<p>“FYI, the Tawana Brawley case started because she snuck out to see boys and drink and then couldnt get back in.”</p>
<p>Yeah,but with Tawana Brawley a lot of people smelled it for what it was, and there was serious fact finding on what happened. The DA didn’t simply say “I am not prosecuting this”, he came out and said why he wasn’t, and prosecuted those who committed the fraud (maddox lost his law license because of it), despite the fact that there was serious political pressure to prosecute the case, because it was racially sensitive. The DA in this case has in effect mumbled he had no case, he pulled a Bill Belichick and has refused to explain why, for example, the chief perp wasn’t prosecuted for having sex with the girl, not on statutory grounds, but because the girl was clearly was so drunk she couldn’t have consented. Yeah, I have heard the Lummoxes saying the boy was drunk, but that misses the point, if he was capable of having sex with the girl, he is able to be charged with rape, you can’t say "oh,he was so drunk he didn’t know what was going on’, because for him to have sex, he had to know what was going on. In the girls case, it isn’t arguing she was drunk and allowed herself to have sex, it is that she was so drunk she couldn’t make any kind of decision, big difference. Plus if the boy had been that kind of drunk, doubtful he could have had sex physically…the tox results alone on the girl, with how much she drank,should have made it non consensual sex (if he at 17 had sex with a 14 year old, I don’t personally consider that statutory rape). </p>
<p>To argue this is a lynch mob is idiotic, it is wrong use of the term. No one is saying the boy should be strung up, what they are saying is he should face justice. Among other things, given his families prominence, the case should have been handled by the state AG, on the grounds of political tainting. The same way a jury trial can be removed from where it happened (which would be wise in this case, on the grounds that given the families prominence and the notoriety of the case, a jury would likely be biased one way or the other). What people are arguing is that this case, unlike Tawana Brawley, never got to justice, because the DA seems to have simply dropped it without any kind of explanation. With Brawley, the DA fully documented why he didn’t prosecute, and every legal commentator said he had every reason to believe it was a hoax; with this one, from everything I have read, the DA simply said “I am not going to prosecute, I have no case” which seems pretty suspicious, given that the kids family was prominent and that the victim was by all accounts so drunk that it is pretty hard to claim that she was able to consent. </p>
<p>Argybargy seems to be making the same claim that people in the town did, that the girl wasn’t an angel, got stupidly drunk, and had sex with the boy, what they are claiming is basically if she hadn’t of gotten drunk, she wouldn’t have gotten raped. Among other things, if it was consensual sex, why did loverboy and his goon buddies just dump her on the lawn like that in sub zero temperatures? If what they did was simply consensual sex, why not let her wake up and take her home? After all, the parent couldn’t charge him with statutory rape, so why do what he did?. </p>
<p>The other thing people are talking about small town mentality about is that like Steubenville, most of the bile was thrown at the victim, and it was vicious, and most of it was “your a piece of trash, the boy is one of the football players, he is one of the ‘bright future youth’ and how dare you”…Worshipping high school football to that level is generally a small turn, rural phenomenon, while it is held in higher esteem IMO than it should be most places, it is religion in many small towns, including to the point of overlooking the behavior of the athletes. Things like this have happened in my area, and yeah, there were morons trying to cover it up and deifying the players, but in the end they end up prosecuted, in part because someone blows the whistle, the papers get involved, and the DA and cops are forced to act, which isn’t true where everyone worships the team.</p>
<p>As far as all the facts being out there, the fact that the DA dropped the case with the troubling questions raised makes it evident to me that something is amiss, and given the families prominence, someone outside the town should be investigating. I don’t know Missouri law, but in NJ the state AG has the right to investigate things like this…and if the DA has nothing to hide, then he should welcome clearing his name. Among other things, the state can supoena e-mail and phone records and see if there are any signs of tampering or anything that makes them think the DA was told to back off. One of the problems with DA’s is they are elected, and given the alleged perps family, and the kind of influence that has in a small town, it is hard to believe it wasn’t involved. Yeah, that could happen in a place like NYC, but given how big campaigns are, given how much is here, the media and so forth, one family couldn’t have enough influence to do that kind of thing, the DA would know that one family ****ed off at him couldn’t buy an election, whereas in a small town like that, it could. </p>
<p>Just out of curiousity, I spoke to two family members, both of whom had been ada’s in NYC, one of them in the sex crimes units, about the case, they read what was out there, and they basically said that from what they read (and they were careful to say based on what they read), that the girl would have been drunk enough that victims statements, whether conflicting or not, or anything the DA cited would be meaningless, that they would take it to a grand jury mostly based on the level of drunkenness of the girl and would more than likely get an indictment. Another friend of mine worked as an investigator for the DA in NYC, and he said that from the little that is out there, it didn’t sound like the DA’s office did much investigation either, that the DA didn’t take long to drop the case (again, he said from what he read of the case, and the timeline), that in something like this the office would spend a lot of time looking into it.</p>
<p>The reason people are upset is it smells, just like people in the NYC area were upset that the Brawley case smelled, that the girl’s story made no sense, that her claims given who she was and what happened made no sense (all from the media reports I might add). People who are upset about this case are incensed that people could be that vicious towards the victim, when the perp had acted like an animal, and basically said it was the girl’s fault because the boy was a football player and from ‘a good family’ (some family, if a kid could do this, they must be gems, somewhere along the way they forgot to teach him ‘small town values’ I guess), and that is what has many upset. A town full of people of virtue, with any kind of sense of morality or empathy, would be outraged that someone could do this, and would not be violating the victims and their families to protect, not a boy who had made an innocent mistake, but someone who did something vile. This wasn’t a boy having sex with a girl and going a bit over the line, this by all accounts, including his own lawyer, was a boy who did something horrible and got away with it, and apparently has zero remorse. The boy reminds me of Robert Chambers , the so called “Preppie Killer”, a privileged kid who killed a young woman he was having sex with and showed zero remorse; only difference was he was pilloried in NYC, and instead of worshipping him for being ‘an elite’, he was ripped apart for it.</p>