Privacy and Criminal Justice

 Police Want Right To See Medical Records Without Consent
Police want new and expanded rights to access medical records and other confidential data without an individual's consent, a senior police chief has told the Guardian.

Sir Peter Fahy, the Greater Manchester chief constable, said the extra access to sensitive data was needed to help police cope with growing numbers of vulnerable people.


Judge Orders Rape Accuser To Turn Over Facebook Account
A New Jersey judge has ordered a teen who accused a man of rape to turn over access to her Facebook account, providing another example of social media's growing use in courtrooms and the resulting privacy concerns.

Mercer County Superior Court Judge Robert Billmeier this week agreed to a request from David Stevens-Parker's defense attorney, and the judge said he will privately review two weeks of Facebook postings for any comments related to the alleged rape before deciding whether any can be used in court.

Acknowledge That Rape Is Rape and 5 Other Steps to Combat Sexual Violence

President Obama commendably convened a task force to address the rampant rape and sexual assault incidents that are "an affront to our basic decency and humanity. And it's about all of us -- the safety of those we love most: our moms, our wives, our daughters and our sons."

Herewith from my 20 years in advocacy for women and children are my suggestions for the council:

1. Acknowledge That Rape is Rape
One would think this would be obvious -- but one would be wrong.
A minority of people with a grasp on power believes that only a "legitimate" rape results in pregnancy. We know why some conservatives say this -- they want to deny birth control, morning after pills/emergency contraception and abortion options to women, so minimizing the effects of rape means minimizing those women's health options. We heard this from Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and Mike Huckabee, who defended Akin then and attacks Democrats now for (falsely) believing that women are "victims of their gender" who need to get contraception from "Uncle Sugar" to control our "libidos."

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Mike Tyson, Former Boxer and Convicted Rapist, Makes Charming Film With Spike Lee

Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth affords Mike Tyson yet another big opportunity to open up. Spike Lee's new film (premiering Saturday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on HBO) documents the controversial boxing legend's one-man Broadway show. Tyson—sharply dressed, sweaty, charismatic—commands the stage for an hour and a half, dishing on his public and private ups and downs. (The show was written by his wife, Kiki Tyson.)

"I came from the gutter," he says to the packed theater. He discusses (in full-on emotional vulnerability mode) his rough childhood and deaths in the family; his star-making fights and his history of substance abuse; his adrenaline rushes and his rude awakenings. He cracks a lot of cheap jokes, including one about Mitt Romney's whiteness and one about George Zimmerman.

This documentary and one-man show are the latest steps in his years-long effort to reinvent himself. Instead of a drug-addled, off-putting, ear-chomping fighter, he's now a sensitive, vegan funnyman who writes for New York magazine, appears in the Hangover franchise, dances with Neil Patrick Harris and Bring It On cheerleaders, and makes fun of Oscar-bait and George W. Bush with Jimmy Kimmel:

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Victim’s House Burned Down After She Accuses Football Star Of Rape

The Steubenville rape case attracted national attention last year because of how extraordinary — and terrible — that story was: A young girl was victimized first by her teenaged rapists, and then by the town itself, which engaged in the worst kind of victim-blaming and rushed to the defense of her attackers, who were athletes for the town’s pride and glory, the high school football team.

But in the months since that case first came to light, national attention has turned to more and more cases like Steubenville’s. Just this weekend, another, eerily similar story emerged — this time in the town of Marryville, Missouri.

The Kansas City Star published on Sunday their remarkable, seven-month investigation into an eerily similar story that unfolded last year in the small, northwestern Missouri town of Maryville. In this case, though, the rape victim never got to see her horror story go to trial — and the family’s terror hasn’t ended; they’ve even had their house burned down.

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Rape Settlement at Occidental College: Victims Barred from Campus Activism

Occidental College, the Los Angeles school where thirty-seven students and alumni filed a federal complaint last spring about rape on campus, has quietly settled with at least ten of the complainants. Under the settlement, negotiated by attorney Gloria Allred, the ten received cash payments and are barred from participating in the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition, the campus group that organized the campaign that has resulted in a federal investigation.

