Hoax by Zarko

2011-04-25T21:25:00.001-04:00

It was not necessarily easy to pick a list of the top 15 greatest villains in that disaster of a Hoax. Some are sharing a spot in this list, as they are often difficult to tell apart in their non-sensical screed. The hatred the people on this list displayed for justice, freedom, and other traditional democratic values is astounding. Their methods of perpetrating injustice at any cost, including self-deprecation, is a testament to how far we still have to go before we can trully make a great society.

I have excluded the two principal villains, District Attorney Mike Nifong and the False Rape Accuser herself, the Hoax Enabler, Crystal Gail Mangum from this list, as they were clearly the #1 and #2 criminals otherwise.

#15: Richard Broadhead, Wahneema Lubiano, Karla Holloway, Peter Wood, Maurice Wallace, Thavolia Glymph, and the rest of the Group of 88

There are more 88ers coming lower in the count, but these are the people I couldn't fit in this list.

The Group of 88 are 88 Duke professors with a chip on their shoulders, an irrelevancy complex, and an almost obsessive hatred of a large variety of things, often male and white. The lacrosse team provided a very easy platform from which to launch their views.

The original "Listening" ad and Wanted Poster provided enough fuel for the fire of hatred to last a long time. Under the guise of 'anonymous' students, the 88ers provided their own quotes damning the team. Lubiano even characterized it as a stake through the heart of the Lacrosse team.

Of course, when the case collapsed and the 88ers were (slightly) taken aback, they would no longer claim the ad was about the Lacrosse incident, but about other, more 'lofty' goals, such as speaking out against the sexism and racism on campus.

Facts, of course, were stubborn things, ignored exclusively by most people on this list.

One note however, is the signatory Arlie Peters. He distanced himself from the G88 and did not sign the clarifying statement later on. For that, he needs to be applauded. The rest continued their hatred long after the case they once so cherished... collapsed so utterly.

For a list of their behavior, google.com, KC Johnson and others provide ample information.
Finally, the president of Duke, Richard Broadhead. He was not an 88er, but he certainly shares their views. Many people attest to his intelligence, and I have no reason to doubt any of them. He is a very smart, suave man, with a great eloquence, which is clearly lacking in most of the company he keeps (on this list and the 88ers in general).

When Finnerty and Seligmann were arrested, he gave his speech of: "If they did it, it's appaling. If they didn't do it, whatever they did is bad enough".

He knew, at that point, that all Seligmann and Finnerty did was drink beer. According to Broadhead, that was enough to warrant a 30 year prison sentence.

He failed his university, he failed his institution, he failed academia in general, and he failed to reign in a mob of morally destitute gangsters.

#14: Kathy Redmond

Redmond is the founder of the National Coalition against Violent Atheletes.

The clear greatest heroes next to Brad Bannon were the Lacrosse women at Duke. Their wearing of the Innocent armbands, alongside the jersey numbers of the false accused, at their top-4 game was one of the defining moments of this entire hoax.

The backlash of hatred was expected. The Lacrosse men's team suffered the most of the hate. Columnists like Selena Roberts, Harvey Araton, John Feinstein, Andrew Cohen and others slandered vigorously and unchecked.

However, the vitriol and sexism launched at the women of Duke Lacrosse was amongst the ugliest in the entire hoax.

The first was Harvey Araton of the New York Times, calling (disparagely) the lacrosse women "gals", wondering how they would stake their reputation on the outcome of the case. He went on and on, and for a while, he was the forerunner in the hate leveled against the female lacrosse team. Until...

In a Jeff Schultz article oozing with condescension, Kathy Redmond was given a voice:

"These are stupid, spoiled little girls. It smacks of high school. Maybe one day when they'll read about one of their friends who was raped. Then they'll rethink this."

and:

"More than any other sport, there's this mentality with women lacrosse players of, 'We're as tough as the men.' It's almost like a competition. It's like they try to carry themselves with a masculine edge. They want to be looked at as being just as good as the men, yet they still look to the men for validation."

and:

"I'm surprised [the women players] didn't fear any reprisals from Duke. It tells me that the school is still taking this less seriously than it should."

So, this is the founder of the Coalition against violence expresses suprise that the women didn't suffer reprisals.

One of the consistent good things that came out of this case is the exposure of the morals of feminists and other politically correct entities. The sheer sexism thrown at the Lacrosse women is very telling.

#13: Amanda Marcotte

Marcotte is a foul-mouthed blogger and a feminist extraordinaire. Facts, logic and reason are anathema to her very existence. I have rarely, if ever, met someone as vitriolic as her.

Marcotte's view of the case was straight-forward. They raped her, and absolutely nothing can possibly change her mind about it. Not only that, she completely disregards any new development, or old fact, about the case. She does this with frightening dedication. She does this after the DNA conspiracy was exposed, where anyone with even a shred of intellect would realize the extent of the Hoax.

She is not stupid, far from it. For someone with intellect to have followed this case and produce such opinions, is very suspect. Marcotte knows the Lacrosse players are innocent, and yet throws so much hate at them that one would think she was personally involved.

Marcotte also claims she was raped. Whether she was or not, the fact that she willingly props up a case for a clear false rape accuser is evidence enough that she absolutely does not care about actual rape victims, but is quite willing to stab those that were raped in the back. For her, a false rape victim is just as fine as a real one, in fact better: it is far more 'Hollywood' and enticing.

Marcotte was hired by (North Carolina native) presidential candidate John Edwards as his official blogger. She was then promptly fired (she said she left), not long after her famous 'stuck at the airport' comment towards the Lacrosse team.

That Edwards, by far the highest ranking person to come out of North Carolina, was silent about the biggest case of prosecutorial misconduct in American history in HIS OWN STATE, is telling. That he hired Amanda Marcotte, with her views quite public, is sheer stupidity.

Marcotte, of course, deleted her posts, as she does with anyone disagreeing with her. For some reason, she does not understand a very key concept about the internet, that Rooney Mara mentionned in the movie, 'The Social Network':

"The internet isn't written in pencil, it's written in ink."

#12: Tim Tyson

Tyson is a professor at Duke. He is also one of the two known professors (the other being Faulkner Fox) to have admitted to attending the potbanger protests outside the Lacrosse house, chanting songs and waving "Castrate" banners (quite an accomplishment for a teacher against his own students, and a violation of the Student Handbook).

Tyson admired Crystal Mangum, but was part of a very ironic situation: when he was at the lacrosse house protesting in the shadow of the "Castrate" banner, Mangum was dancing, quite limberly, at her strip club (so much for "injuries" and "trauma").

Tyson is also the author of, in my opinion, the most outrageous of all remarks to come out of this case, when he suggested that that Duke students refusing to speak to Mark Gottlieb without presence of their attorneys "may be illegal".

That a professor is so ignorant of the bill of rights and the 6th ammendment is stunning.

#11: Ariel Dorfman

Dorfman is a professor of literature at Duke. He was one of the Group of 88ers. Unlike most of the rest, Dorfman is well-read and accomplished, and has written against injustices before, such as the Pinochet regime in Chile.

In short, not the kind of person that the Gang of 88 would associate themselves with.

Dorfman, in general, has had little to say other than being part of the original statement. I am not really aware of much other controversy he initiated... other than...

Dorfman was one of the signatories on another petition. The petition to free Roman Polanski. Polanski, of course, admitted not only to rape, but to rape of a minor, after drugging his victim, in a case where there actually was a victim. This wasn't even in doubt, and Polanski fled the US after this.

So Dorfman wants to punish the demonstratively innocent, and release the demonstratively guilty.

It is understandable, because Dorfman and Polanski have collaborated before, but the extent of his actions, the man has a lot in common with Pinochet, the very man he campaigns against.

Thanks go to KC Johnson who noticed this.

#10: Houston Baker

We start the top-10 off with a bang. Houston Baker is one of the most vocal members of the Group of 88, who wrote a guilt-pressuming racist screech of a letter, denouncing everything male, white, athletic.

Even his fellows were taken aback, and it prompted the first (and for a long time only) rebuke from Duke, from Provost Peter Lange (Lange was public about it, at a time where the entire world was against the Lacrosse players).

Baker soon left for Vanderbilt where he was hailed as the "leading dissident voice inside Duke University regarding that administration's handling of rape accusations against members of its lacrosse team" (apparently, at Vanderbilt dissident means something other than the Oxford Dictionary Definition.

Furthermore, he was characterized as: "one of the most wide-ranging intellectuals in America today in any field of the humanities. He is prolific and writes to an audience far broader than academic specialties."

When the mother of a lacrosse player (unindicted) wrote to him, asking him for help in a fairly moderate and very friendly letter, the wide-ranging intellectual replied:

LIES! You are just a provacateur on a happy New Years Eve trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males! You know you are in search of sympaathy [sic] for young white guys who beat up a gay man [sic] in Georgetown, get drunk in Durham, and lived like 'a bunch of farm animals' near campus.

I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email rots in .... umhappy [sic] new year to you ... and forgive me if your really are, quite sadly, mother of a 'farm animal.'

---

Trully the words of an intellectual and a professor.

#9: Kim Curtis

One could make a top-88 of villains of just the Duke Professors. Kim Curtis, in my mind, is probably the greatest G88 villain outside of Houston Baker. The reason Houston Baker is behind her on this list: he does a pretty good job at making himself completely irrelevant.

Kim Curtis is a Political Science professor, best known for using grade retaliation against unindicted Lacrosse players, after accusing them of a covering up the rape, a crime for which she should have gone to the authorities if she had proof.

This is not all she is known for. After a scuffle between a Duke student and a few NCCU students (where the Duke student was knocked unconcious), the Duke police increased security. Since there was an event with objective proof, this seemed like a reasonable response. There were no demonstrations, just a few increased patrols.

Curtis was livid, slandering the Duke student (and his female companion), and urging "research on this (knocked unconscious Duke) student and making it public". That a professor would display such hatred for her own students is shocking.

She even repeatedly claimed the female companion lied about such matters on a regular basis.

Then came the Lacrosse case.

Curtis was one of the potbangers, as Liestoppers discovered, and never admitted to it. She presumed guilt and inferred (in writing) that the Lacrosse players covered up a crime (even the ones not accused of rape). She should have gone to the police with such proof.

Of course she had none, and resulted to grade retaliation, especially against Kyle Dowd, who ended up suing the university.

The fact that Curtis still works as a professor is unbelievable. She and her husband/fellow G88, left Duke in 2007. As the Lacrosse case collapsed and her vicious hatred for her students was exposed, there really wasn't much Curtis could do at Duke.

#8: Larry Moneta

Larry Moneta is the VP for Student Affairs at Duke.

As the VP for Student Affairs, Moneta's job is simple: take care of the students entrusted to him. I might be unaware of other job descriptions.

What Moneta should have done, in the wake of the trampling of the Lacrosse player's rights, is to protect the Lacrosse players. These were his students, at his institution, and they were threatened by a bloodthirsty mob waving "castrate" signs and the extremist New Black Panthers Party. Not only that, 88 professors have taken it upon themselves to slander their own students, and Moneta did nothing.

When asked by an attorney to do his job and protect the students, he refused, and when pressed, Moneta replied: "Frankly, Samantha, I don't believe them."

Not much was heard from Moneta until another allegation of rape happened on February 11th, 2007, near Duke University, where a Duke student, a girl, was raped by a non-Duke man. The fact that the alleged victim was white, and the alleged perpetrator was black, had nothing to do with Moneta's vastly different response, of course.

Incredibly, he appears to be blaming the alleged victim:

"It's part of the reality of collegiate life and of experimentation and some of the consequences of students not necessarily always being in the right place at the right time."

So, we have the Duke VP for Student Affairs that goes against his own students, when they are accused of rape, and goes against his own students when they claim they were raped.

This man has twice failed to defend his own students, although in all fairness, he did say that he would help the alleged victim in the February 11th case.

It must have dawned upon him that it is alright if he violates constitutional rights for 46 of his own students, and allows an external mob to run amok on his campus (twice). It might have been harder to explain to his politically correct allies that he does not believe the girl's rape allegation off-hand.

This is not the only time that Moneta was not too concerned with his own stutends. The 'Water Buffalo' incident at Penn was also on Moneta's shift, and while his performance there isn't quite as criminal as the one at Duke, it's still stunning that this man keep being in the position he is in.

#7: Samiha Khanna

Out of all the people on this list, Samiha Khanna is probably the least well-known. This is unfortunate, as she was the only person that was granted an interview with Crystal Mangum, and she co-authored a story that launched the Hoax into the public eye. She painted the false rape accuser as an innocent victim and portrayed the lacrosse players as brutal gang rapists, with no evidence, and against the most basic journalistic standards.

She portrayed Crystal Mangum as a hard worker... which she was - a dozen men in a few days... a devoted mother - who had her driver and random people take care of her kids while she was out, "working hard"... and a serious student - although no one remembers her actually going to class.

Most importantly, Mangum claimed two things in that interview: That the second dancer, Kim Roberts, was also raped, and that the lacrosse players stole her money. Both things never made the paper for obvious reasons, and were quietly dropped even by the police. If she reported those, the case would have collapsed far more quickly, as the evidence would contradict her actual rape claims immediately.

After the Hoax collapsed, Khanna came back to the case, and offered a stunning piece. First, she declines to take credit for her own work/words, blaming Mangum. She built up Nifong's fallen case as something other than the trainwreck that it was. Finally, she tried to cast doubt on Roy Cooper's declaration of innocence.

She pushed the irrelevancy of her earlier work and claimed that it did no damage. Finally, she kept up the mantra of "we'll never know what happened".

It takes uncommon dedication to this case to keep supporting it long after the evidence and proof came to light and showed it as the greatest hoax in american jurisprudence. Samiha Khanna was the proud flagbearer and first contact. We salute her!

#6: Wendy Murphy / (honorable mention: Nancy Grace)
I am loathe to group people together, but in this case, the two are virtually undistinguishable from another. Despite that, let it be clear that it is Wendy Murphy as the undisputed sixth place selection, lying just outside the top 5 worst villains. Nancy Grace was a primary enabler of Murphy, but did enough work to stand out on her own.

It is difficult to summarize what Grace has done, but a more prosecution-friendly figure there wasn't. Grace (who had her own problem with ethics), like Murphy, purports to be a seasoned sexual assault prosecutor.

Let's start with Grace.

On her show, Grace is a wrecking ball. She would loudly and vitriolically shut down any attempt by any of her guests to even remotely suggest such quaint notions like due process, justice, presumption of innocence, probable cause, or any actual rights afforded by the Bill of Rights. She would mock and humiliate (or try to, anyway) her own guests by bombarding them with incorrect, but loud facts. She was a cheerleader for Mike Nifong.

She would routinely make up facts and mention non-existing evidence. She also made collosal errors on the most simple concepts; one of her funniest statements: "There you see the alleged district attorney there in Raleigh-Durham speaking out."

"Alleged" DA? Also, there is no city by that name.

Grace has been silent since the case collapsed.

Now, Wendy Murphy. Ah, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy... I cannot think of a single person in the entire history of modern american justice that has done more for the cause of injustice than her. Starting with the horrific Fells Acres injustice and leading up to the Duke Hoax, Murphy has been at the front lines of many a judicial disaster.

Her dedication to put the innocent behind bars is something to be admired.

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/12/wendy-murphy-file.html

I cannot come close to duplicating the amazing work that KC Johnson has done to bring the hoax to light, but his work on Murphy is some of the best written on any topic. KC's 3 main charges against Murphy:

- Making untrue statements

- Presenting wholly unfounded speculation

- Denigrating Due Process

This is from a adjunct "professor" and former "sex crimes prosecutor".

One can assume that Wendy is a fairly smart person, and she is. But long after all of Nifong's supporters abandonned the case, Murphy was still willing to go to bat for the criminal DA.

Much like Khanna, Murphy displayed uncommon dedication to the cause of injustice. She was THE zealot amongst zealots, the longest-lasting supporter of Nifong, willing to take it as far as possible. Unlike Grace, Murphy never gave up, never backed down, and continued to live in her fantasy world until no one cared anymore.

Now we come to the top-5, and while the first batch of villains is debatable, I absolutely do not think these anyone but these 5 will fit in this group. Whereas the others are mostly only talking heads, irrelevant demagogues that have long since fallen out of favor or public eye... These five, alongside Mangum and Nifong, have done enough damage to the justice system and American values, to be felt for a really long time. Let the parade begin.

#5 Brian Meehan

He was the lab director at DNA Security Inc, the private DNA lab that Nifong hired, after the SBIs DNA results came in exonerating all Lacrosse players.

In the first meetings with Nifong, Meehan explained how none of the Lacrosse players DNA was on Mangum. He also explained that there were (about a dozen) other male DNA in her "private" orifices. Given that she said she did not have sexual intercourse for a week before the "rape", and the fact that so many unknown men left DNA was on her, should have been a red flag to anyone even remotely competent.

It wasn't.

The report Meehan prepared did not include this information. He did have to give up the results (about 1800 pages worth), and both him and Nifong thought that the defense did not have the knowledge, and would not have the patience, to go through the entire mount of high-level forensic results to figure it out.

Nifong even told the judge afterwards, when asked by the defense, that no other men's DNA was found on the "victim".

Unfortunately for Meehan, Mangum, Nifong and the throng of their supporters that based their entire ideology upon this case, one of the Duke heroes, defense attorney Brad Bannon, spent an entire month learning DNA, combing over the results, and (per KC Johnson) exposing the Meehan-Nifong conspiracy in a Perry Mason moment (capped by Jim Cooney):

Seligmann attorney Jim Cooney: "Was the exclusion of material the result of a specific agreement between you and representatives of the state of North Carolina?"

DNA Security director Brian Meehan: "Yes".

This was the moment the Hoax was done. Those three letters, Y-E-S, is when the Hoax collapsed.

The ideologues that propped up the case, from feminists to race-baiters, that blame everything from the players to the "rape culture" to the "system", should know that Brad Bannon is the number one reason why this gross injustice was avoided and three innocent people didn't go to jail.

Let me just put it this way: Bannon is a far greater hero than anyone on this list is a villain, and that is saying something.

Meehan was fired. He then sued DNA Security for unjust termination. That alone should give you an idea of the mindset of this man.

#4: Linwood Wilson

He was Nifong's henchman, a "private investigator" with a longer rap sheet than anyone else in this list.

Wilson was the enforcer for a variety of tasks, his most prominent was the arrest of Mozeldin Elmostafa, the cab driver that would prove Seligmann was not at the house at any time Crystal Mangum said she was raped. Between his testimony and Wachovia ATM bank video evidence, Seligmann had an ironclad alibi. Wilson arrested Elmostafa on an "outstanding warrant", but never really questionned him about it, instead asking him if he had any "new" information about the Lacrosse case.

The setting was clear: you have a prosecutor, Nifong, sending a police officer, Wilson, to arrest, coerce, and intimidate a witness that could blow the cover off the Hoax.

This alone should have been enough to convict and jail Wilson. However, it was far from his only crime.

After the December 15 hearing where the conspiracy between Meehan and Nifong to conceal DNA evidence came to light, Wilson was sent to FINALLY interview Mangum about the night in question. A full nine months have passed since the "rape", and this was the first time the prosecution talked to the "victim" about the case. The new story, of course, is that she was not "raped" per se, but instead only assaulted, in order to circumvent the new information. He, of course, did not record this meeting, the police department's last procedural violation in a long line of stunning violations.

Even for someone as unethical as Wilson, this should have been a red flag. Instead, he plowed straight ahead, a last ditch attempt to prop up a case he should have known would die. This proves that he knew his actions to that point were illegal.

Wilson was fired, and then was arrested on charges of threatening his wife (unrelated).

#3: Kendra Montgomery-Blinn

We now come to the top three, the cream of the crap, the most criminal amongst the many evils. We start the list with someone that is probably the least known on this entire list. Montgomery-Blinn is a former Durham Assistant District Attorney who is the first director of the then just-established North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission.

At the Nifong DHC hearing, Montgomery-Blinn gave a fawning performance over just how good Nifong was. As KC Johnson said, this endorsement was stronger than even Nifong's lawyers.

So why is she on this list, and even in the top three?

She is the director of the NC Innocence commission. Let that sink in for a moment. If nothing else, between the Duke Lacrosse and Alan Gell cases, North Carolina proved itself to be dead-last in the concepts of justice and reason. The head of the Innocence commission testifies, at a hearing of Nifong's crimes of framing innocents and trying to put them in prison for almost a combined century... on behalf of the criminal prosecutor.

She also praised no-drop policies and seems to not understand the purpose of courts (insists that anyone that makes an accusations NEEDS to have their day in court).

She continued praising the fact that even with no evidence, a case should go to trial if the prosecutor simply "believes".

Words simply escape me. She was not involved at all with the actual Hoax before the innocence declaration from the Attorney General, and this is why she takes third place and not top honors. The fact that the head of the innocence commission would commit such an atrocity is telling of the justice system in North Carolina.

#2: Mark Gottlieb

In a case where Law Enforcement performed as poorly as this, in a case where so much corruption came to light, in a case where so many criminals were not only supported by the media and the blind followers, and wore shiny blue suits... Durham Police Department Sargeant Mark Gottlieb stands out.

Gottlieb's maliciousness was evident before the case, as he arrested ten times as many Duke students as all other supervisors combined. He trully hated Duke. To put such an evidently biased person in charge of any investigation is paramount to madness, if not outright villainy.

Gottlieb committed many crimes that all but ensured justice could not be served. His main crime consisted of the rigged April 4 line-up to Crystal Mangum, after DNA evidence exonerated the players and proved the Hoax was a... hoax.

The story was ever-morphing and never consistent, but after the original numbers were thrown out (0->20 rapists), the police settled on three. This wasn't clearly communicated with Mangum, as I will mention below.

On April 4th, Gottlieb showed her the mugshots of all 46 white Lacrosse players and told her to select any three. She selected four (this is taped and recorded incidentally), adding yet another number of rapists to her story (she never before claimed 4).

Gottlieb selected two at virtually random (Finnerty and Seligmann), leaving the other two, in limbo. Over a month later, they indicted a third (Evans), leaving out the last one Mangum selected, Matt Wilson. There was no rhyme nor reason to Gottlieb's selection on April 4.

Mangum gave them description of her "three rapists" early in the investigation, and none of the descriptions matched any players on the Lacrosse team, much less any of the 2/3/4 selected. This, of course, was ignored, much like Matt Wilson.

What is frightening about all this is the information having been made available almost immediately. The media, and the people, KNEW of everything as it came out. It didn't take a genius to figure out this was a Hoax, and yet, no one cared. Gottlieb was emboldenned by this, as will future criminals that will frame the innocent.

His second crime, and ultimately his undoing, was his "straight-from memory" notes in July 2006. Gottlieb never took any notes for any of his interviews/interrogations (2 pages for 2 months, actually, in one of the most famous cases in American judicial history), and yet was able to produce a 33-page typed document that plugged any and all holes in the Mangum/Nifong conspiratorial story.

A lot of the people on this are either stunningly incompetent or frighteningly malicious. Gottlieb, like the first selection, proved that he could excelt at being both. This puts him ahead of Linwood Wilson, a far more malicious, but smarter, corrupt police officer.

After his anti-Duke arrest record was revealed, Gottlieb was replaced by Linwood Wilson. Finally, Gottlieb was fired after the case collapsed.

#1: Tara Levicy

There is little doubt as to what villain would earn the top spot in this debacle, after Mike Nifong and Crystal Mangum were discounted. Tara Levicy, the feminist zealot, park ranger turned SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) nurse, was in my mind, the single most important reason as to why this hoax went as long as it did.

Levicy filled a very important role in the hoax. As the only medically endowed ally of Mike Nifong (although those credentials were called into question many times), Levicy did everything in her power to prop him up and to feed him information they both knew was false, under the guise of "expert" respectability.

Levicy discovered the only injury that Mangum had on her when she was brought in: the non-bleeding scratches on her knee and foot. Mangum also had a yeast infection, which caused antoher nurse (Dr. Manly) to note that Mangum had diffuse edema of the vaginal wall, but the only injury that was there was the non-bleeding scratch.

That injury prompted her to evaluate that Mangum was not lying when she claimed rape, and told the police that it was consistent with someone that suffered sexual assault.

Mangum told a large ammount of varied stories about what happened to her, changing many aspects of it, including the ammount of rapists (0 -> 20), the ammount of dancers (she claimed there were 4, even though there were 2), the names, the time, who did what, and various other things. The actions of the second dancer, Kim Roberts, also varied... in one story Roberts was a fellow rape victim, in another a thief, and in others accomplice to rape. The only thing that remained consistent was the lack of condoms.

