Mike Nifong's fourth victim?
Published Tue, Jan 2 2007 4:17 PM
Technorati Tags: Elections, Corruption, Courts, Political Correctness
Susan Estrich tells us that there are four victims of Mike Nifong's botched prosecution. From FOXNews.com:
There are four victims of District Attorney Mike Nifong’s twisted tactics in the Duke Lacrosse case.
The first three, of course, are the young men who never would have been charged with anything had Nifong adhered to the standard practices in his own office. With luck, they will ultimately be exonerated, and be able to move on with their lives, albeit after having endured a chapter in hell.
The fourth victim is unlikely to be so lucky; she will not be exonerated at trial, and she will not be able to move on with her life. She will be destroyed by this case, and while she is partly to blame for that herself, the other part of the blame rests squarely on Mike Nifong’s shoulders.
The woman is a liar. That is the English translation of the latest round of maneuvers, in which the prosecution dismissed the rape charges because the woman could no longer say, as she once did, that she had intercourse with three men at the party. In other words, she lied when she said she did.
That about sums it up. I don't see her as a victim at all. I see her as a liar looking for quick publicity and a big cash settlement. I see another Tawana Brawley destroying race relations with yet another bogus charge.
In the bad old days, before rape laws were reformed, a number of jurisdictions enforced a special corroboration rule in rape cases that provided that a case could not go to the jury on the uncorroborated testimony of the victim. The idea behind the rule was, as Sir Matthew Hale famously warned, that rape is a crime “easy to charge but hard to prove, and harder still to disprove” even by one who is innocent.
So special rules were needed, or so it was thought, to protect men against acts of spite so easily launched and so difficult to disprove.
Every jurisdiction that had corroboration requirements ultimately got rid of them, as a formal matter, but informally, of course it matters whether there is corroborating evidence.
No study has ever found that women lie about rape any more often than men (and women) do about other crimes, but that doesn’t mean that every complaint belongs in a criminal trial. The job of the prosecutor, especially because of the special stigma that comes simply with the charge of rape, is to screen out those cases that should not, or cannot, be won, and not bring them in the first place.
I have to ask, has any study ever found that women lie about rape any less often than men (and women) do about other crimes? Probably not. When nobody is an eyewitness to the crime, and when there is no physical evidence of the crime, it's often a case of "he said - she said". I've sat on rape juries before. The standard is that the crime must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There's a hell of a lot of reasonable doubt in this case.
Just exactly who did Mike Nifong think he was doing a favor by pushing forward a case with an alleged victim who, the minute she spoke, would inevitably be massacred as a lying slut?
Her? Her family? Her community? So that later there would be pressure to charge her for lying? Did he really think he was doing her any favors?
I can tell you who he likely thought he was doing a favor. He probably thought that by pumping up the rhetoric in the case he could help his re-election chances. He probably thought that by delaying the trial until the spring that he could help his re-election chances. He probably thought that by suppressing evidence in the case so that it looked like he was being tough on a racially motivated rape he could help his re-election chances.
Mike Nifong was re-elected. Now, after the election he drops the rape charges. He should drop the whole case. It's built on a house of cards and the wind is blowing.
Previous:
Trackposted to Rightwing Guy, Perri Nelson's Website, Outside the Beltway, Is It Just Me?, Faultline USA, The HILL Chronicles, The Random Yak, Wake Up America, Don Surber, Pirate's Cove, Planck's Constant, The Bullwinkle Blog, Dumb Ox News, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Trackback URI for this post: http://perrinelson.com/track.aspx?postid=357
Permalink URI for this post: http://perrinelson.com/2007/1/2/357.aspx
The HILL Chronicles trackbacked with "No sympathy for Nifong"
Mike Nifong was sworn in today for a four-year term as Durhams district attorney. Some wonder whether he will be able to finish the term due to the intense scrutiny he has received from the Duke University lacrosse case.
Subscribe to this entry's
comment feed. (Atom)
bullwinkle responded with:
 | There will be a lot of victims of Nifong's sham prosecution, real rape victims who will be afraid to come forward fearing that their local DA will mishandle the case for his own benefit or that their peers will think suspect that they themselves are making the claims to get a settlement. |
Comments to this entry are closed.