The settlement, reported by the Los Angeles Times September 19 on page one, immediately provoked criticism. Danielle Dirks, a criminology professor who has been active in the campaign, told the Times that requiring “the women to remain silent and not to participate in campus activism could have a chilling effect at Occidental.” “Part of the reason so many women have come forward is because other assault survivors have been able to speak openly about their treatment,” Dirks said.
The settlement negotiated by Allred, Dirks said, “effectively erases all of the sexual assaults and the college’s wrongdoing.”

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7 Shocking Ways Colleges Have Trivialized Rape

Universities are some of the worst offenders when it comes to undermining the problem of rape and violence against women.
 

 One of the most persistent problems anti-rape and anti-domestic violence activists face is the inability of people to see these crimes as crimes. In theory, yes, we all understand that abusing someone is wrong and criminal, but all too often it becomes easy in individual cases to write off the incidents, which usually happen between people who know each other, as less a matter of criminal justice and more just interpersonal squabbling, instead of as a systemic problem that affects all of us. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding is perpetuated by institutions that would rather see these problems as personal problems than cultural problems in order to protect their reputation. Universities are often some of the worst offenders. 

 

Here’s a list of some of the euphemisms and coded terms colleges and universities have used that minimize or even trivialize the problem of violence against women on campus.  

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Cleveland Horror Caps Week of Violence Against Women

These tales of misogyny should jolt us to connect the dots and to shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there beneath the surface.

In just the last few days, we’ve seen a series of news stories involving violence against women. The violence comes in different forms -- physical, psychological, financial -- and from different quarters: a former school-bus driver in Cleveland, the NRA convention in Houston, the military, congress. And so it’s not surprising that the media, as usual, is delivering these stories as unrelated incidents. But arriving almost simultaneously, these tales of misogyny should jolt us all to connect the dots and to shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there, just below the surface. 

The story of the three Cleveland women who were found alive after being held captive (and, by all accounts, raped, beaten and bound) in a neighbor’s house for 10 years is the most shocking. The suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, reportedly let them outside only twice in all that time. Michelle Knight was 20 when she disappeared in 2002, Amanda Berry had been reported missing in 2003 when she was 16, and Gina DeJesus vanished at age 14 in 2004 on her way home from school. Berry’s mother died in 2006 of what friends say was “a broken heart” less than two years after a psychic on "The Montel Williams Show" told her Amanda was dead. DeJesus’ mother believed her daughter had been sold into the sex trade. On Monday, Berry and her 6-year-old daughter (possibly fathered by Castro) escaped with the help of neighbors Charles Ramsey and Angel Cordero. The other women came out shortly after. Berry and DeJesus are now home, while Knight remains in the hospital.  

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Hate Crimes: A Rape Every Minute, a Thousand Corpses Every Year

There' a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and incessantly overlooked.

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the  rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who  gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the  gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who  gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who  gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large.  Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern

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Bill Seeks to Criminalize Abortion After Rape

Here’s some more backward thinking from the political party that introduced terms such as “legitimate rape,” “forcible rape,” “easy rape” and “enjoyable rape” into the national lexicon. Legislation introduced in New Mexico recently by a Republican lawmaker would make it a crime for a woman who gets pregnant as a result of being raped to get an abortion because it would be considered “tampering with evidence.” 

The result: Victims of rape would be forced to carry their pregnancies to term or be charged with a felony that could land them in prison for up to three years. That’s quite a burden for sexual-assault survivors—who, let’s remember, have already been heinously violated and victimized—to bear. 

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Justice for India’s Rape Victims

Influenced by extraordinary street protests, Indian authorities have moved swiftly to try the men accused of gang-raping a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in New Delhi. Clearly, justice must be served, but there are disturbing aspects to the way the case is being handled.

The victim died last month, two weeks after the brutal attack in which she was beaten, assaulted with an iron rod on a moving bus and then thrown bleeding onto the street. She had taken the bus after seeing a movie with a male friend, who was also beaten. Thousands of Indians have demonstrated and called for justice. 