When the DNA results came back exonerating the lacrosse player (two weeks after the party, before the protests and before any arrests), Nifong needed condoms, and Levicy obliged. This was the first example (of many), where Levicy changed the story to better fit with new developpments.

She also modified the SAER report in several locations. For example, in the notation about whether the alleged rapists had tried to conceal evidence, Levicy had initially entered 'no'. In the version produced on April 5, however, this was crossed out, and 'yes' was indicated, with a handwritten notation 'wiped her off with a rag'.

Levicy will always be remembered as a feminist of the highest caliber, an ideologue that testified that she never encountered a woman that ever lied about rape, and a key person that propped up a falling case for over a year. This was not done innocently, or blinded by ideology. She knew Crystal Mangum was a liar and the Duke Lacrosse kids were innocent, and she did everything in her power to continue the Hoax. She is a criminal of the highest order, and should have been the second person, after Nifong to go to prison. The fact that this was not done will reverberate for a long time, and will hurt future rape victims as well as the future innocently accused.

Her crime is unique in its enormity, even given the company she finds herself in.

Levicy was fired. More than anyone, she escaped with punishment far below her crime.

The Chances of Holding Your Son Responsible for a Rape He Didn't Commit Have Just Skyrocketed

2011-04-13T10:28:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the great Paul Elam for publicizing this crucial story on his mega-blog: see here

Harvard Snow Phallus 2003

2011-04-11T12:20:00.001-04:00

2011-01-11T23:33:00.001-05:00

2011-01-11T23:26:00.001-05:00

2011-01-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

Write to newspapers that refer to accusers as "victims"

2010-01-19T08:38:00.000-05:00

Sample text:

Re: [Name of story]

Dear ___________:

I write to express my concern about your use of the term "victim" to describe the accuser in the above-referenced story.

By labeling her the "victim" before a single scrap of evidence has been admitted at trial, much less an adjudication of guilt, you have unwittingly rushed to judgment and declared her allegation to be factual.

Such a description does a grave disservice to (1) the presumed innocent who are accused of such crimes since, by necessity, they must be guilty if their accusers are, in fact, "victims"; (2) actual rape victims, because you trivialize rape when you include among its victims women who might only be false accusers; and (3) your readers, who are entitled to accurate reporting but receive something less than that when you transform an accuser into a "victim."

It is well to note that every objective study ever conducted on false rape claims shows that they are a significant problem. The only fair manner of reporting on these cases is to refer to accusers as exactly what they are: accusers.

I implore you to exercise greater care in reporting on such stories, and to show sensitivity to the presumed innocent and their families, by not suggesting that the trial is over even before it has begun.

Thank you.

Very truly,

______________

What to do if you are wrongly accused

2010-01-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

While we are always happy to hear from and to lend support to the wrongly accused and their loved ones, we are loathe to furnish legal advice -- and not because we don't want to. If we were to furnish legal advice, it could do the wrongly accused a grave disservice. Only a licensed and qualified attorney who is able to interview the accused and to conduct other appropriate investigation can properly serve his interests.

If you are accused of a sex crime, get the best criminal attorney in the area to represent you, preferably one who has tried before a jury numerous similar cases. Spare no expense because it is the most important investment you will ever make.

Make sure you have an attorney present, and make sure you follow his or her advice, when you speak with police or anyone else about the matter of which you've been accused and related matters. If you receive a suspicious phone call from anyone trying to get you to discuss the incident or related incidents, it might be a pretext call -- a call recorded by police in order to get you to incriminate yourself. Be polite but firm. Refuse to answer questions or engage the caller in a conversation. Hang up as soon as possible and call your criminal defense attorney. Anything you say might be used as evidence in a criminal trial against you, depending on the jurisdiction.

About False Rape Society

2010-01-19T08:23:00.000-05:00

This Web site was started by a U.S.-based attorney to raise awareness about false rape claims.

I became interested in this subject in a roundabout way. As a lifelong liberal and strong supporter of equal rights for women, I had always accepted the feminist insistence that only two percent of all rape claims are false. To be honest, I felt assured by it.

But then I became involved in a pecular case involving a false rape claim, and my studies led me to research done by persons without a political agenda. I found that the two percent claim was not correct. False rape claims, in fact, comprise a much higher percentage of all rape claims. Worse, I found that false rape claim victims had peculiar needs, unique needs, and that their suffering is not being addressed. I also found it disurbing that the entire field was terribly politicized, and that things which are untrue are repeated over and over and over in order to carry out an ideological agenda.

I also found that in case after case involving false rape claims, judges bemoan the harm done to actual rape victims by the lies. The credibility of every rape victim is reduced with every rape lie. I began to seriously wonder why the persons who dominate the public discourse about rape would insist on sticking their heads in the sand and do nothing to help reduce the prevalence of false rape claims. Unfortunately, as I discovered, any other course of conduct would be inconsistent with their ideological stance that allows neither for nuance nor for any admission that males can be victimized by the actions of women in significant numbers.

I decided to write an article about what I'd found, and to monitor false rape claims in the news. I decided to put the raw news stories I found into a blog in case anyone else became interested in it. This blog is the result of that. My article has turned into a book I am writing, and the blog that nobody read has acquired a large and zealous readership.

I am still a very strong supporter of equal rights for women. But I part company with what I believe is a small but vocal cabal of ideologues that seems disinterested in helping victims of false rape claims. In a strange way, our blog has become a champion to enhance the credibiltiy of rape victims by eradicating false rape claims. We have been surprised about the number of rape victims who support our work precisely because false accusations make achieving justice for rape all the more difficult.

Every objective study ever conducted on the prevalence of false rape claims reveals that they are a significant problem. Yet, despite the grievous harm often suffered by the falsely accused, their unique needs are not being addressed.

We freely permit the reputations of persons falsely accused of sex crimes to be destroyed by baseless accusations; we freely permit the presumed innocent, who too often turn out to be falsely accused, to be arrested and jailed on even far-fetched claims, with bail set sufficiently high to insure they won't be released before trial; and we freely excuse false accusers with little or no punishment, thus providing no deterrent to other would-be false accusers.

These needs of the falsely accused, and others, are ignored because issues surrounding rape have become unnecessarily gender-politicized, and the persons who dominate the public discourse about rape refuse to acknowledge the false rape problem because, they wrongly insist, it would somehow hamper the war on rape.

By any measure, denigrating the experience of the wrongly accused by dismissing their victimization as a myth or as unworthy of our discussion, much less our protection, is not merely dishonest but morally grotesque.

If you have news or a comment about false rape or sexual assault accusations, contact us at thefrs@ymail.com

False Rape Claims Primer

2010-01-19T08:02:00.001-05:00

Quotes to remember

"Terrible as it is for a victim to see a rapist escape punishment, it is far, far worse for an innocent person to be convicted of a sex crime."

Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, S. Taylor, K.C. Johnson (2007).
_____________________________

“Rape is such a serious crime that deliberately bringing a false accusation of rape should be an equally serious crime and women are not being punished for those crimes. I believe that being falsely accused of rape is as traumatic as being raped.”

Prof. Alan Dershowitz
________________________________
"Although it may not be 'politically correct' to question the veracity of a women's complaint of rape, failing to consider the accuser may be intentionally lying effectively eradicates the presumption of innocence."

Dr. Bruce Gross, False Rape Allegations: An Assault on Justice, Annals of the American Psychotherapy Associaton, Dec. 22, 2008.
_________________________________
"The trouble with the feminist position is that it seems to leave no room for the presumption of innocence when a woman accuses a man of violating her."

Commentator Cathy Young

LINKS TO INFORMATIVE SOURCES

"Campus Rape Myth" by Heather MacDonald

About Half of Rape Allegations are False, Research Shows

Catherine Comins quote found in Time Magazine article

Continuing to Defame the Duke '3' as Rapists

Date Rape's Other Victim by Katie Roiphe

Duke Case: Unusual Only Because The Prosecutor Got Caught

Duke Rape Case All Too Common

Duke Rape Case Raises Issue of Protecting Identity of Accused

False Rape Accusations May Be More Common Than Thought. by Wendy McElroy

False Rape Allegations, by Eugene J. Kanin

False Rape Allegations: An Assault On Justice

False Rape Charges Hurt Real Victims

False Rape Claim Hurts Real Victims

Innocence Project

Kathleen Parker : Picking up after Duke debacle

On False Rape Allegations, A Judge's Pious Words Are Not Enough

Rape Scandal Turns Sympathy Into Skepticism

Researching the "Rape Culture" of America

The Truth Behind Legal Dominance Feminism's "Two Percent False Rape Claim' Figure

Treat Accused, Accuser Alike

What If Kobe Bryant Has Been Falsely Accused? Why the Law of Acquaintance and Date Rape Should Seriously Penalize False Reports

What Percentage of Rape Accusations are False? CrimProf Blog

Who says women never lie about Rape?

LANDMARK POSTS ON FALSE RAPE SOCIETY

It is better that ten rapists escape punishment than for one innocent man to be imprisoned for a rape he did not commit

Another study debunks the two percent false rape canard

Reduce false rape claims by teaching young women what 'consent' means

Falsely accused boys: collateral damage in the war on rape

Two men's lives destroyed by false rape claims

Morally grotesque: The denigration of the falsely accused by insisting their victimization is a "myth" or a "bugaboo"

How women became the victims of a crime that only targets men: False rape claims in the feminist "rape culture"

A whopper of a feminist double-standard: Women don't lie about rape, except when they recant a rape claim

UK women have a monetary incentive to lie about rape

False rape accusers should not be punished, and women are the real victims of false claims
Another rape and dv double standard

Another way to empower women

Bury Your Mistakes

2009-09-26T09:14:00.000-04:00

Posted by SHG at 9/26/2009 6:53 AM
Simple Justice/A New York Criminal Defense Blog

The pending question from the Hofstra false gang-rape accusation was how Nassau County District Attorney would hide from her responsibilities. After all, Rice had worked hard on building a "tough as nails" prosecutor image, but busily courted the female vote, and there were deep concerns that prosecuting 18 year old Danmel Ndonye would "chill" true rape victims from coming forward.

I was talking to the Blind Guy about it the other day, and he predicted that she would bury it. And he was right. At about 5:00 o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday, the news broke. Rice would not prosecute.

The AP story in the New York Times says little more than that, including only the description that she was a "deeply troubled woman." Would that have been the way Rice described her had she not admitted to fabricating the story? Was she "deeply troubled" because she made this false accusation that put four innocent men in jail? By that definition, the same sympathy evoked from the description could be applied to a lot of people. Yet I doubt Rice would feel very sorry for most of them.

The Newsday story gives Kathleen Rice's brief explanation.

"There exists no perfect solution to this case, only our best attempt at holding her accountable while encouraging real victims to come forward and accusers to tell the truth, so that we can avoid incarcerating an innocent person for even one minute, Rice said in a statement Friday afternoon.

It's a well-designed statement, carefully crafted to make two wholly unrelated things appear connected. Allowing a woman who lied about a heinous crime being committed against her to avoid prosecution, causing four men who committed no crime to be arrested, smeared throughout the media, sit in jail and have their names perpetually tied to a gang rape, has no rational connection whatsoever to encouraging real victims to come forward. It does, however, have a strong connection to encouraging false accusations, since the conditions of counseling and community services offer little disincentive to not take the risk.

And notice the concern about "incarcerating an innocent person for even one minute?" But Rice never apologized to the four men that sat in jail for her role in blindly accepting the word of this "deeply troubled woman." She didn't even thank the criminal defense lawyers for the men who brought forth the proof that Ndonye was the criminal, not the boys, thus saving her from the destiny of Mike Nifong.

Timing is key to the success of this maneuver. By Monday, when people get back to paying attention to the news, this will be an old story. The Saturday paper is the least read paper of the week. Over the weekend, nobody will know. By Monday, nobody will care. Chances are good that something new will happen over the weekend, and if Rice has any luck at all, it will be a drunk driving death of a child. She's very strong on drunk driving deaths of children. They get prosecuted for murder, and she gets to rail about how she's tough on crime and saving us from the demon.

She's a shrewd one, that Kathleen Rice.

Link: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/09/26/bury-your-mistakes.aspx?ref=rss

A Tabloid Lynching

2009-09-26T09:06:00.000-04:00

On Sept. 14 four young men were charged with raping a young woman in a Hofstra University dorm. The media said the rape was brutal and premeditated. The accused rapists were named and their photographs published.

The headlines were sensational. The fact the crime was alleged and that the police were beginning to collect evidence about the rape was treated as a mere technicality.

The message was clear: A woman was raped and these guys did it. It was the message put out by the Nassau County police and office of the Nassau County district attorney. No one told the press that detectives were beginning to have problems with parts of the alleged victim’s story.

Two days later the police announced the girl had admitted she had made up the story. Any sex she had that night was consensual. The men were set free but their lives, reputations and families have been damaged.

The woman who falsely reported the rape may face criminal charges. But what about the Nassau police and DA and the media? They have some self-examination to do.

Link: here

No Charges in Rape Hoax at Suburban NYC University

2009-09-26T09:02:00.000-04:00

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 25, 2009

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) -- A suburban New York City prosecutor has decided not to file criminal charges against a university student who falsely claimed she was gang-raped in a dormitory bathroom.

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice says Hofstra University freshman Danmel Ndonye (en-DAHN'-yeh) must undergo mental health treatment and perform community service in exchange for not being prosecuted. Rice described the 18-year-old as ''deeply troubled.''

The student had claimed she was attacked Sept. 13 following a dance party at a Long Island campus nightclub. Four men were arrested.

But the woman changed her story three days later when she was confronted with a cell phone video of the encounter, which indicated the sex was consensual.

The accused men were released. One of their attorneys said the video looked ''more like a porn movie.''

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/25/us/AP-US-Hofstra-Rape-Hoax.html

Attorneys take opposing views on agreement with DA

2009-09-26T08:59:00.000-04:00

September 25, 2009 By ALFONSO A. CASTILLO alfonso.castillo@newsday.com

Attorneys for two of the four men falsely accused of gang-raping a Hofstra freshman took opposing views - one negative, the other positive - on Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice's decision not to bring criminal charges against the accuser. But both said that the community service the young woman has agreed to do is a fair punishment.

Bronx attorney Victor Daly-Rivera learned of the agreement between the DA's office and Danmell Ndonye moments after a phone conversation Friday afternoon with his client, Kevin Taveras, 20, of Brentwood. Taveras had just expressed his wish that Ndonye be criminally prosecuted, he said.

"We feel that the law was broken and she should be made to answer for that," Daly-Rivera said. "People are prosecuted all the time for filing false insurance claims and things like that . . . When you compare that to accusing four men of rape, it sort of pales by comparison."

While neither he nor his client wants the 18-year-old Ndonye to go to jail, Daley-Rivera said, she should have been put "through the system" even if it ultimately resulted in the same punishment.

Daly-Rivera said he believes his client found "a small degree of comfort knowing that she's going to have to do the community service," referring to the agreement's requirement that Ndonye, of Washington Heights, perform 250 hours of such service at a location approved by the DA's office.
Taveras' stepmother, Giselle, said she did not like Rice's decision.

"He [Kevin] still gets flashbacks," she said. "It's not fair. She has to pay for that. All the family got hurt because of her."

Jon Silveri, a Bronx attorney who represents Stalin Felipe, 19, of the Bronx, another of the falsely accused young men, said his client "trusted the judgment" of Nassau prosecutors because of how quickly they acted in releasing him from jail after learning of his innocence.

Felipe said he did not believe prosecuting Ndonye would be much of a deterrent for future false accusers.

"If anything, the fact that this was so public, that the girl got thrown out of the school . . . that might be more of a deterrent," said Silveri, who spoke with his client Friday. "This is an example of how you can't rush to judgment. Hopefully people will remember this."

An attorney for Jesus Ortiz, 19, of the Bronx, did not return a call for comment. Rondell Bedward, 21, of the Bronx, could not be reached for comment.

With Bill Mason

Link: http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/attorneys-take-opposing-views-on-agreement-with-da-1.1476711

Maybe the real crime is how easy accuser is getting off

2009-09-26T08:56:00.000-04:00

September 25, 2009 By ELLIS HENICAN ellis@henican.com

She isn't being charged with any crime.

But is the woman in the Hofstra rape-allegation case actually getting a sterner dose of justice in the deal she cut on Friday with the Nassau district attorney's office? District Attorney Kathleen Rice says so.

Danmell Ndonye now admits she wasn't raped at all. She says that she had consensual sexual contact with four young men in a dorm bathroom - and didn't have any sexual contact with student Rondell Bedward. Until she recanted to Nassau prosecutors, all five faced up to 25 years behind bars.

Besides publicly admitting she lied, she promises to get some therapy and do 250 hours of community service.

"There exists no perfect solution to this case," Rice said at week's end. "Only our best attempt at holding her accountable while encouraging real victims to come forward and accusers to tell the truth so that we can avoid incarcerating an innocent person."

Not arresting Ndonye, Rice said, "is the only way we guarantee that this woman gets the help that she needs and is held publicly accountable for what she's done."

Even if the young woman were charged, Rice added, state law only allows for a misdemeanor.
Is New York law really that weak?

A person can accuse another of a horrible felony without facing any serious charge? Maybe that's where this discussion should turn next.

Link: http://www.newsday.com/columnists/ellis-henican/maybe-the-real-crime-is-how-easy-accuser-is-getting-off-1.1476824

Ndonye Deferred Prosecution Agreement

2009-09-25T21:01:00.000-04:00

DA: No charges for Hofstra gang-rape accuser

2009-09-25T19:59:00.000-04:00

September 25, 2009 by ANN GIVENS/ann.givens@newsday.com

The Hofstra University student who prosecutors say falsely accused five men of tying her up and gang-raping her in a dormitory bathroom will not face criminal charges as long as she admits she lied, gets psychological help and does 250 hours of community service, under an agreement she signed Friday with the Nassau County district attorney's office.

Prosecutors say they considered, but rejected, bringing criminal charges against Danmell Ndonye, 18, of Manhattan, who was publicly identified by the district attorney's office for the first time.

Under the agreement, announced Friday afternoon, prosecutors in District Attorney Kathleen Rice's office said they were able to specify the terms of Ndonye's punishment, rather than leaving it in the hands of a judge. She has no criminal record.

Any of the crimes she might have been charged with are misdemeanors, which, because of her age, would have carried a maximum jail sentence of 6 months, prosecutors said. In practice, people who do not have prior criminal records almost never serve jail time upon conviction of misdemeanors.

"There exists no perfect solution to this case, only our best attempt at holding her accountable while encouraging real victims to come forward and accusers to tell the truth, so that we can avoid incarcerating an innocent person for even one minute," Rice said in a statement Friday afternoon.

Previously, Rice had declined to identify Ndonye, citing the ongoing investigation.

If criminal charges had been brought against Ndonye in connection with the Sept. 13 incident, a judge would have been required to give her youthful offender status, which means that her record would have been sealed at the time she was sentenced, prosecutors said.

But Rice, in her statement, said, "Because of the youthful offender provision in the law, a misdemeanor charge doesn't hold this girl accountable, and it wouldn't require that she get the treatment that she needs."

Prosecutors say if Ndonye does not follow through on her end of the agreement, they could use her sworn admission that she lied as evidence in a criminal case against her.

Bruce Barket, a Garden City attorney hired earlier this week to represent Ndonye, said his and his client's primary goal was to avoid a criminal prosecution, what he called "an extremely difficult," expensive and unnecessary process that would have served nothing more than to create a "circus" at every court appearance.

"They took a very, very difficult situation, and we were able to fashion a reasonable and quick resolution that I think satisfies everybody's concern," Barket said Friday afternoon. "It was a very difficult time for everybody involved, and there was virtually no chance that the young woman was going to serve any jail time."

Ndonye sought counseling before she hired an attorney and had seen a therapist twice since last week, according to Barket. In addition, she is no stranger to community service, he said, having done volunteer work with AIDS patients in the past.

In the statement that the young woman signed Friday, she says she had sexual contact with four of the men, prosecutors said. She says she did not have sexual contact with Rondell Bedward, 21, of the Bronx, the only one of the men who is a student at Hofstra.

Jim Cohen, a criminal law professor at Fordham University, said Friday that while agreements of the kind Ndonye signed are unusual in high-profile cases, they happen somewhat frequently in less-publicized cases.

In some drug cases, for example, prosecutors defer charges against people who promise to get treatment and later drop the charges as long as the defendants are not again arrested.

In the end, Cohen said, the agreement accomplishes the same thing that a criminal prosecution would, but may send a message to real rape victims that they are safe telling their stories.

"The difference between this and a conviction is like the difference between dusk and twilight - I don't think there's much of a difference at all," he said.

The statement of guilt that Ndonye signed as part of her agreement with prosecutors will be strong evidence in any civil lawsuit that the wrongly accused men file against her. But it is no stronger than a criminal conviction would have been, Cohen said.

Ndonye also made a new statement to police after she first admitted that she had lied, though it was not immediately clear whether that statement would be available for use in a civil case.

Jamie Bogenshutz, executive director at YES Community Counseling Center in Massapequa, said that at first glance, the decision not to prosecute the woman appears to be a positive choice.

"When there's an opportunity to avoid a jail sentence and provide somebody with help, it's always a good thing," Bogenshutz said.

Ndonye had told police that she was gang-raped in the early morning hours of Sept. 13 after a man she was dancing with at a fraternity party stole her cell phone, then lured her into bathroom in Estabrook Hall, where his friends were waiting. She told police that five men used a rope to tie her in a stall and raped her.

Four men - Bedward, Stan Felipe, 19, and Jesus Ortiz, 19, all of the Bronx, and Kevin Taveras, 20, of Brentwood - were arrested and arraigned on charges of first-degree rape. Authorities still were seeking a fifth man when the case took a marked turn.

The fifth man had taken a video of a portion of the bathroom incident with a cell phone. On Sept. 14, the district attorney's office learned that such a video might exist.

On Sept. 16, prosecutors who were interviewing the young woman told her that the incident may have been videotaped. Her story crumbled, and she soon admitted that sex with the men had been consensual.

Within hours, charges against Bedward, Felipe, Ortiz and Taveras were dropped and they were released from jail late that night.

This week, according to Rice's statement, prosecutors learned of more evidence about the early morning hours of Sept. 13 - including a second set of still images recovered off the phone of one of the men involved in the encounter. The images depict similarly consensual portions of the encounter, the statement said.

In addition, prosecutors also have obtained security video from Hofstra that Rice's statement said contradicts many aspects of the girl's original statements to police.

After Ndonye recanted her story, Hofstra officials suspended her pending an internal judicial process.

At that time, the university retracted its suspension of Bedward, a Hofstra junior, and said it would assist him in returning to campus, including living in a different dormitory if he so chose.

The district attorney's handling of the case had brought criticism from Rice's election opponent, former Nassau prosecutor Joy Watson.

Watson, who was in charge of sex-crime prosecutions under former District Attorney Denis Dillon, said Sunday that Rice should have charged the young woman "immediately."

"A crime was committed, and there's no question who committed the crime . . . I prosecuted cases in the past where we had false allegations made, and arrests were made immediately," Watson said.

At the time, Rice's spokesman Eric Phillips said the district attorney "doesn't make snap judgments or let political expedience replace diligent fact-finding in investigations, so it's disturbing to hear that a candidate without the facts running for such a serious office would attempt to politicize and score political points on an issue like this."

Link: http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/da-no-charges-for-hofstra-gang-rape-accuser-1.1475704

Juliette Dallas-Feeney: Hofstra debacle highlights sexual assault issues at colleges

2009-09-24T09:20:00.000-04:00

Hofstra debacle highlights sexual assault issues at colleges

GW's sex education programs should have a higher profile
by Juliette Dallas-Feeney Hatchet Reporter

Last week, an 18-year-old Hofstra University student told police she had been gang-raped by five men in a residence hall bathroom. A few days later, she recanted her story and said the sex was consensual.

The story made national headlines, with some arguing over who was at fault for the debacle. Charges may be levied against the accuser, but the real question that should be asked is why would this woman make such an accusation and then retract it in the span of a few days? The possibilities are endless. Maybe she had consensual sex with the men, freaked out and cried rape, and then took it back. Maybe she just didn't want to deal with the intense emotional stress and media frenzy that a rape trial so often involves, and thought that retracting her statement would avoid that.

Whatever her reasons, it's doubtful we'll ever know her true intentions because these situations are all purely speculative. But the societal conventions, more so than the possible reasons, that prompt a young woman to recant such a serious charge are worth analyzing. There is a distinctly sexist personal responsibility placed on women to not get raped - don't drink too much, don't wear short skirts, because if you do, you are clearly asking for it, is the sentiment. But why is there barely any responsibility placed on men? Men should take an equal responsibility for their actions, especially when alcohol is involved.

We have all heard some combination of statistics about the seriousness of rape and sexual assault. College-aged women are four times more likely to be sexually assaulted, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. One in six women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Of these, 60 percent are not reported to the police.

GW is rife with potential to educate its community not only about rape, but about healthy sexuality and sexual safety. Sex, let alone rape, is an uncomfortable topic of discussion for most people, but silencing the conversation only perpetuates the problem. Passing out condoms and pamphlets can only go so far. The GW Sexual Assault Crisis Consultation Team provides excellent resources and services about what to do if you've been raped or sexually assaulted, but their visibility on campus is next to nothing. The SACC Team should be just as publicized to the student body as 4-RIDE, another on-campus safety resource. Greek-letter life, sororities and fraternities alike, should do more to make the discussion about rape an integral part of their societies. At Colonial Inauguration, CI leaders should incorporate an in-depth program for incoming freshmen to discuss issues likely to confront them, especially since the definition of rape is complex and varied.

The incident at Hofstra is a wake-up call for GW and all universities to answer the problem of rape on campus. By no means can we singlehandedly stop it, but we can certainly expand on the resources we have to make our campus not just another statistic.

The writer, a junior majoring in women's studies, is a Hatchet columnist.

Link: http://media.www.gwhatchet.com/media/storage/paper332/news/2009/09/24/Opinions/Juliette.DallasFeeney.Hofstra.Debacle.Highlights.Sexual.Assault.Issues.At.Colleg-3782043.shtml

Five freaks plus a female equals the Hofstra University rape case

2009-09-23T10:07:00.001-04:00

Five freaks plus a female equals the Hofstra University rape case

September 22, 11:39 AMSF Dating Advice Examiner
Deborrah Cooper

I'm sure the parents of the 5 young men recently released from jail after their alleged rape victim recanted her story are relieved.

But they shouldn't be.

What is the deal with your sons mothers and fathers? Why did not one of your sons attempt to intervene on the young woman's behalf? Why is it that your boys think its okay to not only watch a girl being victimized , but to jump into the fray and participate with glee in the victimization?

She wasn't raped and she made the whole thing up you say? As an advice columnist for the past 20 years, I have a handle on how men think, the rage men have towards women that deny them, and the fears and vulnerability young women have. Here's how I think it all went down.

Guy is dancing with woman. She is fine. He and his friend want some booty. They concoct a ruse to get her away from the party and the eyes of others, so one of the group snatches her cell phone and runs off with it. Of course she follows him, requesting that he give her the phone back. Who wouldn't? He heads towards the men's room where his friend is laying in wait. She is surrounded by two strapping young men in their physical prime. They that threaten to tie her up with a rope and do her anyway if she doesn't give it up willingly.

Terrified, she looks around and sees there is no one to come to her aid. There are no security cameras, no security officers, and no students around. There is no one to help get her out of this situation.

Keep in mind every single rape advocacy organization out there tells women "make a decision to fight or go with it. The goal is to come out of the situation alive." In cases of abduction kidnapping victims are advised to "keep track of what is going on, what the kidnappers are doing, what they call themselves, how many of them there are, etc. This information may be needed to help in the victim's escape or to later identify the kidnappers."

This is exactly what the victim did.

Humiliated and frightened, she decides with two guys it is more likely for her to come out of the situation alive if she gives in to their demands. In shock and afraid of what will happen if she doesn't comply, she enters the bathroom and is subsequently raped by the first two men. Using their cell phones they alert their buddies about the good time they are having. From news reports, there was no indication that police ever checked texts or calls between the alleged culprits, but perhaps that was on their agenda for later. We'll never know now.

Apparently, no one ever considered that the victim is in a nasty men's bathroom smelling of urine, and on a cold tile floor. Why is it that no one thought about the fact that a woman having sex wants to be comfortable? If this girl were truly consenting to sex, wouldn't she would have gone to the dorm room of the student ... a place with a comfortable bed instead of doing all this on a cold tile floor? Guess not.

The victim is hoping that after the first two finish she'll be let go. But instead, in walk three other guys looking to get their share of the action. She pleads with them to help her, but they laugh and start unzipping their pants, congratulating their friends on scoring such a fine piece. Standing by the door to block her exit, they wait their turn. She said "no!," "please don't!" and "Stop, let me go!" but her pleas fall on deaf ears.

Several of those guys look to be way over 200 lbs, and there is no woman except for Xena The Princess Warrior or Gogo Yubari (Kill Bill) that can fight five guys at the same time! So while her mind quietly retreats she allows use of her body in the hopes that pleasing them will get her out of there and back home to family and friends in one piece.

After they finish their "party" the victim is released. I guess we should be happy that these five aren't murderers.

What people are not considering is the impact of what psychologists call the Stockholm Syndrome. Some of you may be too young to remember, but back in 1975, a bank robbery at the Stockholm Kreditbankenin, turned into a three-day siege. During these three days, the hostages and their captors were barricaded in a vault. When rescued police and psychologists observed that the hostages seemed to become emotionally attached to the captors, so much so that they warned the bank robbers when the police moved in to affect a rescue. It was also publicized that some of the victims refused to testify against the bank robbers, and maintained contact with them even after their imprisonment. A female victim later married one of the captors as well.

A year earlier Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing giant William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped at gunpoint from her Berkeley apartment by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. After two months of captivity, she announced in a recorded statement that she had joined the SLA and taken the name Tania. Within the same month (April 1974) newspapers across the country showed a photograph of Patty holding an M1, threatening patrons of a Hibernia Bank in San Francisco during a robbery.

I say all this to point out that in a situation where someone is held captive, with no options for escape, it may seem that they present themselves as being in agreement with their captors. It may later appear that the victim was there of their own volition, and that they fully consented to the abuse suffered. In reality, that is not at all the case, and any mental health professional and seasoned police investigator knows this.

They also know how many rape victims decide not to testify against their rapists due to the negative publicity and attitudes of Americans which is "she must have wanted it… otherwise she would not have (fill in the blank)." I've addressed society's attitude towards women and their rights to their bodies and men's feelings of ownership and control over women's vagina's in the articles The Male Sruggle for Control of Female Sexuality, and Jerks, Idiots and Abusive Behaviors - Recognizing the Signs of Verbal Abuse.

To me it is no surprise that she recanted her story, hoping that it will all just go away and life will get back to normal. Poor thing, she doesn't know the psychological and emotional hell that awaits her.

More and more men seem to feel entitled to women's bodies and believe they have the right to take what they want, in spite of a female's protestations. Some blame the video music industry, others violent video games and movies. I blame the men because they are the only ones in control of their bodies, minds and actions.

Shocking statistics from the Department of Justice/FBI's report on Crime in the United States reflect misogny and a sense of entitlement to women:

*The National College Women Sexual Victimization Study estimated that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 college women experience completed or attempted rape during their college years (Fisher 2000).

*Fewer than half (48%) of all rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police (DOJ 2001).

*Factoring in unreported rapes, about 5% - one out of twenty - of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. 19 out of 20 will walk free. (Probability statistics based on US Department of Justice Statistics)

*The FBI estimates that only 37% of all rapes are reported to the police. U.S. Justice Department statistics are even lower, with only 26% of all rapes or attempted rapes being reported to law enforcement officials.

*Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted. (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) calculation based on 2000 National Crime Victimization Survey. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice)

Even in situations as non-invasive as sexual harassment on jobs, men and women exhibit widespread acceptance of these behaviors as either something out of their power to stop, something that women should take "as a joke," or something that women must tolerate out of fear of losing their jobs. Sexual comments and gestures, as well as physically blocking entre and exit from rooms falls under the umbrella of sexual harassment per Federal law.

So, when told by five adult males that the only way you, a small female, were leaving a room was to first lay there and give them what they wanted, you'd probably agree to that. And I guess it might appear, after reviewing a few convenient minutes of phone recordings, that you were "consenting" to the nonsense you were just coerced and threatened into doing. If you were real simple minded, you might even believe that garbage.

Are you making the connection here, or am I the only one that sees how this really went down?

So now we turn back to the parents of these boys, who really need to get over their feelings of relief and closely examine the mentality of their sons.

First of all, let's look at the behavior of the guy that snatched the phone and lured her to the trap. For two men young men to plan the abduction and rape of a young woman is disgusting. Typically, men of this sort are undesirable, and harbor resentment towards women for years of rejection. Did he have his eye on this particular woman or did she represent a "type"? Had he tried to get at her before and got shot down? Was this his moment to "get the b's back?" Apparently so. By luring a woman to a situation he not only got what he wanted from her, but to make her suffer the ultimate humiliation of a gang rape.

Then you have to look at the mentality of a male that would even want to have sex with a woman in a group setting. Like rutting animals one after the other - posing her, plunging in and out of her like beasts, using her body for their sexual satisfaction while others cheer him on and await their turn. What happened in that bathroom was not sex – it is sexual perversity and objectification of women.

I hope their nasty behinds used condoms, but if not that's a whole 'nother issue to deal with.

Finally, the fella that made the recording of the rape is the most twisted. By recording the violation, he is in a position to send it to every male he can think of, or post it on MySpace or forums. He can also relive the glorious moment of his release of rage towards women that denied him sex over and over and over again. Much like mass murders take an item belonging to their victim as a trophy of the kill, this guy left with a trophy of his sexual attack on an unwilling female.

Parents, your boys are sick and need to get some help. If you have daughters, nieces and other young females in the family and/or neighborhood, you need to watch your sons when around them. This is not normal behavior for males with a sense of decency and respect towards females… this group of five males exhibited misogynistic attitudes towards women at a very deep, sociopathic level.

My warning to the parents: your sons are headed to the Registered Sex Offender list and prison in a few years if you don't intervene now.

Perhaps if I were Barbara Walters or Oprah, I could get an interview with the victim. Putting her behind a screen to protect her privacy, I could talk with her candidly, without judgment or ridicule, and get her version of the events that led to her being in a bathroom with five men having sex. We don't yet know the contents of the 5 minutes and 38 seconds of cell phone video that reportedly show "consensual" sex, but somehow I doubt it shows the vital components of the story – the part where she said "Stop it!," "I want to leave!" "Get off me!" and "Help!"

Sexual contact with any woman after she utters even one of those words constitutes rape.
Health 24 - Kampusch: Identifying with kidnapper?

http://www.health24.com/mind/Cybershrink_says/1284-2864,37248.asp
Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime in the United States (2004)http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/offense_tabulations/index.html

Link: http://www.examiner.com/x-22282-SF-Dating-Advice-Examiner~y2009m9d22-Five-freaks-plus-a-female-equals-the-Hofstra-University-rape-case

No rape charges vs. U. of Ark. basketball players

2009-09-09T15:25:00.000-04:00

Prosecutor: No charges in alleged Ark. rape case

By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press Writer Jon Gambrell, Associated Press Writer – 46 mins ago

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A prosecutor says he won't file charges over an alleged rape at an on-campus fraternity at the University of Arkansas after investigating the behavior of three Razorback basketball players.

Prosecutor John Threet told The Associated Press that details from witnesses and statements from the alleged victim herself showed a lack of evidence. Threet said the woman had attended a party at the Phi Gamma Delta house the first week of classes at the school and that alcohol was involved.

Earlier Wednesday, deputy prosecuting attorney Dustin Roberts had told Rogers television station KHOG that charges could be filed by the afternoon.

University police Lt. Gary Crane told the AP that a female student had filed a complaint saying she was raped on Aug. 27 at the fraternity house, a short walk from the arena where the basketball team plays.

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090909/ap_on_sp_co_ne/bkc_arkansas_rape_investigation

_________________________________________

No Charges to be Filed in UA Rape Investigation

The Washington County Prosecuting Attorney's Office says there will be no charges filed in a rape investigation that involved University of Arkansas basketball players. The victim's attorney, John Bass, has told 5news earlier that he had been working with the Washington County Prosecuting Attorney's Office on the now closed investigation. The University of Arkansas police tell us the alleged rape happened at a fraternity house on the U of A campus on August 27th. A report from the u of a police says the victim walked into the university pd and told police she had been raped by an acquaintance. The Prosecuting Attorneys Office told us that there was not enough evidence to file charges.

University of Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long released this statement regarding the rape investigation: "The athletic department is aware of an ongoing investigation into an incident involving an alleged sexual offense. We are also aware that students, including student-athletes, have been questioned regarding this matter. The department and our student-athletes have cooperated fully with the investigation and will continue to do so. We will not speculate on any allegations. We will wait for the prosecutor's office to assess the case and determine how the matter should proceed. We will support our student-athletes in an appropriate manner in accordance with University and NCAA guidelines."

The Victim's attorney, John Bass, released this statement this afternoon:

"As you know, I represent the victim and her family in this matter, and am acting as their counsel to guide them through this difficult process. We have just learned that the Washington County Prosecutor's Office has made the decision to not file charges in this matter. At this time we are reviewing all available information and will continue to explore all options until this matter is resolved. I cannot speculate as to what that may entail at this time, but may have a more detailed comment at a later time. As before, the family wishes to keep this a private matter and again we appreciate your respecting that and please continue to make contact through me only, and please continue to keep the victim's and the family's name out of the press."

Link: http://www.kfsm.com/kfsm-news-basketballplayers,0,7196441.story
____________________________________________

SEC Talk Forum:

Arky players in trouble

An ugly story is developing in Northwest Arkansas today.

Three basketball players at the University of Arkansas are under investigation for rape, a prosecutor told a local TV outlet.

The players were not identified by prosecutors.

The alleged incident took place late last month at a sorority house. Campus police initially investigated the claim and concluded there was not enough evidence to press charges.

But the case was turned over to Washington County prosecutors.AD Jeff Long issued a statement about an hour ago confirming the investigation.
__________________________________________

ArkansasSports360.com: Reports Say Rape Case Involves Razorback Basketball Players

By ArkansasSports360.com Staffttp://www.arkansasbusiness.com

Northwest Arkansas' KHBS/KHOG 40/29 is reporting that three Arkansas Razorback basketball players are involved in a rape that occurred at a campus fraternity house late last month.
____________________________________________
YOU TUBE NEWS STORY
Prosecutor: UA athletes under investigation in campus rape Clipped Fresh --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVdxKmYOYLQ&feature=player_embedded:

This news report on a Fort Smith-Fayetteville, AR television station, interrupted regular programming to report on the alleged rape. At 3:30 into the story, the reporter reminds people about the Duke scandal, but then immediately made this bizarre comment: ". . . that three basketball players are involved doesn't speak well for what's happening with the University of Arkansas basketball program."

COMMENTS:

Tracy says:
September 9, 2009 at 10:43 AM
And it begins again. Jeebus. I remember when several of Nolan’s players were under investigation in the 80s-90s. What is up with athletes thinking they can get away with this shit?

Tracy says:
September 9, 2009 at 1:18 PM
No charges filed. What a shocker.

http://www.nwanews.com/news/2009/sep/09/no-charges-planned-ua-rape-case/?breaking

Lehigh U. woman recants rape claim

2009-09-08T08:39:00.000-04:00

Student reports sexual assault, then recants

By Autumn Gould

Issue date: 9/8/09

Early Friday morning, a student reported to the Bethlehem Police Department that she was sexually assaulted on campus, according to an e-mail sent out to the campus community by John Smeaton, vice provost for student affairs. Lehigh Police Chief Edward Shupp said the student reported the assault at around 2:15 a.m.

The 19-year-old female was already in the custody of Bethlehem Police for an unrelated matter.B

ethlehem, Lehigh and Pennsylvania State police departments began an investigation immediately regarding the assault.

Several hours later, the student recanted her statement, saying no such assault actually took place, Shupp said.

Again, both police departments further investigated the situation and decided to support the student's retraction, Smeaton said.

Another e-mail was sent out that afternoon to the campus community, stating that the woman's claim had been unfounded.

According to The Express-Times, the student reported a rape.

Shupp did not comment on the actual type of sexual assault she reported.

Shupp said he hopes students still notify police immediately of any crime. "We should be seen as an advocate, not an adversary," Shupp said.

Smeaton said students should contact the Lehigh University Police Department, the Dean of Students Office or the Break the Silence Hotline in case of any crime.

Link: http://media.www.thebrownandwhite.com/media/storage/paper1233/news/2009/09/08/News/Student.Reports.Sexual.Assault.Then.Recants-3764484.shtml

EARLIER REPORT

State police: Lehigh University rape report unfounded

Saturday, September 05, 2009
By LYNN OLANOFF
The Express-Times

BETHLEHEM Pennsylvania State Police say they can't prove a Lehigh University student's rape allegation, but the investigation is continuing.

The 19-year-old woman was in custody of city and university police on an unrelated matter when she reported the rape, state police said. State police met with her about 2:30 a.m. Friday.

The woman could not tell police where the assault occurred.

State police on Friday afternoon said they deemed it unfounded upon their preliminary investigation. The investigating officer did not return a call for further comment.

Bethlehem and university police declined comment on the incident.

A Lower Nazareth Township woman was charged last month with falsely reporting to police she had been raped at knifepoint at East Stroudsburg University.

Laura Gruver, 22, allegedly made up that rape allegation to take focus away from personal problems and failing out of two schools.

Gruver allegedly told police a man forced her onto her back and she lost her underwear and glasses before a sound scared the attacker off about 11 a.m. Aug. 13 at the university.

Reporter Lynn Olanoff can be reached at 610-867-5000 or by e-mail at lolanoff@express-times.com.

Link: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/bethlehem/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1252123548109010.xml&coll=3

State of Minnesota vs. Obeta

2009-09-07T10:11:00.000-04:00

State of Minnesota, Respondent, vs. Nathan NMN Obeta, Appellant.

A08-1419

COURT OF APPEALS OF MINNESOTA

2009 Minn. App. Unpub. LEXIS 966

August 25, 2009, Filed

NOTICE: THIS OPINION WILL BE UNPUBLISHED AND MAY NOT BE CITED EXCEPT AS PROVIDED BY MINNESOTA STATUTES.

PRIOR HISTORY: [*1]
Ramsey County District Court File No. 62-K9-07-003955.

DISPOSITION: Reversed and remanded.

COUNSEL: For Respondent: Lori Swanson, Attorney General, St. Paul, MN; and Susan Gaertner, Ramsey County Attorney, Thomas R. Ragatz, Assistant County Attorney, St. Paul, MN.

For Appellant: Marie L. Wolf, Interim Chief Appellate Public Defender, Benjamin J. Butler, Assistant Public Defender, St. Paul, MN.

JUDGES: Considered and decided by Klaphake, Presiding Judge; Stauber, Judge; and Muehlberg, Judge. *

* Retired judge of the district court, serving as judge of the Minnesota Court of Appeals by appointment pursuant to Minn. Const. art. VI, § 10.

OPINION BY: KLAPHAKE

OPINION

UNPUBLISHED OPINION
KLAPHAKE, Judge

Following a jury trial, appellant Nathan Obeta was acquitted of kidnapping but convicted of first- and third-degree criminal sexual conduct. He was charged after 22-year-old M.B. reported to police that appellant raped her in the backseat of a Ford Bronco on the afternoon of April 26, 2007. Appellant claimed that M.B. consented to having sexual intercourse with him.
On appeal, appellant challenges a number of the district court's evidentiary rulings, which he claims prejudiced his ability to present a complete defense. Appellant further claims that [*2] the cumulative effect of the errors prevented him from receiving a fair trial. Because we are left with the firm impression that appellant did not receive a fair trial due to the cumulative effect of the district court's erroneous rulings, we reverse and remand for a new trial.

FACTS

M.B. spent the evening of April 25, 2007, at the home of her friend, E.K. E.K. had invited two men, appellant and his friend A.S., to her home in Isanti after making contact with them on the "Live Links" phone chat service. The group listened to music, hung out, and drank alcohol. The men stayed at E.K.'s until the early morning hours of April 26, when M.B. decided to leave with them.

Within a few blocks of E.K.'s home, A.S. ran a stop sign and was pulled over and arrested. The Bronco in which the three were riding was impounded, leaving M.A. and appellant without a vehicle, so M.B. decided to call her former boyfriend, T.G., for help. M.B. asked T.G. to help the group pick up A.S., who had been released from the Isanti County jail, and to drive to St. Paul, where the men lived, to pick up the vehicle's owner and obtain some money so that they could retrieve the Bronco from the impound lot in Braham. T.G. [*3] agreed to help and the group set out on their mission, which took most of the day.

During her opening statement, the prosecutor described M.B.'s relationship with T.G. as "volatile." M.B. testified that her relationship with T.G. was "abusive" and that T.G. was a "jealous man." M.B. claimed that while T.G. was driving the group around, he became more and more upset with her, and called her a whore and a bitch. M.B. denied flirting with any of the men, although she admitted that at one point she pretended to lift up her shirt (or "flash") the men in an effort to tease T.G. While the details of their testimony were not always consistent, T.G., A.S., and appellant all tended to agree that M.B. was flirting with the men, that she flashed them at least once, and that she seemed to be enjoying herself.

By the time the group returned to the impound lot in Braham to retrieve the Bronco, it was late afternoon on April 26. M.B. explained that she decided to get into the Bronco, rather than into T.G.'s vehicle, because she was afraid of T.G. A.S. testified that appellant claimed she wanted to go with them because T.G. beat her. Appellant testified that M.B. simply preferred to ride with him and [*4] his friends. T.G. acknowledged that he was upset at that point and testified that M.B. was "happy to go with" appellant and his group.

T.G. left in his vehicle and returned to his home in Isanti. The others drove back to St. Paul in the Bronco, with its owner driving, A.S. in the front passenger seat, and appellant and M.B. in the back seat. M.B. claimed that she kept asking to be brought home and that she became "uneasy" and eventually scared when the men kept driving toward St. Paul. M.B. also testified that at one point appellant told her that there was a gun in the car. Appellant and A.S., however, denied any talk about a gun and claimed that M.B. did not appear scared or ask to go home. They testified that everyone was smoking cigars and having fun, particularly M.B., who was dancing and who again flashed them.

After A.S. and the owner of the Bronco were dropped off at various locations in St. Paul, appellant drove to a parking lot in Roseville. M.B. claimed that appellant got into the back seat and forced her to have sex; appellant claimed that the intercourse was consensual. M.B. acknowledged that she did not fight or scream, but claimed that she asked appellant to stop.

Afterward, [*5] M.B. got out of the Bronco and went to a nearby gas station where she used the bathroom. M.B. testified that when she came out, appellant had driven away. Appellant testified that M.B. asked him for a ride back to Isanti, but that he had already told her he would not drive her back. Appellant testified that M.B. threatened to tell the police that appellant had raped her if he did not bring her home, but that he told her to go ahead because he knew he had not done anything wrong. Appellant claimed that M.B. laughed and walked away.

M.B. called several people in an attempt to find a ride home, but could not reach anyone. She was able to reach at least one friend, who testified that he did not intend to come and pick her up and that he merely told T.G. to go and get her. After realizing that her friend was not coming, M.B. flagged down a police car and reported that she had been raped.

The officer testified that M.B. "was very upset" and "crying," and that her "shoulders were slumped forward." M.B. was transported to the hospital, where she was examined by a sexual assault nurse. The nurse testified that M.B. was "very upset, very quiet, shaking at times." The nurse found several scratches [*6] on M.B.'s back and arms, but she did not discover any injuries to M.B.'s vaginal area. The nurse's audiotape interview of M.B. was replayed for the jury, with some redactions.

A police detective was assigned to investigate the case. Appellant came in voluntarily and during an interview told the detective that the sex was consensual, that M.B. had told him that she would find her own way home, but that she became upset after the sex when he refused to drive her back to Isanti.

During its deliberations, the jury asked several questions regarding M.B.'s interview with the nurse, and portions of the audiotape were replayed several times. The jury eventually acquitted appellant of kidnapping, but found him guilty of first- and third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

DECISION
I.
Appellant argues that the district court abused its discretion by allowing the sexual assault nurse to testify about common injuries to and characteristics of sexual assault victims and to imply that because M.B. fit those characteristics she was such a victim. Appellant asserts that the testimony was improper expert testimony and that the nurse was vouching for M.B.'s credibility. 1

1 The state argues that the plain error [*7] standard of review applies because appellant failed to object at trial on the grounds that he now raises. But a review of the trial transcript demonstrates that appellant's attorney repeatedly objected to the nurse's testimony on the commonality of injuries and to the common reactions of victims of sexual assault. Appellant's attorney also made contemporaneous objections during the prosecutor's examination of the investigating detective. These objections put the district court and the prosecutor on notice of the challenges that appellant now makes on appeal.