The case has brought to light India’s growing problem with violence against women. It has underscored serious weaknesses in the judicial system, which encourages women not to bring charges against rapists and rarely brings to justice those who are accused. Incompetent police are also part of the problem. The victim’s male companion said later that police were slow to respond and then wasted more time wrangling over who had jurisdiction over the crime. 

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This is from a NYTimes editorial.  Tom

John Koster, GOP House Candidate: 'The Rape Thing' Does Not Excuse Abortions

John Koster, a Republican congressional candidate in Washington state, said Sunday that "the rape thing" is not a good enough reason for a woman to have an abortion, the Associated Press reported.

Asked at a campaign fundraiser whether he supports abortion rights in some situations, Koster replied that he only supports abortion in cases where a woman's life is in danger.

"Incest is so rare, I mean, it's so rare," he said. "But the rape thing-- you know, I know a woman who was raped and kept the child, gave it up for adoption, and she doesn't regret it."

He added, "On the rape thing, it's like, how does putting more violence onto a woman's body and taking the life of an innocent child that's a consequence of this crime -- how does that make it better? You know what I mean?"

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Court Requires Disabled Rape Victim To Prove She Resisted, Calls For Evidence Of ‘Biting, Kicking, Scratching’

In a 4-3 ruling Tuesday afternoon, the Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned the sexual assault conviction of a man who had sex with a woman who “has severe cerebral palsy, has the intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old and cannot verbally communicate.” The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define physical incapacity for the purpose of sexual assault as “unconscious or for any other reason. . . physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act,” the defendant could not be convicted if there was any chance that the victim could have communicated her lack of consent. Since the victim in this case was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” the Court ruled that that victim could have communicated lack of consent despite her serious mental deficiencies:

When we consider this evidence in the light most favorable to sustaining the verdict, and in a manner that is consistent with the state’s theory of guilt at trial, we, like the Appellate Court, ‘are not persuaded that the state produced any credible evidence that the [victim] was either unconscious or so uncommunicative that she was physically incapable of manifesting to the defendant her lack of consent to sexual intercourse at the time of the alleged sexual assault.’

According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), lack of physical resistance is not evidence of consent, as “many victims make the good judgment that physical resistance would cause the attacker to become more violent.” RAINN also notes that lack of consent is implicit “if you were under the statutory age of consent, or if you had a mental defect” as the victim did in this case.

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How a Student Run Database is Changing the Way Universities Respond to Rape

Justice for survivors of campus rape is often hard to come by. Now, an online database compiled by students is pushing universities to shift their policies on sexual violence.

Is there at least one full-time person working on campus sex-assault? May rape survivors report their attack confidentially and-or anonymously? Does the school's policy cover the sex assault of a man? Is emergency contraception available in the school health center?

These are the questions that students across the country are answering through the Campus Accountability Project, an open-access database designed for students, applicants and parents.

The database ranges in alphabetical order, beginning with the University of Alabama and ending with Yale University. It finds plenty of schools failing to present friendly survivor policies.

Of about 250 schools now in the database, 19 don't cover the cost of counseling after a sexual assault or rape, including such well-known universities as University of California-Berkeley and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Only 30 offer victims amnesty from punishment for offenses surrounding the assault, such as violating school policy against underage drinking. The fear of being punished for such offenses is considered a major deterrent to bringing a report.

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FBI changes definition of rape to include men as victims

The FBI is changing its long-standing definition of rape for the first time to include sexual assaults on males following persistent calls from victims advocates who claim that the offense, as currently defined in the agency's annual crime report, has been undercounted for decades.

Under the current definition, established 85 years ago, many of the sex crimes alleged in the ongoing prosecution of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky would not be counted in the bureau's Uniform Crime Report, one of the most reliable measures of crime in the United States. Sandusky is accused in alleged assaults and sexual misconduct involving 10 male victims.

Rape is currently defined as the "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will."

The new provision will define rape as any kind of penetration of another person, regardless of gender, without the victim's consent. It also includes a broad range of rapes involving both males and females in which attackers use objects to penetrate their victims.