To be admissible, expert testimony must be "helpful" to the jury and be based on special knowledge or training that laypeople and jurors do not have. Minn. R. Evid. 702; State v. Saldana, 324 N.W.2d 227, 229 (Minn. 1982). Because matters of witness credibility are generally within the competence and common experience of most jurors, the use of an expert's opinion to bolster the credibility of a witness is discouraged. See State v. Morales-Mulato, 744 N.W.2d 679, 687 (Minn. App. 2008), review denied (Minn. Apr. 29, 2008). This is particularly true in cases involving sexual assault of an adult victim when the issue is consent; the [*8] state may not present testimony on typical reactions or experiences of rape victims. Saldana, 324 N.W.2d at 229-30. "[S]uch testimony is of no help to the jury" because it is irrelevant whether the alleged victim "react[s] in a typical manner to the incident," and she "need not display the typical post-rape symptoms . . . to convince the jury that her view of the facts is the truth." Id. at 229.

In this case, the nurse and the detective were not asked their opinions about whether they believed M.B. was a sexual assault victim or whether they believed she was telling the truth. To that extent, the statements were not offered as true "expert" opinions and did not constitute "vouching" testimony. But the nurse and the detective were allowed to testify that, based on their experience, most women who are assaulted "have significant fear and don't fight back," that "they just lay there and wait for it to be over with for fear of being injured more," and that "there's a delay" in reporting in "the majority" of sexual assault cases, thus permitting the jury to infer that M.B. was a typical victim.

In Saldana, 324 N.W.2d at 229, the jury heard "discussion of the stages a rape victim typically [*9] goes through . . . essentially an explanation of 'rape trauma syndrome.'" Although the statements of the nurse and the detective in this case were not so extensive and did not specifically refer to a syndrome, the statements were indirectly offered to explain M.B.'s reactions and symptoms and to allow the jury to draw inferences that M.B. was a typical rape victim. We therefore conclude that this testimony improperly invaded the province of the jury and the district court erred in allowing it over the continuing objections of defense counsel. See id. at 232; State v. Vue, 606 N.W.2d 719, 723 (Minn. App. 2000), review denied (Minn. May 16, 2000). Compare State v. Dunkel, 466 N.W.2d 425, 429 (Minn. App. 1991) (finding no error in allowing state to ask a single question to refute inference of late reporting and noting that state did not argue rape trauma syndrome in closing argument).

II.

Appellant argues that the district court erred by prohibiting him from cross-examining M.B. about a prior act of dishonesty that was relevant to her credibility and to allegations of bias. Before trial, appellant sought permission to cross-examine M.B. about a November 2006 report she made to police that [*10] her boyfriend, T.G., had assaulted her. As a result of that incident, M.B. was convicted of domestic assault, while T.G. was not charged. The district court denied the request, concluding that information regarding the relationship between M.B. and T.G. was not relevant and was more prejudicial than probative. 2

2 The state asserts that appellant was required to make a formal offer of proof regarding M.B.'s alleged prior act of dishonesty. But because the "substance of the precluded testimony" was apparent, a formal offer of proof was not necessary "to preserve the issue for appeal." In re Welfare of M.P.Y., 630 N.W.2d 411, 415 (Minn. 2001).

Appellant asserts that evidence of M.B.'s relationship with T.G. and of her false allegations against him was relevant to M.B.'s credibility and to rebut the state's claim that T.G.'s account of the events was biased. During opening statements, the prosecutor described M.B.'s relationship with T.G. as "volatile," and M.B. herself described the relationship as "abusive" and claimed that T.G. was a "jealous man." Appellant asserts that the state was allowed to present the jury with an entirely one-sided view of the relationship between M.B. and T.G. [*11] Evidence of M.B.'s 2006 report of an assault is potentially more relevant because of appellant's claim that M.B. threatened to report him for rape if he refused to drive her home, which paralleled her apparent false claim of assault against T.G. Appellant claims that the district court's rulings violated his rights to present a defense and to effectively cross-examine and confront M.B.
Minn. R. Evid. 608(b) provides in pertinent part:

[Evidence of] specific instances of the conduct of the witness, for the purpose of attacking or supporting the witness' character for truthfulness . . . may . . . in the discretion of the court, if probative of truthfulness or untruthfulness, be inquired into on cross-examination of the witness . . . concerning the witness' character for truthfulness or untruthfulness[.]

An examining attorney who inquires into collateral matters on cross-examination, including matters relating to the witness' credibility, is bound by the answers he receives and is not permitted to introduce collateral matters to prove facts contradicting the answers, even if they are false. State v. Ferguson, 581 N.W.2d 824, 834 (Minn. 1981).

Appellant acknowledges that his attorney would [*12] have been bound by any response he would have received from M.B. But appellant should have been allowed to cross-examine M.B. about the 2006 incident involving T.G. We therefore conclude that the district court's ruling, which limited appellant's ability to probe M.B.'s character for truthfulness and had the effect of presenting the jury with a one-sided view of M.B. as the victim of an abusive relationship, was error.

III.

Appellant next argues that the district court erred in admitting M.B.'s audiotape statement to the nurse as a prior consistent statement. Appellant argues that the statement was materially inconsistent with M.B.'s trial testimony and was highly prejudicial because it contained several damaging allegations, to which the jury paid particular attention. 3

3 The state again asserts that the plain error standard applies to our review of this argument because appellant only objected to two inconsistent statements on the tape. But again, examination of the trial transcript demonstrates that appellant's attorney placed a lengthy objection on the record to the admissibility of the tape. During that objection, appellant's attorney stated that there were "at [*13] least five instances" in which M.B.'s testimony was inconsistent with her statements to the nurse and that the audiotape statement thus did not qualify as a prior consistent statement.

The audiotape was admitted into evidence as a prior consistent statement under Minn. R. Evid. 801(d)(1)(B), which provides that an out-of-court statement is not hearsay and is admissible as substantive evidence if "[t]he declarant testifies at the trial or hearing and is subject to cross-examination concerning the statement, and the statement is . . . consistent with the declarant's testimony and helpful to the trier of fact in evaluating the declarant's credibility as a witness." To be admissible under this rule, the prior statement must be "reasonably consistent" with the declarant's trial testimony, but need not be verbatim. In re Welfare of K.A.S., 585 N.W.2d 71, 76 (Minn. App. 1998). The district court should "analyze the individual statements . . . to determine their consistency with [the declarant's] testimony." State v. Bakken, 604 N.W.2d 106, 109 (Minn. App. 2000), review denied (Minn. Feb. 24, 2000). Without this type of analysis, "a few consistent statements in a multi-statement interview may [*14] be used to bootstrap into evidence inconsistent statements that do not qualify under the rule." Id.

In this case, the district court did not separately analyze the individual statements to determine their consistency with M.B.'s trial testimony. In addition, the audiotape contained several pieces of information that were either inconsistent with M.B.'s trial testimony or not mentioned by M.B. during her trial testimony. In particular, during her interview with the nurse, M.B. stated that appellant told her he had a gun in the car after he had parked the Bronco and immediately prior to the assault; that he told her to "shut up" and that he would take her home after he was done; and that appellant put his hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming during the assault.

This information was not included in M.B.'s trial testimony, during which she stated that she did not resist because she was scared and that she did not recall appellant saying anything during the assault.

Because the district court failed to either exclude the entire audiotape or redact the inconsistent statements in that tape, the jury heard a number of inconsistent statements that were inadmissible under the rule. See [*15] Bakken, 604 N.W.2d at 110. Moreover, the jury paid particular attention to the audiotape and asked the court to repeat or replay portions of the tape several times during its deliberations. Thus, the error in admitting these inconsistent statements likely had a significant effect on the jury's verdict.

IV.
Finally, while some of the individual errors may be harmless, we believe that the cumulative effect of these errors deprived appellant of a fair trial. "Cumulative error exists when the cumulative effect of the . . . errors and indiscretions, none of which alone might have been enough to tip the scales, operate to the defendant's prejudice by producing a biased jury." State v. Johnson, 441 N.W.2d 460, 466 (Minn. 1989) (quotation omitted). In this close credibility contest in which the crucial issue was whether M.B. consented to sexual intercourse with appellant, we believe that the district court's evidentiary errors unfairly tilted the balance in favor of the state's case and deprived appellant of a fair trial. Because there was "a great deal of conflicting testimony and the factual determinations must have been difficult," we conclude that "any error, however small, may have prejudiced [*16] defendant," particularly when the evidence of appellant's guilt was not overwhelming and the issue of consent was close and subject to conflicting evidence. State v. Underwood, 281 N.W.2d 337, 344 (Minn. 1979).
Reversed and remanded.

Teen attempts to clear name

2009-08-30T06:22:00.000-04:00

TEEN ATTEMPTS TO CLEAR NAME

August 30, 2009 1:10 am
BY PAMELA GOULD

A former Aquia Harbour teen who spent 17 months incarcerated for a rape, even though his accuser recanted her accusation, is suing the state Department of Juvenile Justice to clear his name and get off the state's sex-offender registry.

The lawsuit claims the teen's court-appointed attorney, Denise Rafferty of Stafford County, violated his constitutional rights by providing ineffective counsel.

Specifically, she is accused of failing to investigate the claims against her client, of failing to interview him, of failing to investigate his and his accuser's backgrounds, of misrepresenting the evidence against him and of ignoring an eyewitness. She also is accused of not properly informing him of the allegations against him and of his legal options before recommending he plead guilty to charges of rape and breaking and entering.

Though the suit focuses its claims on Rafferty, it also faults Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Eric Olsen, who prosecuted the case.

"Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney conducted even the most cursory investigation of the complaining witness or the defendant," the suit filed in Stafford Circuit Court states.

"Had they done so, they would have learned that the complaining witness had a well-documented history of falsely accusing others, including but not limited to sexual allegations, and that she was fully capable of consenting to sex."

Olsen prosecuted the case on the grounds that the girl, then 14, did not have the ability to consent to sexual intercourse because of intellectual shortcomings.

The suit contends that the girl and the boy, then 15, were intellectual peers because both "have IQs lower than the lowest 5-10 percent of the general population."

The civil suit was filed Aug. 18 against the state Department of Juvenile Justice as a procedural matter since the department continues to supervise the boy while he is on parole.

The suit includes 20 affidavits from the teens and from people who know them such as their parents, their siblings, a coach, a caretaker, a psychologist, an assistant principal and teachers.

Among the information contained in the affidavits is that:

The detective who interviewed the boy doubted the allegations at the start.

Stafford school officials knew the girl had a history of false accusations and, as a result, immediately doubted her rape allegation.

Stafford County prosecutors, sheriff's deputies and social workers had had previous encounters with the girl and evidence of her untruthfulness before this allegation.

Rafferty told the boy's father the boy should plead guilty because the prosecution had DNA test results that conclusively linked him to the crime, but a lab report shows the test was never conducted.

Though the boy is now 18 and an adult, neither he nor the girl is being named because of their ages at the time of the incident. Both sets of parents have different surnames from their children.

IMPACT ON THE ACCUSED

The suit claims the boy and his family suffer ongoing effects from the false accusation and from having his name on the sex-offender registry. They have moved twice since the boy's arrest.

"We live in constant fear--fear of future allegations, fear of strangers who see the Sex Offender Registry, fear of retaliation by Eric Olsen for continuing to maintain our son's innocence, fear of our young sons being out without us and without alibis," Cherri Dulaney, the boy's mother, said in her sworn statement. "I have little hope that anyone can undo the damage that has been done to him."

Dulaney said her oldest son lives with the effects of being imprisoned as a sex offender.

"[My son] is a different person now than before he was incarcerated," she said. "[He] continues to have great difficulty trusting people and fears that he will have to go away again."

He can't shake the habits learned while held in a juvenile correction center.

"He carries around a knapsack containing his valued belongings, he paces around the yard and insists on living according to a set, inflexible schedule," she said.

A younger brother fears he could meet the same fate.

Since the accused was released to his family in late February, a neighborhood girl has made a false sexual allegation against one of his brothers and someone has left a note on their door reading: "We don't want a rapist living in our neighborhood."

When police investigated the allegation against the brother, the girl admitted she made it up because she didn't like having a convicted rapist next door, Dulaney said.

As a result of those incidents, Cherri and Edgar Dulaney felt compelled to move to a rural, isolated area where they feel better able to protect their four sons.

"I have always taught my boys that if they are honest and law-abiding and respectful, they will be safe in the community," Edgar Dulaney said. "My boys now know that this is not true. [My oldest son] learned a lot at the age of 15 that the 'community' is not always fair, and that his mother and I cannot really protect him.

"This is a fact, and it has been devastating for all of us."

APPEALING FOR HELP

The Dulaneys contacted Deirdre M. Enright, director of The Innocence Project at the University of Virginia law school, in December after appeals by Rafferty and another attorney failed to overturn their son's convictions.

Since then, The Innocence Project and Andrew K. Block, legal director of JustChildren, a program of the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, have been working on the boy's behalf.

Angela A. Ciolfi of JustChildren and Jeremy S. Byrum of the McGuire Woods law firm in Richmond joined the team for the civil suit.

The girl's mother, Michele Sousa, also has been working to help clear the boy's name since her daughter told her in November 2007 that she lied about the accusations to avoid getting into trouble for inviting the boy into the house.

In January, Enright and Block sent a letter to Director of Juvenile Justice Barry Green asking for the teen's early release and laying out the facts they had gathered about the case.

In February, the boy was released shortly ahead of his originally scheduled date.

The attorneys are currently seeking to get the teen's convictions and sentence set aside, including the requirement that he be listed on the state's sex-offender registry. If those requests are not granted, a new trial is sought.

The suit also seeks a declaration of actual innocence.

THE INCIDENT

Sousa returned home the evening of June 4, 2007, to find the 15-year-old boy in the kitchen of her Aquia Harbour home and her 14-year-old daughter in her bedroom getting dressed.

Sousa called the Sheriff's Office, believing the boy had broken in and sexually assaulted her daughter.

The case moved quickly through the legal system.

The boy was charged three days later, pleaded guilty to two charges on Aug. 22, 2007, was sentenced Sept. 19, and was given a final sentencing hearing Nov. 19.

Five days later--over the Thanksgiving weekend--the girl told her mother she had lied about being raped. She said she had let the boy into the house and that they engaged in consensual sexual intercourse.

Within days, Sousa contacted an attorney for advice and then notified Rafferty of the girl's changed story.

But Rafferty didn't file a motion seeking to overturn the verdicts until Feb. 28, 2008, court records show.

Juvenile court Judge Julian Johnson denied the motion on procedural grounds, presumably because the motion wasn't filed on time.

The boy was originally charged with rape, abduction and breaking and entering.

After Olsen's office threatened to try the boy as an adult, Rafferty advised the boy's parents that he should plead guilty to keep the case in the juvenile system and avoid the risk of a lengthy term in an adult prison.

She never suggested fighting the charges on their merits, including the boy's innocence, the suit states.

In exchange for pleading guilty to rape and breaking and entering, Olsen dropped the abduction charge and his motion to move the case to adult court.

The boy was held in a juvenile justice facility until Feb. 25 of this year. He is now on probation.

RESPONDING TO THE SUIT

Rafferty did not return calls seeking comment about the accusations in the lawsuit.

Olsen said he has been instructed by the court not to comment on cases involving juveniles.

The Virginia Attorney General's Office is representing the Department of Juvenile Justice and has until Sept. 25 to respond to the suit. The office does not comment on pending litigation, spokesman David Clementson said.

Sousa told The Free Lance-Star she is aware of how her daughter is portrayed in the lawsuit but does not dispute the accuracy of the information.

She said she had hoped the matter would be resolved shortly after reporting to attorneys that her daughter had lied.

She regrets all that the boy's family has been through since the accusations, and said that's why she's willing to be so public.

"This cannot go on. His whole family is dealing with this," Sousa said. "We have to do what we have to do."

Pamela Gould: 540/735-1972 Email: pgould@freelancestar.com
_____________________________________________

The following information comes from sworn statements gathered by the attorneys representing the teen who is suing the state Department of Juvenile Justice in an effort to clear his name.

The mother of the girl who accused the boy of rape and later said she lied seeks to right what she considers an injustice.

MICHELE SOUSA, the girl's mother, states that Stafford Detective Gerald Lloyd, the man who investigated the allegation and questioned the boy on the date of the alleged incident, "seemed to doubt the rape allegation at the beginning. Det. Lloyd seemed to be challenging that this had happened, and it made me mad then."

Lloyd indicated that the boy said he and the girl were friends, noted that the boy "seems a little slow," and "wondered if this wasn't a 'mistake.'"

Sousa said Stafford officials were familiar with her daughter and family from incidents prior to the June 2007 allegation.

"Both Child Protective Services and the Stafford prosecutors were aware of [my daughter's] history of false accusations, because they have had to deal with our family in the past."

One such encounter stemmed from the girl's Mother's Day 2000 accusation that her father caused bruises that she had on her legs. Her father spent the night in jail, but charges were later dropped after the prosecutor's office became convinced it was a lie.

ROBERT BALDWIN, former A.G. Wright Middle School special-education chairman: "[She] lied in order to save herself from getting into trouble. Her concern for her own self-preservation led her to make damaging statements about her teachers, her parents and peers, with no apparent understanding of the negative consequences to others of her words."

"Based on my knowledge of her behavior patterns, when I first learned that [she] had accused a young man of raping her, I doubted the veracity of her accusation."

THE ACCUSED TEEN said: "I pled guilty to those crimes on Aug. 22, 2007, because my lawyer Denise Rafferty told me that I didn't have a choice."

"I did not break into [the girl's] house, and I did not rape [the girl] and I never told anyone that I did."

EDGAR DULANEY, the boy's father, said the attorney misrepresented the evidence. "When I shared my uncertainty about [whether my son should plead guilty] with Ms. Rafferty, she immediately told me that Det. Lloyd would testify that [my son] had confessed to him. Ms. Rafferty then said that Det. Lloyd's testimony, along with the DNA results, would be plenty to convince any jury of his guilt. Ms. Rafferty showed me a folder and said the Commonwealth had the results of the DNA tests, and that the results showed that it was 100 percent certain that [my son] had raped [the girl]."

A state lab report shows tests were never conducted on evidence in the case and that Lloyd told the lab on Aug. 22, 2007--the date the boy entered his guilty pleas--not to test the evidence.

DANIEL TRYON, the boy's Brooke Point High School freshman basketball coach and study-hall proctor, said he "was congenial, quiet and even-tempered throughout the four hours each school day that I spent with him. [His] behavior did not noticeably change in the presence of girls: he was not preoccupied by girls and he did not exhibit any hostile, menacing or aggressive behavior whatsoever."

He "struck me as an affable but intellectually challenged young man."

Jan. 22--Innocence Project Director Deirdre Enright and JustChildren Legal Director Andrew K. Block Jr. send letter to Department of Juvenile Justice Director Barry R. Green asking him to release boy.

Feb. 25--Boy is released from Department of Juvenile Justice facility and placed on probation.

Aug. 18--Boy sues Department of Juvenile Justice in Stafford Circuit Court.

Link: http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2009/082009/08302009/489686/index_html?page=1

Language is important: we need to take issue with the mainstream media when it cloaks false accusers in the mantle of victimhood

2009-08-09T10:39:00.000-04:00

Here is the letter I sent to television station WITN in Jacksonville, North Carolina at email address witn@witn.com regarding a story we reported last week:

I write to express my concern about your use of the term "victim" to describe the false accuser in the above-referenced story, posted August 5, 2009. Labeling a woman who committed the most vicious prevarication a "victim" despite the fact that she recanted her false allegation does a grave disservice to (1) the innocent man she falsely accused; (2) actual rape victims, because you trivialize rape when you include among its victims false accusers; and (3) your readers, who are entitled to accurate reporting but receive something less than that when you transform a false accuser into a "victim." I implore you to exercise greater care in reporting on such stories, and to show sensitivity to the presumed innocent and their families.

I also take exception to your asymmetrical anonymity policy where you freely identify an innocent man accused of the most vile crime (and because of you, this false claim will trail him forever on the Internet), yet you guard the false accuser's identity with all the tenacity that Clark Kent employs to guard Superman's. This policy is shamefully unfair to the innocent man.

I founded the foremost Internet site devoted to giving voice to persons falsely accused of sex crimes. http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/ We will be watching to insure you do better in the future. Thank you.

Pierce Harlan

Jennifer's Body

2009-08-08T22:50:00.000-04:00

Another barbaric idea from Harriet Harman: targets for prosecutors and police to jack up rape convictions

2009-08-05T14:32:00.000-04:00

Labour's deputy leader in the UK is at it again: "Ms Harman is understood to want a more radical overhaul of the law which could include targets for prosecutors and police to secure more convictions."

The comment I left for the Times Online:

As the founder of the leading internet site giving voice to victims of false rape claims, The False Rape Society, I find the suggestion of "targets for prosecutors and police to secure more convictions," in all its Star Chamber ramifications, to be among the most barbaric I have encountered. This proposal mocks the image of blindfolded Lady Justice meting out justice in accordance with the facts of the particular case before the court. Ideological zeal that sweeps over the rights of the presumed innocent, and that pretends "justice" can be achieved by meeting quotas, has no place in the most advanced jurisprudence the world has ever known.

The notion of hitting targets for convictions blinks at the maxim handed down some 250 years ago by the celebrated English jurist William Blackstone: It is "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." (Commentaries on the Laws of England.) This principle not only is fundamental to our criminal jurisprudence, it is the hallmark of a civilized society, and it is has never been seriously challenged. Until now, that is.

Will the rights of innocent men and boys be jeopardized if police or prosecutors have difficulty meeting their rape conviction targets? The question scarcely survives it's statement.

Persons of good will the world over implore you not to allow Ms. Harman to politicize and defile the criminal justice system that has long been the model of civility throughout the world.

Pierce Harlan

Germaine Greer: The woman who rails against porn culture

2009-08-05T11:19:00.000-04:00

GERMAINE GREER: THE BOY pic and story here

Feminist Greer, 64, champions the Boy

The feminist Germaine Greer, in a move that might surprise those well acquainted with the career of The Female Eunuch author, has enlisted the help of a teenage male model to put her case for the supremacy of boys.

Greer, 64, posed with 18-year-old James Taylor for ITV's South Bank Show tomorrow. Her argument, which she also puts forward in a new book, The Boy, is that it is traditionally the figure of the young male - not the female - that represents the ultimate in human beauty. In the film, the writer and academic visits Paris, Florence and Rome and interviews the boy band Westlife to trace artists' obsession with the boy from ancient Greece to the present day.

Women, too, have always looked at boys for pleasure and should be encouraged to do so, she says. "There are many ways in which a boy is an ideal fantasy partner for a woman."

Apart from being "easier to manage", he has more staying power in bed than an older man, she argues.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1444457/Feminist-Greer-64-champions-the-toy-boy.html

"Hanging 'Em Out to Dry"

2009-07-04T23:02:00.000-04:00

Charges Dropped Against Husband in Pizza Delivery Rape Case

2009-07-04T19:19:00.000-04:00

Charges Dropped Against Husband in Pizza Delivery Rape Case

David Jansen Had Been Charged With Raping Woman Who Has a History of False Claims
By SARAH NETTER
July 2, 2009—

Charges of rape and kidnapping have been dropped against a married father of two who got more than he bargained for during a romantic rendezvous in the mountains with a stripper.

David Jansen was arrested after a pizza deliveryman stopped by his remote rented cabin in the Tennessee Smoky Mountains and saw a woman tied up on the couch mouthing, "Call 911."

But Jansen claimed all along that the woman was his lover and that she was into bondage, his lawyers providing stacks of evidence that the two had been in a relationship for sometime.

After news of the arrest hit the media, the woman's history of filing false rape claims surfaced and her mother was interviewed saying that her daughter was a notorious liar.

The Sevier County District Attorney's Office agreed with Jansen, saying in a statement that "we could not obtain a conviction against Mr. Jansen nor would we try."

"As district attorneys our job is to seek justice not convictions," District Attorney James B. Dunn said in the statement. "Justice requires us to dismiss these charges based on the victim's credibility and other evidence."

Dunn's statement noted that the woman has been told about their decision and "she insists that her allegations are true.

"This office will not prosecute the victim," Dunn said in the statement. "The evidence would not sustain a conviction for making a false report."

As for Jansen, his lawyers said he's just happy to be cleared.

"Mr. Jansen looks forward to resuming some level of normalcy in his life in hopes to move on as best as possible from this incident," his attorneys said in a statement. "As one might imagine, it has been costly on both a financial and emotional level."

But the damage is already done in many aspects. His wife filed for divorce shortly after learning of his arrest.

Pizza Deliveryman Makes Startling Discovery

The case gained notoriety when pizza deliveryman Chris Turner was initially hailed as a hero for rescuing the woman. But he, too, has reportedly found trouble for himself, being arrested on charges that he hit his wife while they delivered pizzas together, according to the Journal-Constitution.

Turner, who worked for Capelli's Pizza & Subs, told ABCNews.com last month that he initially didn't know what to think when he delivered the large supreme pizza, 10 hot wings and four bottles of 20-ounce soda to the cabin.

Turner, 32, said he saw the woman, whose name is not being released due to her accusation of sexual assault, laying on the couch when he asked Jansen to sign the credit card slip for the purchase.

The woman, on her back with her wrists tied, lifted herself up to look at Turner, he said, and mouthed "Call 911."

"I really didn't know to believe her at first," Turner said, adding that she was fully clothed and he at first thought he had stumbled onto a couple simply having a sexual encounter. "She really didn't look like she was in distress."

Turner said he mouthed back to the woman, asking if she was "for real" and decided she was serious after she rolled her eyes back at him.

Turner said he tried to play it cool with Jansen, then hopped back into the car where his wife was waiting and had her drive to the nearest neighbor's house to call 911 since his cell phone didn't get service in that part of the mountains.

"I was pale white and numb all over," he said. "I just told her to go."

Deputies initially believed Jansen's story that the two knew each other through a club that the woman owned with her husband and that they had discussed the bondage, but began doubting his account after speaking with the woman, according to police reports.

According to the woman's account to police in the report, Jansen pulled up next to her while she was jogging and asked her to come look at his new car. The woman told police she sat down but Jansen then tied her hands down with what she described as "pre-made restraints of rope," according to the report.

Pleading His Case

After his arrest Jansen tried to convince police that the woman, whose identity is being withheld because she may be the victim of a sexual assault, was with him voluntarily and that she enjoyed bondage.

His lawyer Donald Bosch said that Jansen would spend up to $1,000 a night with her at Tattletales where he knew her as "Violet."

The attorney also released the results of a June 1 lie detector test administered to Jansen that he reportedly passed.

In addition, Bosch released photos of herself the woman allegedly sent to Jansen, credit card receipts for a facial and a dinner he allegedly paid for the woman, and surveillance videos of Jansen in a convenience store and at a busy gas station on the day he was accused of kidnapping the woman.

Maj. Ron Hunton of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department, about 30 miles north of Atlanta, told ABCNews.com earlier this week that the woman twice called police in August 2005, saying she had been kidnapped from her apartment by two Hispanic men and taken behind a Kohl's store and raped.

"Once her story quickly unraveled, the short version is the evidence didn't match what she was saying," Hunton said. "She eventually admitted that she made the allegation up."

Hunton said she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation and community service.

But while investigating the woman's story, Hunton said they turned up an arrest from Henry County in 2004 where she had made very similar claims that turned out to be false -- that she was kidnapped and raped by Hispanic men. Hunton said she was never charged in that incident.

And in Fannin County, Hunton said the woman pleaded guilty to another count of making a false report after claiming she had been stabbed.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=7988272&page=3

When ex-model Kate Mulder claimed many men raped her

2009-07-01T07:40:00.000-04:00

The crack-up of a Cosmo model: over the past decade, Karen Mulder graced the covers of dozens of magazines, including this one four times. But then she suffered a serious mental meltdown. Read on for the details of her unraveling and what brought it on.

Publication: Cosmopolitan
Publication Date: 01-JAN-03
Author: Franck, Elisabeth

COPYRIGHT 2003
© Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved

It was the evening of Wednesday, October 31, 2001, and Karen Mulder, one of the hottest supermodels of the '90s, was scheduled to appear on a provocative French talk show. Karen had previously refused to appear on the show, probably because its host, Thierry Ardisson, was known to have a style of questioning that was too aggressive for her. And as the modeling industry's quintessential nice girl, Karen had always avoided confrontation. But earlier that month, the Dutch-born blond bombshell had called Ardisson to say she wanted to go public with some explosive secrets about the modeling industry. Because Karen was a former cover model on countless magazines--including four times on Cosmopolitan--and the star of major advertising campaigns, Ardisson was game to get the juicy details from her.

What followed, however, was more than even Ardisson had bargained for. In front of a live audience, Karen claimed that many men--her former bookers, her friend Prince Albert of Monaco, even her own father--had raped her. She hadn't come forward earlier, she explained, because she'd been hypnotized as part of a huge conspiracy against her. It was clear she was not in her right mind--she seemed very agitated, almost delirious. Ardisson quickly stopped the cameras. "None of what she said made sense, it was just this bizarre rant," Ardisson remembers. "Everyone was flabbergasted to see this beautiful girl just losing it." The show's producers decided to edit her out of that week's show, and Karen left the set in tears. Days later, she repeated her allegations, this time to a weekly magazine in an interview conducted in her Paris apartment. Within hours of the interview, her sister Saskia arrived and took her to Villa Montsouris, a psychiatric hospital specializing in such disorders as depression, anxiety, and delirium, where Karen stayed for more than three months. "Everyone was very, very shocked," says Elite New York modeling agency president Monique Pillard, who worked with Karen for many years. "Karen had always been very professional, very together, and very healthy." But beneath her picture-perfect exterior, she was actually hiding a very troubled past. Here, Cosmo takes a look at what caused this onetime fixture of the high-fashion world to come apart at the seams.

THE STORYBOOK BEGINNINGS

As a child growing up in the Netherlands, Karen hadn't given modeling much thought. But her teenage friends entered her picture in the Elite Look of the Year contest, and thanks to her 5-foot-10 stature and classically beautiful features, she won second place. Within weeks, the 17-year-old had flown to Paris and started posing for Vogue, Elle, and Marie-Claire. "There was a fresh quality to her," remembers her former Elite booker, Raphael Santin. (Mulder declined to be interviewed for this article.) "She was always smiling, ways upbeat and happy. Even a little kooky, in the best sense of the word."

Soon, she was in high demand on the fashion runways. At the age of 22, she became the face of Guess jeans. Shortly after, in 1992, she appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan for the first time. Photographer Francesco Scavullo went on to shoot her for three more Cosmo covers over the following three years. "She was one of my favorite models," he remembers. "She loved the camera, and the camera loved her." By the mid-1990s, her career was full throttle, but even still it seemed that Karen was eager to please and be loved. "When I'd tell her she was looking beautiful, she'd light up," says Scavullo.

Her personal life was also moving very quickly. In 1988, at the age of 20, she had gotten married to a French photo age Rene Bosne, but by 1993, her marriage had fallen apart. "She married very young very quickly," Santin remembers. "Then her career evolved, and she probably realized that marriage had come too soon." Almost immediately, she started dating Jean-Yves Le Fur, a real-estate entrepreneur, after meeting him in an airport in Paris before a flight. In interviews, she talked of blissful happiness with Le Fur. But Elite's Pillard said she remembers Karen seemed depressed and acted agitated and even mistrustful toward others. Her busy schedule seemed to be taking a toll as well. "There were moments of intense pressure, when she had six shows to do in one day, when I saw her lose her poise and control," says Santin. A

CRACK IN THE ARMOR

Even the careers of the most successful models inevitably wind down. In 1995 Karen appeared on her final Cosmo cover. In 1997, she and Le Fur broke up. Then in April 1998, she announced she was quitting modeling and revealed some of her true feelings. "From the beginning, I hated being photographed," she told reporters at the time. "For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, `Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day."

After leaving the modeling industry, she took singing lessons and tried acting but spent a lot of time traveling, often with her new boyfriend, a wealthy Colombian named Julio Mario Santo Domingo, whom she dated until February 200l. Although she had been happy to stop modeling, she later told the press that working had been a convenient way to avoid painful thoughts. "My job distracted me from my worries," she told a French magazine. "It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else. But when my energy was no longer directed toward this one goal to meet, the anguish caught up with me."

But what, exactly, was haunting Karen? In later interviews, she said that those close to her were refusing to acknowledge that she had been sexually abused by an old family friend, now dead, when she was 2 years old. Karen had repressed the incident for years but had pieced it back together in psychoanalysis after she quit to modeling. She said it was the explanation for her teenage battle with anorexia, her excitable moods, and her constant flights between laughter and tears.

Yet no one believed her. Feeling increasingly isolated, she finally broke down. "It seemed everyone was against me," she later remembered about this period. "People told me I was fantasizing, that my psychoanalysis was wrong. So in order to be heard, I exaggerated. And I went overboard." Since then, she has recanted the rape allegations she made to the press and apologized to Prince Albert. But she continues to suggest that she was sexually abused as a child. "A lot of people thought she just wanted attention," says Elite's Pillard. "They'd say things like `Well, she waited for her career to be on the wane to come out with this.' But I really don't think so."

In fact, Karen's descent into a delusional state is probably a rare but recognized condition where seriously depressed people can start having trouble separating fact from fiction. "Some people who get depressed become psychotic," says Carol A. Bernstein, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at New York University's School of Medicine. "They lose touch with reality and start to see or hear things that aren't there." Experts say the delusions are often linked to actual disturbing events in a person's life. "In some ways, delusions can be an adaptive response to stress," said Bonnie Strickland, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Sometimes, when trying to understand why something happened to you, you start making up things that are going wrong that you can point to. If there's a history of sexual abuse, then the rape allegations could well be an attempt to understand how she feels toward men in general. She knows that something is wrong."

A CLEAN SLATE AT LAST?

Today, friends insist that Karen has put her illness behind her. "She went through a depression and is out of it now," one of them says. "She wants to leave all this behind her." last July, after staying in seclusion for months, Karen appeared in the front row of the Christian Dior fashion show to a chorus of whispers. In an attempt to launch a singing career, she also recorded a single--ironically, a cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I Am What I Am," which was a summer hit on the French charts. In early June, she even made it back to Ardisson's show. "She came back to thank me for not airing the piece," says Ardisson. "Then she sang a cappella, and everyone heard what a pretty voice she has." Unfortunately, it's a well-known fact that once you've suffered a serious case of depression, you're at a greater risk of being hit by the debilitating disorder again. But her former booker Santin, who now runs a restaurant, says that she recently came into his place and that she seems to be doing well. "It's a new beginning," one of her friends says hopefully.

THE MANY FACES OF DEPRESSION

Symptoms of typical depression include weight loss and insomnia, but there are several subtypes that take on much different guises. Women with so-called atypical depression (which is somewhat less severe and affects anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of those with the malady) will gain weight and sleep excessive amounts. Those with the less common agitated depression will seem antsy and irritable, while those with psychotic depression can become delusional and paranoid. (For more information, go to nimh.nih.gov.) More Model Meltdowns

--HEATHER HABER

False Rape Allegations by Eugene J. Kanin

2009-06-28T13:58:00.000-04:00

Archives of Sexual Behavior
Feb 1994 v23 n1 p81(12)
False rape allegations.
by Eugene J. Kanin

With the cooperation of the police agency of a small metropolitan community, 45 consecutive, disposed, false rape allegations covering a 9 year period were studied. These false rape allegations constitute 41% the total forcible rape cases (n = 109) reported during this period. These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. False rape allegations are not the a consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations.

© COPYRIGHT 1994 Plenum Publishing Corporation
INTRODUCTION

Of the many controversies surrounding the crime of rape,
no more thorny issue arises than that dealing with false
allegations. Generally, this issue is couched in terms of
unfounded rape. However, we are not addressing that
concept here since unfounded rape is not usually the
equivalent of false allegation, in spite of widespread usage
to that effect. There is ample evidence, frequently ignored
(see MacDonald, 1971; Brownmiller, 1975), that in
practice, unfounded rape can and does mean many things,
with false allegation being only one of them, and
sometimes the least of them. Other factors that are
typically responsible for unfounded declarations are
victim’s late reporting to the police, lack of corroborating
evidence, lack of cooperation by the victim and/or
witnesses, reporting in the wrong jurisdiction,
discrepancies in the victim’s story, wrong address given by
the victim, victim’s drunkenness, victim’s drug usage,
victim’s being thought a prostitute, victim’s uncertainty of
events, victim’s belligerence (Clark and Lewis, 1977;
Hursch, 1977; Katz and Mazur, 1979; Kanin, 1985;
LaFree, 1989). In sum, the foregoing largely represent
those conditions that could seriously frustrate efforts to
arrest and/or convict the offender. This paper deals
exclusively with false rape allegations: the intentional
reporting of a forcible rape by an alleged victim when no
rape had occurred.

False rape charges have probably been in existence as
long as the concept of rape. However, in the 20th century,
medical jurisprudence saw a new development that
enabled false allegations to be viewed as a singular
instance of gender-related lying, something quite different
in nature from the false accusations of robbery or burglary
that were made by men. In short, false rape accusations
became a reflection of a unique condition of women, not
unlike that of kleptomania (Abelson, 1989). This new
development was the masochistic nature of woman
doctrine, a perspective that assumed women had a
subconscious desire for rape, as evidenced by their rape
fantasies (Freud, 1933; Deutsch, 1944; Horney, 1933),
and that neurotic individuals would convert their fantasies
into actual beliefs and memory falsification (for an
extensive and critical treatment of this perspective, see
Edwards, 1981, 1983; Kanin, 1982; Bessmer, 1984). In
addition, some influential medical figures adopted the
position that false rape allegations were widespread
(Menninger, 1933; Guttmacher and Weihofen, 1952).
Many legal scholars enthusiastically endorsed this medical
position (Wigmore, 1940; Juliver, 1960; Comment, 1973;
Hibey, 1973) and commonly recommended that rape
complainants be routinely subjected to psychiatric
examination in order to determine their truthfulness
(Guttmacher and Weihofen, 1952; Sherwin, 1973;
Comment, 1973). An American Bar Association committee
offered a similar recommendation to this effect as early as
1937-1938 (Weihofen, 1959).

In the legal literature, pseudologia phantastica became the
authoritative scientific label for the condition responsible
for false rape reporting (Grablewski, 1958; Juliver, 1960).
Pseudologia phantastica was described as a "Delusional
state in which the complainant truly believes that she had
been raped although no rape, and perhaps no sexual
contact of any kind, had taken place. Since she firmly
believes this non-fact, her story is unshakable" (Bessmer,
1984). Less pretentious legal scholars made the same
point by merely making references to delusional and
hysterical states (Smith, 1953-1954; Comment, 1970). In
recent years, however, possibly as a response to the
women’s movement, members of the mental health and
legal community have become markedly less likely to
express such a position on false rape allegations. In
England, judges still rather freely comment on the
mendacious nature of women (Lowe, 1984).

Currently, the two main identifiable adversaries involved in
the false rape allegations controversy are the feminists
and the police. The feminists are by far the most
expressive and prominent on this issue. Some feminists
take the position that the declaration of rape as false or
unfounded largely means that the police do not believe the
complainant; that is, the rape charges are real reflections
of criminal assault, but the agents of the criminal justice
system do not believe them (Brownmiller, 1975; Russell,
1984). Some feminists virtually deny the existence of false
rape accusations and believe the concept itself constitutes
discriminatory harassment toward women (see Grano,
1990). On the other hand, police are prone to say the
reason for not believing some rape complainants resides
in the fact that the rapes never occurred (Payton, 1967;
Wilson, 1978; Jay, 1991). Medical Examiners lend support
to this police position by emphasizing the ever-present
possibility that rape complainants may be lying (Shill,
1969, 1971).

The purpose of this paper is to report our findings on the
incidence and dynamics of false rape allegations from a
long-term study of one city’s policy agency.

METHOD

This investigation is essentially a case study of one police
agency in a small metropolitan area (population = 70,000)
in the Midwestern United States. This city was targeted for
study because it offered an almost model laboratory for
studying false rape allegations. First, its police agency is
not inundated with serious felony cases and, therefore,
has the freedom and the motivation to record and
thoroughly pursue all rape complaints. In fact, agency
policy forbids police officers to use their discretion in
deciding whether to officially acknowledge a rape
complaint, regardless how suspect that complaint may be.
Second, the declaration of a false allegation follows a
highly institutionalized procedure. The investigation of all
rape complaints always involves a serious offer to
polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally,
for a declaration of false charge to be made, the
complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is
the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false.
The police department will not declare a rape charge as
false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to
pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless
how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity
of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only
because the complainant admitted they are false.
Furthermore, only one person is then empowered to enter
into the records a formal declaration that the charge is
false, the officer in charge of records. Last, it should be
noted that this department does not confuse reported rape
attempts with completed rapes. Thus, the rape
complainants referred to in this paper are for completed
forcible rapes only. The foregoing leaves us with a certain
confidence that cases declared false by this police agency
are indeed a reasonable -- if not a minimal -- reflection of
false rape allegations made to this agency, especially
when one considers that a finding of false allegation is
totally dependent upon the recantation of the rape charge.
We followed and investigated all false rape allegations
from 1978 to 1987. A ranking police official notified us
whenever a rape charge was declared false and provided
us with the records of the case. In addition, the
investigating officers provided any requested
supplementary information so that we could be confident
of the validity of the false rape allegation declarations.

FINDINGS

Incidence of False Allegations

Widely divergent viewpoints are held regarding the
incidence of false rape reporting (Katz and Mazur, 1979).
For example, reports set the figure from lows of 0.25%
(O’Reilly, 1984) and 1% (Krasner et al., 1976) to highs of
80-90% (Bronson, 1918; Comment, 1968) and even 100%
(see Kanin, 1985). All of these figures represent releases
from some criminal justice agency or are estimates from
clinical practitioners. The extraordinary range of these
estimates makes a researcher suspect that inordinate
biases are at work.

Regarding this study, 41% (n = 45) of the total disposed
rape cases (n = 109) were officially declared false during
this 9-year period, that is, by the complainant’s admission
that no rape had occurred and the charge, therefore, was
false. The incidence figure was variable from year to year
and ranged from a low of 27% (3 out of 11 cases) to a high
of 70% (7 out of 10 cases). The 9-year period suggests no
trends, and no explanation has been made for the
year-to-year fluctuation.

Although very little information exists regarding the
characteristics of the complainant, some data can be
offered. These false complainants are all white, largely of
lower socioeconomic background, and the majority were
modestly educated. Only three complainants had any
education beyond high school. The mean age of these
women was 22. On the basis of the limited information
available, these women could not be distinguished from
those whose complaints were recorded as valid.

The study of these 45 cases of false rape allegations
inexorably led to the conclusion that these false charges
were able to serve three major functions for the
complainants: providing an alibi, a means of gaining
revenge, and a platform for seeking attention/sympathy.
This tripartite model resulted from the complainants’ own
verbalizations during recantation and does not constitute
conjecture. Of course, we are not asserting that these
functions are mutually exclusive or exhaustive; rather,
these rape recantations focused on a single factor
explanation. A possible objection to these recantations
concerns their validity. Rape recantations could be the
result of the complainants’ desire to avoid a "second
assault" at the hands of the police. Rather than proceed
with the real charge of rape, the argument goes, these
women withdrew their accusations to avoid the trauma of
police investigation.

Several responses are possible to this type of criticism.
First, with very few exceptions, these complainants were
suspect at the time of the complaint or within a day or two
after charging. These recantations did not follow prolonged
periods of investigation and interrogation that would
constitute anything approximating a second assault.
Second, not one of the detectives believed that an incident
of false recantation had occurred. They argued, rather
convincingly, that in those cases where a suspect was
identified and interrogated, the facts of the recantation
dovetailed with the suspect’s own defense. Last, the policy
of this police agency is to apply a statute regarding the
false reporting of a felony. After the recant, the
complainant is informed that she will be charged with filing
a false complaint, punishable by a substantial fine and a
jail sentence. In no case, has an effort been made on the
part of the complainant to retract the recantation. Although
we certainly do not deny the possibility of false
recantations, no evidence supports such an interpretation
for these cases.

Alibi Function

Of the 45 cases of false charges, over one-half (56%, n =
27) served the complainants’ need to provide a plausible
explanation for some suddenly foreseen, unfortunate
consequence of a consensual encounter, usually sexual,
with a male acquaintance. An assailant is identified in
approximately one half of these cases. Representative
cases include the following:

An unmarried 16-year-old female had sex with her
boyfriend and later became concerned that she might be
pregnant. She said she had been raped by an unknown
assailant in the hopes that the hospital would give her
something to abort the possible pregnancy.
A married 30-year-old female reported that she had been
raped in her apartment complex. During the polygraph
examination, she admitted that she was a willing partner.
She reported that she had been raped because her
partner did not stop before ejaculation, as he had agreed,
and she was afraid she was pregnant. Her husband is
overseas.

The above cases are prototypical cases where the fear of
pregnancy is paramount in motivating the rape charge.
This theme is constant, only the scenario changes in that
the lover is black, the husband is out of state on a job, the
husband had a vasectomy, the condom broke. Only three
cases deviated from this tradition:

A divorced female, 25 years of age, whose parents have
custody of her 4-year-old child. She lost custody at the
time of her divorce when she was declared an unfit
mother. She was out with a male friend and got into a fight.
He blackened her eye and cut her lip. She claimed she
was raped and beaten by him so that she could explain
her injuries. She did not want to admit she was in a
drunken brawl, as this admission would have jeopardized
her upcoming custody hearing. A 16-year-old complainant,
her girlfriend, and two male companions were having a
drinking party at her home. She openly invited one of the
males, a casual friend, to have sex with her. Later in the
evening, two other male acquaintances dropped in and, in
the presence of all, her sex partner "bragged" that he had
just had sex with her. She quickly ran out to another
girlfriend’s house and told her she had been raped. Soon,
her mother was called and the police were notified. Two
days later, when confronted with the contradictory stories
of her companions, she admitted that she had not been
raped. Her charge of rape was primarily motivated by an
urgent desire to defuse what surely would be public
information among her friends at school the next day, her
promiscuity. A 37-year-old woman reported having been
raped "by some nigger." She gave conflicting reports of the
incident on two occasions and, when confronted with
these, she admitted that the entire story was a fabrication.
She feared her boyfriend had given her "some sexual
disease," and she wanted to be sent to the hospital to "get
checked out." She wanted a respectable reason, i.e., as an
innocent victim of rape, to explain the acquisition of her
infection.

Revenge

Essentially, this category involved a false rape report as a
means of retaliating against a rejecting male.
Twenty-seven percent (n = 12) of the cases clearly
seemed to serve this function. These rejections, however,
ranged from the very evident cases of women who were
sexually and emotionally involved with a reciprocating
male to those women who saw themselves spurned from
what was in reality the females’ unilateral involvement.
Regardless, these women responded with a false rape
charge to perceived rejections. Because the suspect is
always identified, the false allegations potentially pose the
greatest danger for a miscarriage of justice. Examples of
these types of cases are as follows: An 18-year-old
woman was having sex with a boarder in her mother’s
house for a period of 3 months. When the mother learned
of her behavior from other boarders, the mother ordered
the man to leave. The complainant learned that her lover
was packing and she went to his room and told him she
would be ready to leave with him in an hour. He responded
with "who the hell wants you." She briefly argued with him
and then proceeded to the police station to report that he
had raped her. She admitted the false charge during the
polygraph examination. A 17-year-old female came to
headquarters and said that she had been raped by a
house parent in the group home in which she lived. A
female house parent accompanied her to the station and
told the police she did not believe that a rape had
occurred. The complainant failed the polygraph
examination and then admitted that she liked the house
parent, and when he refused her advances, she reported
the rape to "get even with him."
A 16-year-old reported she was raped, and her boyfriend
was charged. She later admitted that she was "mad at
him" because he was seeing another girl, and she "wanted
to get him into trouble."

Attention/Sympathy-Getting Device

Although this device seems to be the most extravagant
use for which a false rape charge is made, it is also the
most socially harmless in that no one was identified as the
rapist. Approximately 18% (n = 8) of the false charges
clearly served this function. The entire verbalization of the
charge is, by and large, a fabrication without base. The
following are typical examples:

An unmarried female, age 17, abruptly left her girlfriends in
the park one afternoon allegedly to go riding with a young
man, a stranger she met earlier that morning who wanted
her to smoke marijuana with him. Later that day, she told
her friends she was raped by this man. Her friends
reported the incident to the police, and the alleged victim
went along with the rape charge because "I didn’t want
them to know that I lied to them." She explained that she
manufactured this story because she wanted the attention.