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Woman Gang-Raped by 7 Halliburton Employees "Signed Away" Her Right to Sue? How Justice Has Become the Privilege of Corporations

Worried about the influence of money in American politics, the huge cash payouts that the US supreme court waved through by its Citizens United decision – the decision that lifted most limits on election campaign spending? Corporations are having their way with American elections just as they've already had their way with our media.

But at least we have the courts, right?

Wrong. The third branch of government's in trouble, too. In fact, access to justice – like access to elected office, let alone a pundit's perch – is becoming a perk just for the rich and powerful.

Take the young woman now testifying in court in Texas. Jamie Leigh Jones claims she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq (at the time, a division of Halliburton). Jones, now 26, was on her fourth day in post in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven contractors and held captive, under armed guard by two KBR police, in a shipping container.

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Rape Isn't Funny: On Making Excuses For Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Blaming the Alleged Victim

When a public intellectual of the left makes light of rape and makes excuses for an alleged perpetrator, we see how much work there is to do on sexism among progressives.

What is the simplest explanation for the misguided logic suffusing recent discussions of the alleged rape of a hotel maid by the former head of the International Monetary Fund? A generational disconnect? A lack of appreciation for the complex links between social issues and economics? A warning that high-brow progressive culture may be in need of some self-reflection?

Robert Kuttner, the well-known journalist and editor of the American Prospect, responded on his new blog yesterday to recent leaks suggesting that the alleged victim in the sexual assault case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an unreliable witness. Reports are circulating that the maid, an African immigrant, lied about her U.S. residency status on her asylum application (on a lawyer's advice), claiming a gang rape that prosecutors say she has since admitted never happened, and that after the arrest of Strauss-Kahn, she called someone for advice who happened to be in jail on a marijuana charge.

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Franken Wins Bipartisan Support For Legislation Reining In KBR’s Treatment Of Rape

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken said:

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Franken's first legislation. Vitter, Ensign, and McCain all voted against the amendment. Tom

So why doesn't Palin just say she's for funding rape kits which include emergency contraception?

As you may know, while Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, her town was one of the few in Alaska to charge rape victims for their own forensic exams - i.e., for the medical exams necessary to gather evidence to catch the rapists. At the time, Palin's own police chief said the town didn't want to pay for the exams because it would be a "burden" on taxpayers (i.e., tax cuts were more important than women who were raped). Others suspect that Palin didn't want to pay for the exams because they often include emergency contraception (conservatives think emergency contraception is abortion), and Palin believes that women should be forced to carry their rapist's baby to full term (ask her, it's true).

Palin's spokesman only gave one brief quote saying how outrageous this story is. Yes, it is outrageous. Then, we heard nothing from Palin. Not that Sarah Palin refusing to talk about anything is news. John McCain would like nothing better than for us to put Sarah Palin a 72-year-old-with-serious-cancer's one heartbeat away from the presidency without knowing a single thing about this woman's credentials for being president (other than that she wears lipstick and can see Russia from her kitchen window).

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I wonder how much of Thursday's Vice Presidential debate will be used up talking about rape kits. Tom

A Culture of Violence Against Women: More Than Rape Kits

by Amie Newman

Americans have recently learned that during the 1990s, Wasilla, Alaska, then under the mayoralty of Sarah Palin, charged victims of sexual assault for the rape kits used for evidence collection.

Attacks from progressives have been swift and harsh. There is good reason to hunt down the facts about the rape kits. But the larger issue - of rape, sexual assault and how we deal with violence against women in this country - has been overlooked.

First the facts:

Last week new evidence arose revealing that under Palin's administration, Wasilla cut funds that paid for the rape kits and shifted the burden onto the victims themselves or their insurance companies (kits generally cost between $500-$1200). Under Wasilla Police Chief Irl Stambaugh, the town had included the cost of rape kits in the budget. But Palin fired Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who then took the money out of the budget - a budget Palin approved. Fannon evidently did not have a problem with billing victims, though he admitted that he would rather see the perpetrator pay for the rape kits (without elaborating on how that realistically or successfully might occur).

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