An unmarried female, age 17, had been having violent
quarrels with her mother who was critical of her laziness
and style of life. She reported that she was raped so that
her mother would "get off my back and give me a little
sympathy." An unmarried female, age 41, was in
postdivorce counseling, and she wanted more attention
and sympathy from her counselor because she "liked him."
She fabricated a rape episode, and he took her to the
police station and assisted her in making the charge. She
could not back out since she would have to admit lying to
him. She admitted the false allegation when she was
offered to be polygraphed.

RELATED FINDINGS

In addition to the foregoing, certain other findings and
observations relevant to false allegations warrant
comment. First, false allegations failed to include
accusations of forced sexual acts other than penile-vaginal
intercourse. Not one complainant mentions forced oral or
anal sex. In contrast, these acts were included in
approximately 25% of the founded forcible rape
complaints. Perhaps it was simply psychologically and
socially more prudent for these women to minimize the
humiliation of sexual victimization by not embroidering the
event any more than necessary. This phenomenon has
been observed previously (McDowell and Hibler, 1987).

Second, although the literature liberally refers to various
extortion scams as responsible for false rape charging
(Comment, 1968; MacDonald, 1973), no such cases were
encountered or could even be recalled by members of the
police agency. This type of case may very well be a period
piece, or perhaps it was even then the exceptional case.
Extraordinary attention would readily have been
forthcoming since this theory nicely meshed with the
position of prevailing authorities who stressed the
omnipresent threat of female cunning and stealth. One
authority, (MacDonald, 1973), for example, cited a 1918
article (Bronson) to illustrate a blackmail case since he
never encountered one himself. In a similar vein, no
apparent case of pseudologia phantastica surfaced. The
earlier view of a deluded complainant, tenaciously
affirming her victimization, just does not appear here.
These women were not inclined to put up a steadfast
defense of their victimization, let alone pursue it into the
courtroom. Recantation overwhelmingly came early and
relatively easily. Certainly, false rape allegations can arise
from a deluded condition but we failed to find indicators for
what was once offered as the most common explanation
for false rape allegation.

One of the most haunting and serious implications of false
rape allegations concerns the possibility of miscarried
justice. We know that false convictions occur, but this
study only tells us that these false accusers were weeded
out during the very early stages of investigation. However
encouraging this result may be, we cannot claim that false
charging does not incur suffering for the accused. Merely
to be a rape suspect, even for a day or two, translates into
psychological and social trauma.

CONCLUSIONS

We feel that these false accusations can be viewed as the
impulsive and desperate gestures of women simply
attempting to alleviate understandable conditions of
personal and social distress and that, as an aggregate,
labels connoting pathology, e.g., delusional states, are
uncalled for. One can be tempted to pigeonhole this type
of conduct since we view it as extreme, as deviant, as
criminally reckless. At first glance, false rape allegation
seems to be a rather extreme gesture to satisfy alibi,
revenge, or attention needs. Practitioners in the mental
health and legal professions, however, will readily
recognize that these false rape reports are not really
exceptional exaggerations in light of what people rather
commonly do in order to satisfy these same needs in other
contexts. Consider the extravagant and perjurious
accusations that routinely pepper divorce and child
custody proceedings, and the inordinate departures from
the truth that have accompanied credentialed and
respected political and corporate figures in their quest for
recognition and office. And think of the petty and
commonplace transgressions that people frequently
verbalize as reasons for having committed homicide.

No evidence exists to suggest that something unique or
defective is in the female condition that prompts such
behavior. Rather, something biological, legal, and cultural
would seem to make false rape allegations inevitable. If
rape were a commonplace victimization experience of
men, if men could experience the anxiety of possible
pregnancy from illicit affairs, if men had a cultural base that
would support their confidence in using rape accusations
punitively, and if men could feel secure that victimization
could elicit attention and sympathy, then men also would
be making false rape accusations.

Most problematic is the question of the generalizability of
these findings from a single police agency handling a
relatively small number of cases. Certainly, our intent is
not to suggest that the 41% incidence found here be
extrapolated to other populations, particularly in light of our
ignorance regarding the structural variables that might be
influencing such behavior and which could be responsible
for wide variations among cities. But a far greater obstacle
to obtaining "true" incidence figures, especially for larger
cities, would be the extraordinary variations in police
agency policies (see Comment, 1968; Newsweek, 1983;
Pepinsky and Jesilow, 1984); variations so diverse, in fact,
that some police agencies cannot find a single rape
complaint with merit, while others cannot find a single rape
complaint without merit. Similarly, some police agencies
report all of their unfounded rape cases to be due to false
allegation, while other agencies report none of their
unfounded declarations to be based on false allegation
(Kanin, 1985). Some of these policies are really nothing
more than statistical and procedural legerdemain. On the
other hand, a degree of confidence exists that the findings
reported here are not exaggerations produced by some
sort of atypical population, that is, nothing peculiar exists
about this city’s population composition to suggest that an
unusual incidence or patterning of false rape allegations
would occur. This city is not a resort/reveling area or a
center attracting a transient population of any kind,
attributes that have been associated with false rape
reporting (Wilson, 1978). The major culprit in this city may
well be a police agency that seriously records and pursues
to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits.
We may well be faced with the fact that the most efficient
police departments report the higher incidence of false
rape allegations. In view of these factors, perhaps the
most prudent summary statement that is appropriate from
these data is that false rape accusations are not
uncommon. Since this effort is the first at a systematic,
long-term, on-site investigation of false rape allegations
from a single city, future studies in other cities, with
comparable policies, must assess the representativeness
of these findings.

ADDENDA

In 1988, we gained access to the police records of two
large Midwestern state universities. With the assistance of
the chief investigating officers for rape offenses, all forcible
rape complaints during the past 3 years were examined.
Since the two schools produced a roughly comparable
number of rape complaints and false rape allegations, the
false allegation cases were combined, n = 32. This
represents exactly 50% of all forcible rape complaints
reported on both campuses. Quite unexpectedly then, we
find that these university women, when filing a rape
complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge.
Other reports from university police agencies support
these findings (Jay, 1991). In both police agencies, the
taking of the complaint and the follow-up investigation was
the exclusive responsibility of a ranking female officer.
Neither agency employed the polygraph and neither
declared the complaint false without a recantation of the
charge. Most striking is the patterning of the reasons for
the false allegations given by the complainants, a
patterning similar to that found for the nonstudent city
complainants. Approximately one half (53%) of the false
charges were verbalized as serving an alibi function. In
every case, consensual sexual involvement led to
problems whose solution seemed to be found in the filing
of a rape charge. The complaints motivated by revenge,
about 44%, were of the same seemingly trivial and spiteful
nature as those encountered by the city police agency.
Only one complainant fell into the attention/sympathy
category. These unanticipated but supportive parallel
findings on university populations suggest that the
complications and conflicts of heterosexual involvements
are independent of educational level. In fact, we found
nothing substantially different here from those cases
encountered by our city police agency.

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News story: Man's fate in rape case rests on whether girl who previously recanted rape claim is believable

2009-06-21T08:58:00.000-04:00

Judge Calls Mistrial In Rape Case

By Daniel Gilbert
Reporter / Bristol Herald CourierPublished: June 20, 2009

BRISTOL, Va. – In the end, the case hinged on whom to believe.

Did jurors believe the 13-year-old girl who claimed Hewie Isaiah Tester raped her three times in 2006, when she was a fifth-grader? That she followed him into the bedroom and put up a minimal fuss even after the first incident? And that she didn’t report it to anyone for a full two years out of fear?

Or did they believe Tester, a 21-year-old with misdemeanor convictions, from passing bad checks to assaulting his father, who denied any inappropriate contact with the girl?

After five hours of deliberating over Thursday and Friday, the five men and seven women jurors couldn’t reach a consensus.

Making their decision difficult was a paucity of evidence corroborating the conflicting testimony. No one witnessed the alleged crime, no meaningful physical evidence could be recovered two years after the fact, and the young girl’s physical exam was normal, neither proving nor disproving sexual assault.

Circuit Court Judge Larry B. Kirksey declared a mistrial Friday, refusing for the third time during the trial to dismiss the charge against Tester, and effectively shunting the case into the hands of some future, yet-to-be-seated jury.

“We’re all very tired and sorry it didn’t get resolved for all the parties concerned,” said Robert Wick, Tester’s defense attorney. “Sometimes it happens that way.”

Bristol Commonwealth’s Attorney Jerry Wolfe declined to comment.

Tester was arrested in November 2008, and charged with rape of a child under 13 years of age. He was 18 in August 2006, when the girl said she was raped.

It is the prosecution’s burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant committed a crime, and Friday’s hung jury indicated that at least one juror doubted Tester’s guilt and at least one believed in it.

Even with nothing to corroborate the 13-year-old girl’s story, her testimony alone would be legally sufficient to support a conviction. In oral arguments Thursday, assistant prosecutor Loretto Doyle urged jurors to look beyond the one-source testimony, arguing that rape is typically a “crime of secrecy” with no eyewitnesses.

Asked Thursday why she kept silent for two years, the 13-year-old girl testified that she was afraid of angering family members and prompting accusations that she was lying. That had been the fallout from her accusation five years ago that her uncle had raped her; she recanted the accusation, she testified, when her stepfather told her to and offered to buy her a game system she wanted.

Both Doyle and Wick seized on that incident in arguing their case. Wick said it damaged the girl’s credibility because she had lied to court authorities before; Doyle said it made the girl an easy target for further victimization, and that her fear of creating another family fight might have influenced her decision to stay silent.

Wick pressed the girl to elaborate about her fear, but she did not.

“I was just afraid,” she said.

“For any particular reason?” Wick asked.

“No, I was just afraid,” the girl said.

She testified that after Tester raped her, she returned to doing her homework or watching television, and said nothing to anyone during the two years that Tester dated an older family member and was a regular guest at the house. She did not speak until September 2008, when her grandmother asked her if Tester had abused her.

The grandmother testified Thursday that the girl broke down in tears at the question.

But the tears were not in evidence when the girl testified, her flat, emotionless voice striking a contrast with her graphic description of the trauma.

“I felt bad,” she testified Thursday, describing how she felt after the first alleged rape.

When Tester would come by her house weekly in the following two years, “I felt mad and scared,” she said.

Tester, too, betrayed little emotion in his testimony. When Wick asked him about the strain of the prosecution, he said, “Yeah, it’s been rough.”

Link: http://www.tricities.com/tri/news/local/article/judge_calls_mistrial_in_rape_case/25552/

Fraudulent reports burden Del. police

2009-06-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

Time-wasting liars keep cops from checking actual crimes

It was every parent's nightmare: On June 9, a 13-year-old girl called police to report that a man had forced her into his car as she was walking home from the Newark Library. The man tried to sexually assault her in his car, she said, but she was able to escape unharmed. The girl provided police with detailed descriptions of her kidnapper and his car: A 5-foot-6 man with spiky hair, a tattoo under his eye and acne on his face, driving a black sedan with heavily tinted windows and chrome rims.

Armed with that information, Newark police assigned a detective to find the girl's assailant before he could strike again. After investing 96 man-hours in the case, Lt. Gerald Simpson said, police uncovered the truth.

The whole story was a lie, made up by a young girl who wanted to keep her parents from knowing she had been visiting her boyfriend without their permission.

All costs considered, Simpson said this case "easily" wasted more than "a few thousand dollars." The detective assigned had put aside work on the rape of a college-aged woman and four robberies to investigate the girl's claims.

Police agencies across Delaware say such false reports are a chronic problem, depleting their departments of resources, while deferring their attention from real crimes.

"Those 96 hours we put in, we missed out on looking into crimes that are legitimate," Simpson said. "I don't know why we end up being pawns in these matters, but we have to fully investigate everything brought to our attention."

Newark police spent 3 1/2 days investigating the girl's lies, Simpson said. They brought in a composite sketch artist from out of state. Officers collected and watched video-camera tapes from the scene of the reported crime, but could find no footage of the girl being forced into a car.
On June 12, officers confronted the girl with the inconsistencies in her story because "things just weren't adding up," and she admitted making up the story, Simpson said.

She was charged with one count of falsely reporting an incident, then released to her parents on $1,000 bond under the conditions that she undergoes a mental health assessment, obeys a 6 p.m. curfew and has pre-trial supervision, Newark police Lt. Brian Henry said.

False police reports became national news fodder last month when Bonnie Sweeten, 38, of Philadelphia, faked her own abduction by making a series of panicky 911 calls. She was found the next day in Orlando, Fla., with her 9-year-old daughter, at a hotel near Disney World.

Sweeten was released on $1 million bond and charged with two misdemeanors -- filing a false police report, and identity theft because she used another woman's identity in her getaway.

In Delaware, lying to the police carries a mandatory minimum fine of $500, 100 hours of community service and repayment to the state for the cost of the investigation and responses, according to the state's criminal code. First offenses are misdemeanors, but subsequent lies to police may be felonies.

"We have asked for restitution to be paid back for the officers' time and base it on his hourly rate or overtime rate," Dover police Lt. Tim Stump said. "It can be very costly to the person making the false claim."

Newark, New Castle County, Wilmington and Dover police and the Delaware State Police all said they handle several false reports each year, though none provided specific numbers.

"The Delaware State Police would much rather respond to legitimate incidents rather than investigate a person's fabricated, poorly concocted story," state police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Whitmarsh said. "There is more than enough work to go around."

Whitmarsh speculated that state police are involved in fewer false reports than agencies responsible for crime "at the street level."

Many cases that DSP investigates involve surveillance equipment or a number of witnesses, he said, whereas smaller departments may have victims alleging crimes where there's no proof of the story except for the victim's word.

New Castle County Police Cpl. Trinidad Navarro said false reports are a "tremendous burden" on his department, as they must treat all reported cases as if they are legitimate until otherwise proven or the fibber backs off his tale.

"We have seen people lose their money gambling or on drugs, and lie about being a victim of a robbery so that their spouses won't be upset," Navarro said. "We have also had persons falsely report rapes or sexual assaults because their significant others found out about their unfaithful behaviors. It is very difficult to prove and often wastes valuable time and resources."

Though people falsely report all manner of crimes, police say a common theme emerges repeatedly: Often the person is trying to hide an embarrassing event from friends and family.

"Everybody's motivation is different as to why they would lie to the police about an event," Simpson said. "But they're usually covering up something that they're either embarrassed about or that they don't want someone else in their life to know happened."

Wilmington police spokesman Master Sgt. Steven Barnes said his department investigated two false police reports last year involving shootings. The victims in both instances said they had been shot by someone else when, in fact, they had accidentally fired a gun and shot themselves.

"As the investigation goes, their story starts to change," Barnes said. "And, though it doesn't turn out to be obvious, when the physical evidence shows us the truth, and their lies can no longer be covered, they'll usually admit they were covering something up. The physical evidence helps a lot with these cases, but either way they've tied up the detective and the patrol divisions at the same time because we're looking for suspects to a crime that didn't occur."

Another common theme among false reports is the tendency to blame a minority for the false crime: The Newark teen, for example, described her abductor as Hispanic, and Sweeten said she was stuffed in a car trunk by two black men.

Last year, GOP volunteer Ashley Todd, who is white, claimed a 6-foot-4 black man carved a "B" into her cheek (for Barack, evidently). She admitted to Pittsburgh police in October 2008 that she made up the story.

In her book, "The Color of Crime," law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown documented 67 racial hoaxes in the period between 1987 and 1996.

Simpson said officers "let the facts take them where they need to go," and, when suspicion of a false report arises, they often bring the person back to ask more pointed questions.

"You have to take everything that's reported at face value," he said. "We treat them all seriously, but the truth is that people lie to us. Not everybody wants to tell us the truth. And, sadly, I think it makes some of the investigators a bit cynical."

Link: http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20090620/NEWS01/906200332

2009-01-12T08:57:00.001-05:00

Visit our main blog False Rape Society

Playing the victim is overplayed

2008-12-10T21:01:00.000-05:00

Women need to take responsibility to be taken seriously: http://www.dailyevergreen.com/story/27259

Jessica Lack

The Daily Evergreen

Published: 12/10/2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each spring, the WSU Women’s Resource Center sponsors the Women’s Recognition Luncheon to acknowledge the achievements of prominent women. This year, the WRC invited Anita Hill to come, after choosing her book, “Speaking Truth to Power,” for the Spring 2009 Reading Discussion Group. With this invitation, the WRC turned the event from a celebration of true achievement to a glorification of victimhood.

Anita Hill is a professor of law, social policy and women’s studies. Her notoriety could be tied to her professional achievements. Yet her fame is solely based on a sexual harassment allegation that is nearly 20 years old.

During Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, Hill accused Thomas of verbal sexual harrassment. As Thomas was her former employer, Hill’s allegations ignited national controversy regarding sexual harassment and the workplace, as well as issues of gender, power and race because both Thomas and Hill are black.

The debate over Hill’s honesty was closed when Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, and I will not readdress it here. Rather, I mentioned Hill to highlight that her story is a celebration of an American victim mentality with detrimental consequences.

This victim mentality is self-limiting. Far too many women attribute their personal failures to societal bias. While sexism does fuel some people’s actions, discrimination alone does not account for all outcome inequalities. Blaming others for our situation is often much easier than self-reflection, but avoiding responsibility is not a successful life strategy. Instead, focusing on self-improvement is a proactive way to handle setbacks. Character development can only happen when we take responsibility for our actions.

Victims see themselves at the mercy of some kind of construct such as “the system” or “the Man” and may resign themselves to a lower position than they otherwise could achieve. Many women’s advocacy groups overemphasize sexism in American society and portray women as helpless victims. This mindset does not empower women to take control of their lives. Rather, it places women at the mercy of ambiguous societal pressures.

At WSU, female students are taught that intoxication absolves them of any responsibility for their behavior. This makes every drunken woman a victim rather than a woman who makes conscious choices about her alcohol consumption. No woman deserves to be raped or assaulted. Unfortunately, many women willingly increase the probability of these offenses by engaging in risky behavior such as binge drinking, walking home alone or late at night, partying with strangers, or abusing drugs.

The victim mentality can be extremely dangerous in cases of sexual harassment or assault allegations. In 2006, false accusations of rape devastated the lives of three Duke University students. The media narrative of a poor black woman abused by privileged white lacrosse players nearly overwhelmed the men’s innocence. Though the charges were dropped, their futures have been tarnished by these false allegations, and they are now forced to defend their character to prospective employers and skeptical dates.

Those hurt most by false rape accusations are not the accused men, but women themselves. Every false accusation severely disrespects real victims of sexual abuse. The manipulative women who deceivingly cry rape ruin the credibility of honest claims. Playing the victim for self-gain is despicable behavior that robs true sexual assault victims of the justice they deserve.

True equality and justice begin when individuals of all genders, races and creeds accept responsibility for their personal triumphs and failures. Women are capable of making wise decisions and should be held accountable for their choices. By robbing women of their responsibility, the victim mentality infantilizes women.

2008-10-17T15:43:00.000-04:00

Please go to our main site:

http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/

2008-10-15T17:19:00.000-04:00

Charges dismissed against Telford man in Kutztown U. case

Faced with findings that police destroyed evidence and an uncooperative alleged victim, prosecutors have dismissed all charges against a Telford man once accused of raping a Lower Pottsgrove woman, a fellow student at Kutztown University.

Charges of rape, aggravated indecent assault and sexual assault were dismissed against 19-year-old James VanDerbeek in Berks County Court on Thursday.

"My client has maintained his innocence from day one. I can't tell you how pleased we are that justice has been done in this case," defense lawyer Maureen C. Coggins said on VanDerbeek's behalf.

"He's an innocent man who was accused of a horrendous crime and his and his family's life was horribly affected by that."

"His life was hell and he suffered as a result of this arrest," Coggins added.

"This was a nightmare for him and his family and now he can start to rebuild his life."

VanDerbeek, a 2007 graduate of Souderton Area High School, had been charged in connection with a March 24 incident inside the woman's dorm room at the university.

The defense, Coggins indicated in court papers, was that the woman fabricated the accusations against VanDerbeek and engaged in consensual sex without force.

VanDerbeek, a former member of the university's wrestling and track teams, is currently attending a community college.

Dismissal of the charges comes on the heels of allegations, made by Coggins in pretrial court documents, that a Kutztown University police officer shredded VanDerbeek's initial statement to authorities, preventing VanDerbeek the chance to present a complete defense.

VanDerbeek's initial statement, Coggins alleged, contained information that would exonerate VanDerbeek, including a "detailed fact specific explanation of the consensual sex that occurred that night."

In court papers, Coggins had asked that all charges be dismissed against VanDerbeek.

Berks County District Attorney John T. Adams said state police investigated the destruction of evidence allegations.

"The bottom line here is that the allegation that police destroyed evidence was not an allegation, it was true," Adams said Thursday.

Adams said the finding that evidence was destroyed undermined the integrity of the investigation in the VanDerbeek case.

"The destruction of evidence is a violation of the rules of discovery and would have hindered any prosecution of this case," Adams explained.

Authorities have not identified the Kutztown University police officer at the center of the destruction of evidence probe.

"We haven't made any final determination as to whether charges will be filed in regard to the destruction of evidence," said Adams, indicating the investigation is continuing.

Coggins also alleged in pretrial court documents that VanDerbeek's accuser previously made similar unsubstantiated accusations against two other university students five months prior to making the accusation against VanDerbeek.

Coggins argued that evidence of the woman's alleged prior false accusations against other students tended to prove that she fabricated the sexual assault claim against VanDerbeek.

In the petition, Coggins listed numerous alleged similarities between the woman's accusations against VanDerbeek and the accusations she allegedly made against two other students - including assertions that the accuser never struggled or called out for help and that she voluntarily consumed alcohol with each of the men in dorm rooms or at campus apartments just prior to the sexual encounters.

Adams said he asked Berks detectives to conduct an independent investigation of the rape allegations.

"The victim told us that she would no longer cooperate in the investigation," Adams confirmed.

Coggins praised Adams and his staff for their review of the case.

"I applaud John Adams for the way he handled the case and making sure that justice was served," Coggins said.

According to court papers filed by the university's police department, the woman, who has since dropped out of school, went to campus police headquarters at 11:45 p.m. March 24 to report she was raped in her dorm room in University Place.

The woman told police she signed-in VanDerbeek around 7:30 p.m. to study for an exam, according to court records. While they were studying, the woman said she provided VanDerbeek with vodka.

During a previous hearing, the woman testified VanDerbeek asked to have sex with her between 15 and 20 times.

According to the woman's testimony, each time she rejected VanDerbeek's request, his tone of voice grew angrier.

The woman said she got up from her desk at one point and went over to the bed."I could notice the change in his voice," the woman testified at a May 27 preliminary hearing.

"I was getting scared. So I removed my clothes and went over to the bed and he drug me on top of him."

Link: http://www.soudertonindependent.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20164731&BRD=1306&PAG=461&dept_id=187822&rfi=6

2008-09-17T11:35:00.000-04:00

Sexual assault victims afraid to face court

By Stephanie Flemmons, Staff Writer(Created: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 7:10 PM CDT)

Victims of sexual assault crimes would sometimes rather live with the pain resulting from the crime rather than seek out a conviction, according to experts.Experts say the judicial process is sometimes too traumatizing for victims of sex-related crimes to experience and confront their attacker.

Shea Alexander, clinical director for The Turning Point, Collin County’s rape crisis center, said the counselors and staff do not force victims to come forward and seek out convictions.

“It’s an unpunishable crime because most victims don’t want their life revealed in public,” Alexander said.

“Closure is different for everyone, there is not one recipe. Some victims are warriors and want to confront the offenders and feel peace. Others are not and it could be very traumatizing to confront a situation like that. They would feel powerless in the end.”

This fact has led the Plano Police Department’s sex crimes investigators to face challenges.

In 1997 the department created a sex-crimes unit, which consists of three investigators, who focus solely on the investigations of sexual assaults, all with more than 20 years experience with the department.

“These types of crimes are very different to investigate,” said Sgt. Sandra Tomeo, Crimes Against Persons.

“Sexual assault crimes are so delicate. We are trained and educated for the apprehension of offenders. Investigations are not always clear cut in their particular complexity associated with sexual assaults.”Rick McDonald, Plano Police public information officer, said with the department having a unit that focuses only on sexual assaults, he believes this will lead to more convictions.

He said with the complexities of these types of investigations, detectives are able to separate themselves from other units, leaving their focus where it needs to be.

“Since the unit developed we have not had a significant rise in sexual assaults,” McDonald said.

“The sex crimes unit is dedicated to this one particular crime that is so heinous. It’s a terrible crime and that is why we have a specialized unit.”

Alexander said the specialized unit has helped willing victims find the closure they need.

“We love the Plano Police,” Alexander said. “They are very patient and cooperative with the victims. It has helped a great deal to have a special unit focusing only on sexual assault crimes.”

Recent reports show 63 percent of sex crimes are committed by an acquaintance, 20 percent by a family member, 12 percent by a stranger and 5 percent are unknown causes.

“With 83 percent assaulted by someone they know, it makes it more difficult to get a conviction,” Tomeo said.

“A lot of the time the claim is the incident was consensual. It’s his word against her word in a lot of cases, which makes it difficult to solve.”

This year Plano’s sex crimes investigators have reviewed 34 cases, 16 of which were dismissed due to evidence proving false accusation.

Tomeo said this is a common occurrence, which is why she said numbers don’t tell the whole story.

“The amount of cases reported shows the amount of cases we investigate,” Tomeo said.

She said the investigators could determine the incident did not happen, the victim can choose not to cooperate or they decide they have loyalty to someone else.

With sexual assault crimes carrying no statute of limitations, Tomeo said incidences can become unreported for years. She said, this makes the case even more difficult to prove.

If a case does goes to trial, Tomeo said the investigators are asked to testify and will see it through.

Tomeo said the unit focuses on walking the victim through the process and what to expect.

The Plano PD refers victims to agencies, such as the Collin County Children’s Advocacy Center, The Turning Point and Crossroads Family Services to seek counseling during the traumatic time.

Alexander said from her experience she believes a jury is not qualified enough to make the determination whether the case should result in a conviction.

“If justice is being served, justice is blind,” Alexander said.

“Many victims who pursue a conviction don’t get justice. It’s a part of the social attitudes. Juries are not qualified enough. Many blame the victim.”

In the past 17 months, a Collin County jury convicted two individuals for sexual assault of an adult. Five cases resulted in a guilty plea and two cases resulted in a not guilty verdict.

During this same time, five indecency or sexual assault of a child have resulted in a guilty verdict and 22 have resulted with a not guilty verdict. There have been 53 guilty pleas.

Currently there are 42 pending adult sexual assault cases and 319 indecency or sexual assault crimes of a child across the county.

Meredith Marsh, Crossroads Family Services clinical director, said she believes Collin County has made strides to verbalize and make the county aware of what is going on.

“It’s not turn your head away anymore,” Marsh said.

“Our courts do a good job giving the suspect the option whether they want to plea or seek a trial. The main issue is working with the victim to go to court. It is very scary for them to face the suspect. We lose a lot of clients as a result of that.”

Link: http://www.scntx.com/articles/2008/09/17/plano_star-courier/news/20.txt

Beyond innocence: A Michigan exoneree finds purpose in advocacy, closure in identification of perpetrator

2008-07-04T15:25:00.000-04:00

Beyond innocence: A Michigan exoneree finds purpose in advocacy, closure in identification of perpetrator
Link: http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=13039

by Sandra Svoboda
7/2/2008

Ken Wyniemko spent nearly a decade behind bars for a Macomb County rape. His most pressing concern was surviving. His second was proving his innocence.

He succeeded at both.

Wyniemko was released five years ago, exonerated by DNA testing that showed he could not have been the man who broke into a Clinton Township woman's home one morning in April 1994 and repeatedly raped her.

But he knew suspicions about him remained, and that he wouldn't feel truly cleared until the real perpetrator was caught.

Last week, that apparently happened. Clinton Township Police publicly confirmed that another man's DNA matched semen found at the crime scene.

"I've been waiting 14 years for this information to come out," Wyniemko told Metro Times. "It's very important. Not only did the police and prosecutors cost me 10 years of my life, but this guy did too and he knew all along that I was innocent. That's just not fair. It's not right for me or the victim."

It's a new freedom for Wyniemko, knowing that the last doubts about his innocence should be put to rest. But he never waited for that information to design a plan of action for his second chance at life.

Wyniemko, now 57, credits the late United Auto Workers Union President Walter Reuther with the words he lives by: "There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well."

He invoked the quote during testimony last week in Lansing before the House Judiciary Committee, one of his many efforts lobbying for laws to both help the exonerated and prevent others from being wrongly convicted. He travels the country speaking about his experience to students, attorneys and lawmakers. He's testified in Lansing several times. He's active with the New York-based Innocence Project, which has helped exonerate 218 people, including himself, across the country using DNA testing to invalidate convictions.

He's supported other Michigan men who have been released from prison with no money, no housing, no health care, no job prospects and no other support services, noting that parolees often have these "luxuries."

He plans to attend law school, doesn't count out a run for office someday and hopes there will always be curiosity about his story, because he sees it as a catalyst for reform.

"The more people that know about it," he says, "the better."

Snitch and miss

The 28-year-old Clinton Township woman was home alone, her husband out of town playing golf, in the early morning of April 30, 1994, when a man broke into her house. Wearing a nylon stocking on his head during most of the four hours he attacked her, the 20- to 25-year-old man she described as 6 feet or 6 feet, 2 inches tall weighing between 200 and 225 pounds handcuffed and blindfolded her, raping her in several rooms of the house, according to reports. She caught a few glimpses of his face and described him to police for a composite sketch. She later said the drawing was only 60 percent accurate.

The man left after stealing $2,500 — including bowling league winnings — from her purse.

Semen was found on the victim's underwear and the bed sheets but wasn't fully analyzed before trial. Testing showed that the evidence on the sheets was consistent with the victim's husband's blood type — but not Wyniemko's.

Wyniemko, a former factory worker and then a bowling alley manager, was charged 10 weeks later. Police had arrested him on an unrelated misdemeanor stalking charge — which was dropped — involving an ex-girlfriend. But while he was in custody, officers told him that he resembled a composite drawing of the suspect in the rape, according to court documents.

They placed him in a lineup, but the victim did not initially pick him. After meeting alone with police and a prosecutor, and then having the men in the lineup speak, she identified Wyniemko, then 43, as the rapist. He was 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighed less than 200 pounds, bearing little physical resemblance to her first descriptions of her attacker.

Wyniemko was charged the next day.

After a five-day trial, a jury convicted Wyniemko of 15 counts of criminal sexual conduct, armed robbery, and breaking and entering. Police have admitted their case was "circumstantial"; no physical evidence tied Wyniemko to the crime. But in addition to the victim's identification, a jailhouse snitch who was given a reduced sentence testified that Wyniemko had confessed. And an ex-girlfriend described his preferred sexual practices as similar to what the victim described.

Noting that Wyniemko failed to show any remorse for the crimes he'd been convicted of, Macomb County Circuit Judge Michael Schwartz handed down a sentence even harsher than guidelines called for: 40 to 60 years for each of the 15 rape counts, 10 to 15 years for breaking and entering, and 20 to 25 years for armed robbery. With the sentences to be served concurrently, the earliest he'd be eligible for parole was 2025.

"There were moments when I actually thought I had died and gone to hell. Prison was hell. I knew that I was innocent and I never gave up hope. I never gave up faith that one day the truth would come out," Wyniemko says.

He didn't let anger consume him. "People ask me now, 'Why aren't you angry?' I tell them because you cannot allow yourself to become angry. Anger will kill you. It will distort your mind and make you unable to focus. I studied the law and tried to contact reporters and attorneys to help me. That's how I survived. And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed."

The state Court of Appeals in 1997 rejected Wyniemko's claims that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing the ex-girlfriend's testimony, that prosecutorial misconduct denied him a fair trial and that his defense lawyer was ineffective. U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Duggan in 2000 rejected Wyniemko's federal habeas petition, which made several claims, including that he'd had ineffective assistance of counsel and that prosecutors lacked evidence.

That same year, the Michigan Legislature passed a law allowing DNA testing in rape cases where the evidence existed, hadn't been analyzed before trial and could exonerate the convicted person. It became effective Jan. 1, 2001.

That May, the Cooley Law School Innocence Project in Lansing officially opened, though faculty had already been getting dozens of desperate requests from inmates to look at their cases.
Among them was Wyniemko's.

Freedom found

With a history in criminal work, attorney Marla Mitchell was part of Cooley's Innocence Project from its beginning. As its co-director, she's seen more than 4,000 requests since the state's DNA statute was passed. "That doesn't mean 4,000 people in prison have DNA cases that fall under the testing law," she says. "Most of them didn't and those cases were screened out."

But Wyniemko's wasn't. He fit the statute's provisions, having been convicted on or before Jan. 1, 2001, with evidence that hadn't been tested and might still be available. (People convicted after that date are ineligible because lawmakers assumed DNA testing was routine during investigation or trial by then, Mitchell says.) In Wyniemko's case, attorneys first had to find out if the underwear, sheets or other evidence still existed. Police don't always keep such evidence.

"The burden is completely on the person who files the petition to prove that the biological evidence sought to be tested exists and is available for testing. That's something that a prisoner simply has no means of determining," Mitchell says.

Much of the Cooley Innocence lawyers' work involves filing Freedom of Information requests with police departments to try to determine if evidence exists. Prisoners are barred by state law from filing FOIA requests, which seek access to public records. But Mitchell says FOIA has actually been an "ineffective" tool because of its limits.

"The FOIA law allows you access to documents. While we are often looking for documents, old lab reports for example, we also ultimately have to find the actual evidence. You can't write a letter under FOIA and say, 'Do you have any evidence?'" she says. "It's not very simple to figure out where the evidence might be. That takes a considerable amount of time and is a big part of our investigation in any particular case."

In some cases, evidence was destroyed before the statute mandating its retention. In Wyniemko's, it was not. Attorneys felt lucky.

In November 2002, Gail Pamukov, a Sterling Heights criminal defense attorney working pro bono with the Innocence Project, filed a request in Macomb County Circuit Court asking that a DNA test be performed on the evidence in Wyniemko's case.

Macomb County Prosecutor Carl Marlinga, who had been in office when Wyniemko was convicted, did not object to the testing that could prove Wyniemko's innocence and his office's error.

"The mistake is not having something like this happen on your watch. The mistake would be to try and deny it and cover it up," he told Metro Times last week. "It just shows the importance of both prosecutors and defense attorneys working together when there is a viable claim of innocence."

Testing found that semen on the bedding from the Clinton Township scene was from the victim's husband, but the semen in her underwear was a mixed sample from her husband and an unknown male. Not Wyniemko.

He was freed June 17, 2003. He calls it his second birthday.

Conviction & compensation

In addition to their caseloads and teaching work, Mitchell and the Cooley faculty have joined with other advocates to help write and re-write bills that have been introduced in the Michigan Legislature to prevent some of the causes of wrongful conviction and help free those who are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

They're hoping to extend the DNA testing provision — the one that cleared Wyniemko — which is set to expire Jan. 1. If inmates do not have their petitions filed for testing by then, the law's expiration would prevent them from doing so.

Other pending bills would change police lineup procedures to improve suspect identification and would mandate recording of police interrogations to help prevent false confessions.

At the House Judiciary Committee meeting last week, Wyniemko testified in favor of a bill that would provide compensation to people who have been wrongly convicted and cleared with DNA.
The measure is sponsored by Rep. Steve Bieda (D-Warren). "I can't think of a more egregious miscarriage of justice than of someone who is actually innocent being convicted and going through our system of incarceration," Bieda says.

When prisoners are paroled they may receive job training, housing assistance, counseling and health care; men and women exonerated of crimes receive no state help. The pending legislation would grant them $40,000 for each year they served, though it would not be paid until a court determines they meet the criteria, which could take months.

So far, there've only been four cases of prisoners who've been freed on the basis of DNA evidence and who could pursue compensation under such a bill.

"After spending nearly a decade in prison for a rape I did not commit, I had absolutely no idea how I was going to survive each day," Wyniemko told the committee.

A day before the hearing, Wyniemko had visited representatives on the judiciary committee with a staff member of the national Innocence Project hoping to convince them to pass it out of committee. Several had not supported the bill.

Mitchell wasn't sure it would pass out of committee last week. Her co-director, Donna McKneelen, was sure it wouldn't.

"But Ken's pretty effective," McKneelen says. "He's invaluable. He has an effect on people that we don't have in the same way. We can testify about the bills. We can talk about the need for them. We can talk about correcting the reasons for wrongful conviction. Ken comes in and puts a face on it. He's lived the things we're talking about it and he makes an impression on legislators that we can't."

After the attorneys spoke to the committee for about 20 minutes, it was Wyniemko's turn. He first talked about Eddie Joe Lloyd, the state's first DNA exoneree who had served 17 years for the rape of a Detroit teenager after he had falsely confessed to police and was convicted. Lloyd was released in 2002 and died in 2004. The real rapist has not been found.

"I saw him a week before he passed. I told him I would keep up this battle for fairness and justice not only for him but on behalf of my father, whom I lost when I was still wrongly imprisoned," Wyniemko told the committee. "It's only fair that the state should offer compensation to these people who have been hurt so much."

The committee voted unanimously to send the measure to the House floor for a vote.

Wyniemko, McKneelen and Mitchell exchanged tearful hugs, surprised at the unanimous vote.
"You did this," both McKneelen and Mitchell told him.

Wyniemko had testified with no prepared remarks and barely a pause. He's come a long way from the man who walked out of the Macomb County Jail after his exoneration five years ago.

WXYZ-TV reporter Bill Proctor remembers that day well. He was one of the first reporters to meet Wyniemko following his release.

"When I looked in his face when he was coming out of prison, I saw sorrow. He seemed to be a beaten person. He came out looking like somebody who may not make it," says Proctor, himself a former cop.

"There's reason to be very proud of his accomplishments. In five years he has demonstrated what you would certainly want someone to try and do when it's all over."

Wyniemko has been helping Proctor form a non-profit organization called Proving Innocence, which will examine wrongful conviction cases where DNA is not present. The former client has also turned advisor for Cooley and the national Innocence Project. He considers working for "the cause" to be his full-time job.

It took Wyniemko a few years and a federal lawsuit, in part, to get where he is today: dedicated, as he says, to providing "justice for all."

The day he was released he first visited the grave of his father, who had died while Wyniemko was incarcerated. Then he went to Greektown's New Parthenon for dinner. He laughs when he recounts his trip to the men's room, where he was confused by a urinal with no handle to flush it — motion-sensitive flushing became the norm while he was locked up.

For months he stayed with family and friends, trying unsuccessfully to land a job. Two months after he was released he got a German shepherd puppy that a friend had rescued from the side of a freeway. He started spending time with his grandchildren, born while he was in prison, and his elderly mother.

But he couldn't let his wrongful conviction go without seeking reparation from those whom he believed caused it. He filed a federal lawsuit against Clinton Township and the police officers who arrested him, claiming serious police misconduct.

"I was motivated to file the suit because of the suffering that not only I but my family had to go through," he says.

Police, according to Wyniemko's suit, arrested him without probable cause, withheld evidence that would have contributed to his defense, and knowingly used perjurious testimony from the jailhouse snitch to wrongly incriminate him.

In addition, according to Wyniemko's lawsuit, police knew the victim was having an extramarital affair — possibly with a law enforcement officer — and failed to investigate. Nor did police test or analyze the victim's underwear.

In his ruling against the township's motion for summary judgment to have the suit dismissed, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Zatkoff wrote, "There is sufficient evidence on the record that the (mis)conduct of Defendants was instrumental to the continued confinement, prosecution and conviction of Plaintiff and that such conduct tainted the legal process such that Plaintiff was denied a fair trial."

The township settled the case before it went to trial, and Wyniemko received $3.7 million.

"We proved they were lying and the whole case was a cover up," Wyniemko says.

Still, he's not bitter to everyone involved in his prosecution. He is friends with Marlinga, who says he's honored by that.

"Ken is kind of my patron saint in life," the former prosecutor says. "I think that Ken Wyniemko is probably the greatest human being I've ever met. ... I wasn't personally involved in the case, but I was the dude in charge when he was wrongfully convicted. For him to not just forgive me but to embrace me and become such an important part of my life, it's beyond what we normally could expect from other human beings."

Marlinga says DNA-related exonerations like Wyniemko's show that wrongful convictions happen. Many are likely in prison, he says, who don't have the scientific proof DNA offers to overcome victims' misidentifications of their attackers.

"There are a whole host of cases, the vast majority of cases where DNA would not be relevant to any issue in the case. Wrongfully convicted persons still end up spending time behind bars with no hope of getting let out because DNA would not be applicable in their case because either there was no biological evidence left behind or it was too eroded."

To help support legal work and exonerees, Wyniemko set up a foundation bearing his name that raises money for innocence work. He drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee with the vanity plate "INO CNT." His other car, a Corvette, is identified by its "EXNR8TD" tag.

The sports car has an eerie connection to Wyniemko. It's a 2003 model, built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the popular car. When Wyniemko was researching his vehicle, he discovered the day it rolled off the line: June 17, 2003.

That was the day he walked out of prison.

"Weird, huh?" he says, his green eyes twinkling.

The call

In May, Wyniemko got the call he'd long been waiting for. While shopping at a department store, his ever-present cell phone rang. It was his attorney, Pamukov. "Are you sitting down?" she asked him.

"Every time she says that I get real nervous," says the soft-spoken, deliberate Wyniemko. "She said, 'I've got something to tell you you're not going to believe.'"

Clinton Township police had contacted her and said Michigan State Police had found a match to the DNA from the crime scene 14 years ago. "So they know who the real rapist was in my case," Wyniemko says. "I've been sitting on pins and needles ever since. I'm real curious to see if he committed any other crimes during the time I was in prison."

Clinton Township Police Captain Richard Maierle refused last week to give details about the suspect, saying police would work with prosecutors to determine charges before releasing his name. Nor would Maierle discuss whether the man had committed other crimes in the 14 years since the Clinton Township rape.

For Wyniemko, knowing the identity of the actual perpetrator is the final piece of the puzzle of how he was arrested, convicted and sentenced for a crime he didn't commit. It's his total vindication.

"It's good for everyone," McKneelen says. "It's good for Kenny because now people really know he didn't do it and it's good for the victim because there's closure for her."

Wyniemko hopes his story will help lawmakers, police, prosecutors and judges at all levels of the criminal justice system take a closer look at innocence claims and avoid wrongful convictions. But he still can't understand fully why it happened to him.

"I told them I didn't do it," he says.

Sandra Svoboda is a Metro Times staff writer. Contact her at 313-202-8015 or
ssvoboda@metrotimes.com.

Red flags about rape claims: "Oakland Co.'s handling of sex case charges raises concerns"

2008-04-27T23:55:00.000-04:00

Overeager prosecutions can ruin lives, some say

BY JOHN WISELY and L.L. BRASIER • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS • April 27, 2008

Oakland County prosecutors have won convictions in just 55% of the sex cases they have argued in front of juries since 2005, according to a Free Press review of court records.

About 35% of cases brought outright acquittals while the rest have ended in mistrials, hung juries or dismissals. By comparison, Wayne County juries convicted, on average, in about 80% of cases during that same time period. A comparable statistic was not available for Macomb County.

Defense attorneys contend the numbers indicate overzealous charging policies that can ruin lives over things like child custody disputes. One man spent almost $100,000 on legal fees and another spent 80 days in jail before their cases were dropped. Several legal experts say a 35% acquittal rate is a sign prosecutors are bringing cases that don't hold up under the scrutiny of a jury.

"That's high and that should give them concern," said Abbe Smith, the former deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School who now teaches legal ethics at Georgetown University. "The charging decision is a critical decision. You should not prosecute every case."

Neither Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca, nor anyone in his office, would speak to the Free Press about his office's charging policies. The claims of negligent prosecutions come at a time when Gorcyca faces increased scrutiny for his handling of sex cases.

Earlier this month, the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission filed professional misconduct charges against Gorcyca for his handling of the case against James Perry, a former Oak Park kindergarten teacher charged with raping two boys. Perry was granted a new trial last year; the second trial ended in a hung jury this month with 11 jurors voting to acquit and one holdout.
Last month, Gorcyca dropped charges in a high-profile case against a West Bloomfield father accused of raping his autistic daughter after the man spent 80 days in jail. The case collapsed because the court could never establish the girl, who cannot speak, was the author of the rape claim allegedly made with the help of a teaching aide through a widely dismissed method known as facilitated communication.

And last fall, an Oakland County jury took less than 30 minutes to acquit an Oxford Middle School teacher accused of groping his daughter, who later recanted her testimony.

Watching for red flags

Michigan law does not require corroborating evidence, such as DNA samples, before sex charges can be filed.

Still, "some cases you just don't prosecute," said Therese Tobin, chief trial attorney in the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office. "Sometimes you have a 3-year-old victim, and you don't think you can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. You don't put the child through that."

Similarly, Tobin said, custody disputes raise questions about allegations children make against a parent.

"Divorce is always a big red flag," Tobin said.

Nancy J. Diehl , head of the felony trial division at the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, agreed.

"In cases where there is a motive, we take an even harder look," Diehl said.

Legal experts say a decision to not charge is almost as important as deciding to charge.

"As a threshold matter, prosecutors have tremendous discretion over what charges to bring," said David Uhlmann, a former federal prosecutor and current law professor at the University of Michigan. "The notion that prosecutors are automatons, who must pursue cases simply because allegations have been made, ignores the role of prosecutorial discretion and the obligation all prosecutors have to do justice in their cases."

Risks for prosecutors

Sexual assault cases, by their nature, are difficult to prove, since they typically hinge on one person's word against another's. Michigan law instructs jurors that they may convict on a victim's claim alone if they find it credible enough to remove any reasonable doubt. But experts say relying solely on victim's claims creates risks for prosecutors.

Gerard Wilson had been searching frantically for more than a day last May for his 14-year-old daughter when sheriff's deputies found her in a motel room with a convicted pedophile from Texas whom she met on the Internet.

The girl told police she had sex with Richard Carrasco, 27, who was arrested with a loaded gun, sex toys and thousands of images of child pornography. But the girl also told police her father had touched her inappropriately, too.

Wilson, an Oxford Middle School teacher, had not slept in more than 24 hours when investigators began an hours-long interrogation. He was in tears when they asked him to write his daughter a letter apologizing for the things she said he'd done: brushing his hand over the top of her breast, and once hugging her while partially aroused. Wilson wrote the letter, was immediately arrested and jailed on a $4-million bond.

The girl later testified that she made up the claims to shift police attention to her father instead of Carrasco, whom she said she wanted to marry. Jurors deliberated for less than half an hour before acquitting.

"I was glad the police interview was taped because it showed the progression, his state of mind, how they befriended him," said Wilson's attorney, Lawrence Kaluzny. "The jurors saw that and found it outrageous."

Since the ordeal, Wilson has returned to teaching and his daughter is back in school.

Patrick McCarthy tells a similar story. He was battling for custody of his two daughters in 2005 when they accused him of fondling them.

Police arrested McCarthy, 50, at his engineering job and jailed him. The Auburn Hills man spent nearly $100,000 on lawyers during the next five months, preparing for a trial that would never happen. The girls, who were 10 and 11 at the time, began recanting. Investigators pressed ahead anyway.

On the eve of trial, the girls met privately with the judge and confessed to fabricating the claims because they preferred living with their mother. Only then did Oakland County prosecutors drop the charges that McCarthy insists should never have been filed.

"They had no witnesses, no evidence and still they went forward," McCarthy said. "They do this, and they're not held accountable. They have to be held accountable when they destroy lives like this."

McCarthy has since spent all of his free time suing everyone involved in putting him in jail on false allegations, including the judge, the prosecutor's office, and the social workers he says failed to adequately question his daughters. All of the suits have been dismissed for not meeting the threshold of malicious prosecution, but he pledges to appeal. And he continues to fight for custody.

"I have to do this; I have to do this because of what these people did to my family," he said.

Protecting children, the innocent

In the case of the West Bloomfield man accused of raping his autistic daughter who cannot speak, the girl allegedly made the accusation through a controversial method known as facilitated communication, where a teacher's aide helps a nonverbal student type answers to questions on a keyboard.

A prosecution expert testified that investigators violated protocols by not having a second facilitator verify the claim.

Defense experts testified that scientific studies of facilitated communication show the facilitator, consciously or subconsciously, authors the messages.

During two days of demonstration in 48th District Court in January, the girl was unable to correctly answer a single question on the keyboard if the question was asked out of earshot of the facilitator. That raised doubts about whether the girl wrote a lengthy statement about sexual abuse.

Other evidence also seemed to contradict the girl's statement, including a physical exam that showed her hymen is intact, despite claims of repeated rapes since age 6. At one point, the girl's statement said she feared going to hell for lying, but her family is Jewish and doesn't believe in eternal damnation. The girl also claimed she feared her father, who kept guns in the house, but a police search of the home found no weapons.

Even after the courtroom demonstrations, Assistant Prosecutor Andrea Dean argued the man should remain in jail. But on Feb. 21, prosecutors reversed course and agreed to release him on personal bond with an electronic tether. On March 11, they asked District Judge Marc Barron to dismiss the case, claiming the girl was too afraid to testify. The judge dismissed the case.

"It is important to protect children, and we understand that," said defense attorney Robyn Frankel, who helped represent the girl's mother. "But it is equally important to be sure you're not putting innocent people in jail."

Perry's case has caused problems for prosecutors since the beginning. When he was accused of raping two boys at Oak Park's Key Elementary School in October 2005, prosecutors refused to charge, in part because the second boy denied any attack. Four months later, they reopened the case and charged Perry with rape after the second boy's mother told them her son had disclosed an attack. But the second boy's accounting conflicted with the first boy's and their accounts continued to change even through the second trial.

In September 2006, a jury convicted Perry, but Judge Denise Langford Morris threw out that conviction, saying police never interviewed three key witnesses who could have aided the defense.

A retrial concluded April 1 in a hung jury. Gorcyca now must decide whether to try Perry a third time, though Morris said that based on her conversations with jurors in the second trial, there was a "low probability of conviction."

During the case, Gorcyca called Perry "a freak" and a "pedophile" and publicized evidence excluded by the court, according to the charges filed against him by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. Gorcyca faces a hearing next month before the state's Attorney Discipline Board on the charges.

He said in a statement that he looks forward to defending himself.

Federal Way women claim sexual assault by ghost

2008-04-22T23:55:00.001-04:00

FEDERAL WAY, Wash. -- Two local women claim they've been sexually assaulted by ghosts.

According to a police report, the two women told officers a paranormal person has been placing sensors on their bodies and having intercourse with them at their apartment in the 28600 block of 25th Place South.

One of the women said the assault began when she lived in Kent and followed them to Federal Way. The second woman said her encounters began recently.

The maintenance man in charge of the apartment complex said the women keep calling him saying the ghosts are raping them on weekend nights. He finally told them to call police.

It's an odd case for cops, but it's right up Ross Allison's alley. He's a ghost hunter.

"Cases like this don't pop up that often," he said.

With the emergence of the Sci-fi channel's hit show "Ghost Hunters," paranormal popularity is soaring. And Allison says as the number of ghost shows grows, so do spirit sightings.

"And so they start to label every little interesting thing happening in their home as paranormal when it might just be a house creaking," he said.

Candid questions help ghost hunters sort the eerie from the unstable.

"A lot of times you'll find it might be medications that they're taking or something psychological," Allison said.

The ghost hunter took a walk through the apartment complex where the women say a spirit has haunted them for two years. He said he would need a psychic to check for the presence of a ghost.

Police declined comment on the unusual report other than to say they do not have any investigative leads.

And the women themselves - well, they weren't anywhere to be found, just like the ghost.

Link: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/18025524.html

Rape claim was cover for cheating on husband, charges allege

2007-12-18T22:33:00.000-05:00

Rape claim was cover for cheating on husband, charges allege

A St. Paul psychologist is accused of making up the attack and changing her story several times; her attorney points to prescription medication that she was taking.

By James Walsh, Star Tribune
Last update: December 18, 2007 - 7:33 PM

A St. Paul psychologist who claimed she was raped by a patient in her office in October 2006 has instead been charged with falsely reporting a crime.

Authorities say that Jill Ajao, 41, made the rape claim to conceal an extramarital affair and to "protect herself and her family." The false report prompted a detailed police investigation, the release of a suspect sketch and surveillance photo and the sifting through of hundreds of tips, according to the criminal complaint filed last week.

Police spokesman Tom Walsh said Tuesday that it was unusual for his department to seek the charges against a woman who claimed to be a victim and police did so only after a thorough investigation.

"It's extremely rare. It's rare because we don't want victims not to report" a crime, he said. "But it's very clear that this young woman was not sexually assaulted. And given the fear that she created in our community, we felt that this action was necessary."

Falsely reporting a crime is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Jerod Peterson, an attorney for Ajao, said that she is "a thoughtful, intelligent psychologist" whose personal behavior in late 2006 was affected by medication prescribed to her for a post-partum thyroid condition.

"We believe that the court will respond compassionately to the charge against her once the incident has been described in its proper context," Peterson said.

"The complaint against Ms. Ajao does not accurately describe the single isolated incident upon which the charge is based," he said.

According to the complaint, this is what authorities say happened:

On Oct. 26, 2006, Ajao called police and tearfully reported she had been raped by a patient named Jeff in her Selby Avenue office two days before. She described specifics of the attack. She said that Jeff had not filled out any of the required paperwork for his appointment. Ajao said she had never seen him before but would recognize him if she saw him again.

But, on Oct. 28, Ajao contacted police and changed her story. She said she'd met the rapist at a restaurant down the hall from her office and that surveillance video would show her walking with him. She also said she had gone to a store to buy sex-related novelties and speculated that her attacker may have seen her there.

On Oct. 30, a witness from the restaurant said she saw Ajao and a man together in the bar talking before leaving together and that they seemed "familiar with each other." Also on Oct. 30, police released a surveillance photo of the man and received hundreds of calls from the public.

On Jan. 6, Ajao again changed her story. This time, she said she'd met the man online and that he suggested that she go to the novelty store. She said she didn't expect to meet the man the day they got together and that there was an expectation that "there would be no sex."

On Feb. 9, 2007, the man asked Ajao in an e-mail whether she "finally admitted that the encounter was consensual and that she claimed rape to cover up an affair. She replied 'yes,' " the complaint said.

A factor in seeking charges, Walsh said, was that the man she said raped her had been subjected to public attention when his photo was shown in the media to help police solve an alleged rape.

Staff writer Anthony Lonetree contributed to this report.

Link: http://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/12613126.html

2007-02-27T19:08:00.000-05:00

False rape allegations: an assault on justice.(ISSUES IN THERAPY)

Source: Annals of the American Psychotherapy AssociationPublication Date: 22-DEC-08
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2007, there were 255,630 incidents of rape and sexual assault in the United States (BJS, 2008a). Of those, 90,427 were forcible rapes (FBI, 2008c). This represents one forcible rape occurring somewhere in the United States every 5.8 minutes (FBI, 2008a). Persons in the age group of 12 to 19 were raped and sexually assaulted at a significantly higher rate than any other age group (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000; BJS, 2008b). Of the 90,427 forcible rapes reported in 2007, 40% were cleared by arrest or "exceptional means" (FBI, 2008d) with 23,307 of those being arrests (FBI, 2008b). Clearance of a report by exceptional means occurs when the known suspect dies before an arrest is made, when the victim refuses to provide the information or assistance necessary to follow an investigation through to an arrest, or when the known suspect is being held in another jurisdiction for a different crime and extradition is denied. In order to clear a case by exceptional means, the officers must have an identified suspect, know where he can be found, and have enough evidence for a legal arrest. Degrees of "Not True" A certain percentage of rape complaints are classified as "unfounded" by the police and excluded from the FBI's statistics. For example, in 1995, 8% of all forcible rape cases were closed as unfounded, as were 15% in 1996 (Greenfeld, 1997). According to the FBI, a report should only be considered unfounded when investigation revealed that the elements of the crime were not met or the report was "false" (which is not defined) (FBI, 2007). This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false. The term "unfounded" is not a homogeneous classification and, to date, there is not a formalized, accepted definition of "false rape allegations." Certainly, the designation of false accusation should not include those situations in which the accuser was raped but unintentionally identified the wrong person as the alleged perpetrator. The definition of false allegation of rape cannot be limited to the situation in which the victim recants the accusation. There are women who were truly raped but for any number of reasons choose to recant. On the other hand, there are women who were not raped but do not recant their accusation. Perhaps the designation of false allegation might best be used exclusively for those cases in which it is determined that the accuser intentionally fabricated the allegation of rape. That is, the accuser claims an incident of forced sexual contact took place when no such incident occurred, or the contact that did occur was consensual. In addition, this would include cases in which a rape was committed, but the victim knowingly identified the wrong person as the perpetrator. Just as there continues to be strong resistance to the fact that some children (for a variety of reasons) lie about having been sexually molested or assaulted, the judicial system, mental health practitioners, and the public at large are reticent to accept that some women (and men) lie about having been raped. However, there is ample evidence that adults lie about virtually anything, including grave matters that have serious consequences for others. Crying Rape Although there is no doubt that false rape allegations occur, it is extremely difficult to determine what percentage of rape reports is intentionally false. This is due to many factors, including jurisdictional variation in definition, criteria, and reporting practices, as well as the fact that not all rapes are reported. Although the FBI had set 8% as the average rate of false (actually, unfounded) accusations during the late 1990s, there is remarkable variation in the estimates of false allegations of rape found in the literature (Kanin, 1994; Epstein, 2005). A review of those studies on false rape accusations conducted between 1968 and 2005 showed a percentage range from 1-90% (Rumney, 2006). Very little formal research has been conducted on the prevalence of false allegations of rape. One study looked at the 109 cases of forcible rape that were disposed of in one small midwestern town between 1978 and 1987 (Kanin, 1994). The given town was specifically selected for study because the police department used a uniquely objective and thorough protocol when investigating rape complaints. Among other procedural safeguards, officers did not have the discretion to drop rape investigations if they concluded the complaint was "suspect" or unfounded. Every rape accusation had to be thoroughly investigated and included offering a polygraph to both the accuser and the accused. Cases were only determined to be false if and when the accuser admitted that no rape occurred. The researchers further investigated those cases that the police, through their investigation, had ultimately determined were "false" or fabricated. During the follow-up investigation, the complainants held fast to their assertion that their rape allegation had been true, despite being told they would face penalties for filing a false report. As a result, 41% of all of the forcible rape complaints were found to be false. To further this study, a similar analysis was conducted on all of the forcible rape complaints filed at two large midwestern public universities over a 3-year period. Here, where polygraphs were not offered as part of the investigatory procedure, it was found that 50% of the complaints were false. Charles P. McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division, studied the 1,218 reports of rape that were made between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases throughout the world (McDowell, 1985). Of those, 460 were found to be "proven" allegations either because the "overwhelming preponderance of the evidence" strongly supported the allegation or because there was a conviction in the case. Another 212 of the total reports were found to be "disproved" as the alleged victim convincingly admitted the complaint was a "hoax" at some point during the initial investigation. The researchers then investigated the 546 remaining or "unresolved" rape allegations including having the accusers submit to a polygraph. Twenty-seven percent (27%) of these complainants admitted they had fabricated their accusation just before taking the polygraph or right after they failed the test. (It should be noted that whenever there was any doubt, the unresolved case was re-classified as a "proven" rape.) Combining this 27% with the initial 212 "disproved" cases, it was determined that approximately 45% of the total rape allegations were false. Unfortunately, like the two studies presented here, the empirical studies that exist on the frequency of false rape allegations are sparse in number and have notable limitations. Small sample sizes and non-representative samples preclude generalizability. Regardless, the mere number of publicized incidents of false accusations of rape over the last two decades indicates not only a need for further investigation into the problem, but a better understanding of how to identify such cases. The Truth Behind the Lie As with all of human behavior, there are numerous reasons why a person would lie about being raped. In the study of false rape allegations in the mid-western town and state universities, over half of the accusers fabricated the rape to serve as a "cover story" or alibi. This included 56% of the non-student and 53% of the student false accusers. The most frequent context and motive for the fabricated rape was consensual sex with an acquaintance that led to some sort of problem for the accuser. The perceived problem was typically something that caused feelings of shame and guilt in the accuser (such as contracting a sexually transmitted disease or becoming pregnant), which was bound to be discovered and received negatively by family or friends. Approximately half of the accusers who were motivated by a need for an alibi identified the alleged rapist. Their goal was not to harm or cause problems for the acquaintance, but to protect themselves in what they perceived to be a desperate situation. As with most lies, the false rape accusation allowed the accuser to deny responsibility by creating an alternate reality into which to escape. The next most common reason for lying about being a victim of rape was revenge, rage, or retribution. In the Midwest study, this included 27% of the non-student and 44% of the student accusers. In these cases, the false victim had suffered some real or perceived wrong, rejection, or betrayal by the alleged rapist. As the purpose of making the accusation was to obtain some measure of revenge, the "suspect" was always identified. Researchers in the Air Force study also found that spite or revenge and the need to compensate for a sense of personal failure through an alibi accusation were the primary motives for false rape reports. There are a range of other reasons why women made false allegations of rape. For some, it was to meet the overwhelming need for attention often associated with Munchaussen Syndrome or Borderline Personality Disorder. In those cases a specific suspect was seldom identified. Others filed false reports in an attempt to essentially "extort" money from the accused, who was typically wealthy. Because the goal was financial, the accuser was typically not motivated to pursue the case through formal legal channels, preferring to push for a settlement. As with certain false allegations of child sexual abuse, false allegations of rape may be the unfortunate byproduct of "recovered memory therapy." False allegations (of child abuse and domestic violence, as well as rape) are also known to arise in the context of divorce and disputed child custody. Within the context of the military, false reports of rape may be filed in order to avoid deployment to war zones.Telling a Lie from a Truth McDowell's research into the prevalence of false rape allegations provided some direction for the difficult responsibility of differentiating between a potentially true and a possibly false report of rape. McDowell compared the initial rape accusations made by "proven" victims with those made by "disproved" complainants. His analysis revealed a number of notable differences between the two groups. That is, there were certain characteristics or indicators that were found with greater frequency in baseless reports than in proven reports. For example, in terms of the initial disclosure, unlike false accusers, true victims tend to go directly to law enforcement to file a report. False accusers are more apt to tell family members or close friends, who either report the rape themselves or push the victim to do so. In discussing the alleged rape, false accusers may be unable to provide detailed descriptions of the rape or may provide too much detail. Although a significant number of true rape cases include numerous sexual acts in addition to penile penetration, those fabricating allegations of rape tend to describe very limited and narrow sexual activity. False accusers may describe the incident with inappropriate affect, such as pleasure or even pride. Because they may have never actually suffered a rape, the allegations of false accusers may be physically improbable (if not impossible) or bizarre. Perhaps most telling are numerous inconsistencies between the accuser's description of the rape and the presence or absence of physical evidence. Approximately 50% of the women who filed false reports claimed their assailant was a stranger or someone they knew indirectly (but whose name she never knew or couldn't remember). Claiming an unknown perpetrator makes the rape random and perhaps more importantly, makes the case unsolvable. This, in turn, frees the false accuser from the need to fabricate additional lies and the demands of being confronted by the alleged assailant. Another 30% of false reporters identified their attacker as someone they "kind of knew." In comparison, 75% of proven victims knew and were able to identify their rapist. It seems that the quality of physical injuries may be the most significant of all indicators. According to McDowell's findings, the physical injuries sustained by false victims tend to be inconsistent or "odd." Because the injuries are self-inflicted, they seldom involve highly sensitive parts of the body, such as the vagina, nipples, lips, or eyes. Similarly, the injuries of false complainants seldom involve permanent injury or disfigurement. As the wounds are self-inflicted, they tend to be on parts of the body that are easily reached by the false accuser. There may be numerous lacerations and abrasions, all of which are comparatively minor in severity. Unlike the true victim, false accusers may seem comparatively indifferent or nonplussed by their injuries. As suggested above, for the vast majority of false reporters, the allegation of rape solved a perceived problem the accuser was, or anticipated, facing. The same cannot be said for proven rape victims as, for most, rape marks the onset of numerous, long-term, and not easily resolved problems. None of the factors identified by McDowell are individually or independently conclusive or diagnostic of rape. Rather, the presence of one or more of the criteria suggests the possibility of a false allegation that should be carefully and sensitively investigated and explored. To test the efficacy of his criteria, McDowell had three independent judges review all of the initially "unresolved" rape reports using his criteria. This group included the cases of those women who had admitted their allegation was fabricated when confronted with taking a polygraph. For a case to be classified as "unproved," all three of the judges had to determine a given complaint was false. After the judges review, 65% of the cases in McDowell's study were found to be false. There is no certainty that any or all of the indicators identified by McDowell will be present in rape reports that appear to be "suspect." When present, however, they may serve to focus an investigation of the charges, as well as to guide the treatment of the alleged victim. The Cost of the Crime In most jurisdictions the accuser must admit that the accusation was false before the charges against the suspect will be dropped. Yet before the accuser decides to recant, the life of the falsely accused may have been disrupted, if not destroyed. They may have suffered any number of inequities, such as being arrested and questioned; dealing with the expense of hiring an attorney; being subjected to time in jail; having trouble with their employer; and fall-out with family and friends, to name just a few. Even if the case is dropped, the reputation of the falsely accused may be irreparably harmed, because some people may believe the retraction was "pressured," and not true. Worse yet for the accused, the case may go to trial. Even if the falsely accused are acquitted, technically that does not mean they are innocent, only that they could not be found guilty. Regardless of the outcome of a criminal trial, the accuser can pursue civil action against the accused, resulting in further loss of resources. The worst possible outcome for those falsely accused of rape might be conviction and incarceration. There is no way of knowing the number of defendants who have been convicted of rape on the basis of a false allegation. One study found 28 cases in which the defendant had been convicted and served an average of 7 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence (Connors et al., 1996). Of note, all 28 cases involved sexual assault with the trials taking place in the mid- to late-1980s when DNA was not routinely tested. According to the Innocence Project, since 2000 there have been 156 cases of post-conviction exonerations based on DNA testing, an untold number of which involved sex crimes (Innocence Project, 2008). The average time the wrongfully convicted person served prior to release was 12 years. Regardless of the exact number, processing those who have been falsely accused of rape is a clear waste of legal, judicial, and penal resources. Essentially, there are no formal negative consequences for the person who files a false report of rape. Not only did the false allegation serve a purpose for the accusers, they actually never have to fully admit to themselves, their family, or their friends that the report was a lie. Although there are grounds for bringing legal action against the accuser, it is virtually never done. Even should a charge be filed, in most jurisdictions filing a false report is only a misdemeanor. When rape cases go to trial, alleged victims are protected by "rape shield statutes." In brief, these statutes are designed to prevent defense attorneys from using the accuser's sexual history "against" her. At the same time, these rape shield laws may suppress evidence related to the woman's history that is relevant to the issue before the court. In particular, they have been used to exclude prior false accusations of rape filed by the alleged victim. Although courts have ruled inconsistently on this issue, there is legal foundation for admitting prior false accusation into evidence in criminal proceedings (Epstein, 2005). In a step toward ensuring justice, perhaps when there is proof of prior false reports, they should be allowed in. Before this can happen, guidelines would need to be established regarding the definition of a "false rape accusation" and the criteria for proof of prior acts. Similarly, consideration should be given to making the filing of a false report of rape a felony, rather than a misdemeanor. Finally, instituting the possibility of a "not guilty and not credible" verdict might provide some recovery for the falsely accused and a clear warning to the false complainant. In the End Although it may not be "politically correct" to question the veracity of a women's complaint of rape, failing to consider the accuser may be intentionally lying effectively eradicates the presumption of innocence. This Constitutional right is especially significant when dealing with allegations of rape as in most jurisdictions, sex offenses are the only crimes that do not require corroborating evidence for conviction. Because there are often no witnesses and no physical evidence (especially if the victim delays in filing a report), the case may come down to the credibility of the accused versus the credibility of the accuser. There is a fine line between supporting victims and protecting the rights of the accused. Yet, considering the unique challenges of trying and defending rape cases combined with the potential costs to the falsely accused, being able to assess the credibility of the alleged victim takes on special importance. Inconsistencies in the accuser's complaint should be confronted gently and respectfully, with awareness of the fact that true victims may distort or even lie out of embarrassment or shame. ADDITIONAL INFO There are several online resources devoted to increasing awareness of the fact that false rape accusations are an all-too-common reality. The moderators of these information sites provide a wealth of articles, links, and statistics on false rape charges. One Web site is www. falserape.net. Falserape.net provides news briefs on publicized cases of false rape, links to other in-depth articles, and a list of helpful Books on the subject. An additional section addressing legal issues is also available. The Web site states that it was created by a concerned mother to increase awareness that women sometimes make false rape charges and destroy the lives and reputations of innocent men, while the false accusers face no repercussions. For more information, please visit www.falserape.net. A Selection of McDowell's Indicators of False Rape Allegations: Physical injuries of false accusers usually are limited to superficial cuts, scratches, and abrasions. Scratches often appear in a hatching or crosshatching pattern, due to repeated attempts to make the scratches visible. Scratches that resemble letters or words sometimes are found on false accusers, typically on their abdomens, but are not found on actual victims. False accusers frequently claim that they offered vigorous and continuing physical resistance but suffered no serious reprisals. Most actual rape victims do not offer vigorous resistance, and those who do often suffer extremely brutal reprisals. A false accusation typically solves some perceived problem for the "victim." It may explain a pregnancy or venereal disease, or it may exact revenge. In contrast, actual rapes seldom appear to solve a problem. They usually create serious problems. False accusers usually do not make their allegations initially to authorities. Typically they make them to friends or relatives who in turn inform the authorities. False victims, more often than actual ones, claim to have been raped by strangers. False accusers, much more often that actual ones, claim to have been attacked by multiple assailants who fit an unsavory stereotype. False accusers typically claim to have been victims of simple penile insertions, or blitz rapes, without collateral sexual activity. False accusers tend to be vague on the details, but when a false victim does provide details she tends to do so with a relish that actual victims seldom have. False accusers, far more frequently than actual victims, cannot say exactly where the rape occurred. In false accusation cases, far more frequently than in actual cases, the purported crime scene and the physical evidence are found to be inconsistent with the allegation. False accusers, more often than actual victims, claim to have received phone calls from their "rapists" before or after the crime. False accusers, more often than actual victims, have personal problems, including difficulty in interpersonal relationships and a history of lying and exaggeration. [Source: (1985). Chicago Lawyer] References Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). (2008a). Personal crimes, 2006: Number of incidents and victimizations and ratio of victimizations to incidents, by type of crime. (Table 26). Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2006. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ cvus/current/cv0626.pdf Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). (2008b). Personal crimes, 2006: Victimization rates for persons age 12 and over, by gender and age of victims and type of crime. (Table 4). Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2006. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ cvus/current/cv0604.pdf Connors, E., Lundregan, T., Miller, N., & McEwen, T. (1996). Convicted by juries, exonerated by science: Case studies in the use of DNA evidence to establish innocence after trial. (NCJ-161258). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. Epstein, J. (2005). True lies: The constitutional and evidentiary bases for admitting prior false accusation evidence in sexual assault prosecutions. (Paper 697). Retrieved from http://www.law.bepress.com/expresso/ eps/697 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (2007). Methodology. Uniform Crime Report: Crime in the United States, 2006. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/methodology.html Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (2008a). Crime Clock, 2007. Uniform Crime Report: Crime in the United States, 2007. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/ about/crime_clock.html Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (2008b). Estimated number of arrests, U.S., 2007. (Table 29). UniForm Crime Report: Crime in the United States, 2007. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from http://www.fbi. gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_29.html Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (2008c). Offense analysis, U.S., 2003-2007. (Table 7). Uniform Crime Report: Crime in the United States, 2007. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from http://www.fbi. gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_07.html Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (2008d). Percent of crimes cleared by arrest or exceptional means, 2007. (Clearance Figure). Uniform Crime Report: Crime in the United States, 2007. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/offense/ clearances/index.html#figure Greenfeld, L. A. (1997). Sex offense and offenders: An analysis of data on rape and sexual assault. (NCJ-163392). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Innocence Project. (2008). Facts on post-conviction DATA exonerations. Retrieved from http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/351.php# Kanin, E. J. (1994). False rape allegations. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 23(1), 81-92. McDowell, C. P. (1985). False allegations. Forensic Science Digest, 11(4), 56-76. Rumney, P. N. S. (2006). False allegations of rape. The Cambridge Law Journal, 65(1), 128-158. Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (2000). Full report of the prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women (research report): Findings from the National Violence Against Women survey. (NCJ 183781). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. Bruce Gross, PhD, JD, MBA, FACFEI, DABPS, DABFE, DABFM, is a Fellow of the American Psychotherapy Association (APA) and is a regular columnist for Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association. He has been a member of APA since 1999.