@dstark How do you know that? And works how? Does sharing information in an investigation, or letting an accuser participate in decisions about what should be investigated lead to more convictions?
The purpose of the criminal justice system is to prosecute crimes, not serve as a healing or cathartic experience for the victims of crime. It is not therapy.
And no I haven’t read Missoula but it is on the list. Summer reading for me is “brain candy” so it has been a lot of historical fiction lately.
If the purpose of the criminal justice system is to prosecute crimes, then step one is to get victims of crimes to report the crimes. Making it so unpleasant to report crimes that people won’t do it is counterproductive. Treating victims of crimes like perpetrators of crimes is counterproductive.
As I said to @HarvestMoon1, I am not prepared to adopt or defend the proposition you are trying to ascribe to me. I have never said that reporting a claimed rape was easy, or that educating the police in how to handle such claims was a bad idea. What I have said, is that the accuser’s expectation of how this should be handled likely made it a more traumatic experience for her which is a bad thing.
The accuser expected to be treated with respect. She should have been treated with respect. That starts right at the beginning. Her first contact with law enforcement.
The accuser could not control how law enforcement treated her, but law enforcement can. And law enforcement screwed up. Law enforcement screws up a lot in these cases.
Would you expect to be treated like a criminal for reporting a crime, @Ohiodad51? If you called the police to report a crime, and their response was to come to your business office with several squad cars and haul you out in front of your clients as if you were being arrested, your belief that people shouldn’t complain how police treat them when they report crimes would vanish.
@“Cardinal Fang” Wow, so now she was treated like a criminal, and “hauled out as if she were being arrested”? Did they carry a scarlet A and a bag of stones with them when they arrived? Where did you get all of that information from?
And speaking of putting words in people’s mouths, have you even read any of my posts on this point?
@dstark Where did she say she just wanted to be treated with respect? I must have missed that quote. I am talking about what she actually said, and the commonly understood meaning of the words she actually used. And are you the arbiter of deciding that “treating someone with respect” means that they should not be sullied by speaking with a uniformed police officer? Law enforcement “screws up” a lot in these cases because you have an unrealistic idea of what law enforcement does. Which is exactly my point.
And to both of you, if things were as crystal clear as you allege that they are, you would not have to make stuff up to try and prove your point.
There, congratulations, that is as far as I am willing to go to argue the point you both want me to :-*
I’m not a lawyer, just a member of the general public, but if I looked out my front window and saw squad cars pull up in front of my neighbor’s house, and then I saw them escort my neighbor out to a squad car and took him away, I would think they thought he was the perpetrator of a crime. And my other neighbors would think the same thing.
Where exactly did you get the information that she was placed in a squad car and driven away? And really, if your neighbors saw you walking outside without handcuffs on with a couple of uniformed officers they would think that you were being arrested? What do you run a meth lab?
Do we know that she was “hauled out”? To me that implies handcuffs. I highly doubt they did that. Did they even escort her to the cars and then drive away with her? I already stated that i think they overreacted, but I don’t know how bad the overreaction was. Did a few cars show up and then those officers simply go inside and interview her? Did they walk with her to the cruisers and take her to the station to give a statement? Do we know the details?
@dstark, to what spinning do you refer? Find one factual statement that I have made that is not directly from the two articles we have seen on the subject. And then find me the quote where the accuser said she “just wanted to be treated with respect”.
If police cars pull up to my neighbor’s house, and they then escort my neighbor to a police car, I’m thinking he’s being arrested. And all my other neighbors are going to think the same thing.
And I will ask again where exactly did you get the information that she was put in a squad car and driven away, or that she was “treated like a criminal”? Or is it just your position that any interaction with a uniformed officer is out of bounds for rape accusers?
You guys continue to make all these assumptions about the terrible things the police did here from no evidence whatsoever. What we know is that 1)She described the police response as “like a train” which certainly implies more than a couple cars 2)that she was escorted outside by uniformed officers and 3) that she said it “should” have been a couple of plain clothes officers.
We have no other facts. We don’t know if the police in East Lansing travel one to a car, or two. We don’t know if there were campus police and local police who arrived. We don’t know how many cars arrived. We don’t know if they sent out the SWAT team. We don’t know whether they put her in the back of a squad car and drove away with her, or if they just went outside to talk away from the public space of the lobby of the building. We can all assume whatever facts we want to drive the agenda that we have. But it is not terribly productive, or persuasive.
And you must live in a weird neighborhood. If I saw police cars pull up to my neighbor’s house, and the officers eascorting one of my neighbors outside without restraints, I would assume that a crime had been committed, and that the cops were talking to the neighbor.
@dstark, fair enough. What facts do you have other than that she spoke with uniformed officers that leads to the conclusion she was not treated with respect? That was your assertion when you said
@Cardinal Fang Maybe I am being nitpicky about wording, but when someone says “put her in a car” like you did then I envision an officer escorting the person to the door (probably even holding their elbow) and then opening it and positioning themselves very close to the person as they guide them into the seat so that it seems like they are in custody. In a case like that I might think they were being either being arrested or at least detained for questioning.
When I read “walked out to a police car, escorted by police officers” (which was the exact quote in the article) I think of a group walking out and the person getting into the car without the police standing right next to them looking like they were waiting for the person to make a break for it. In this case I would not think they were being arrested, or even detained. I would probably think that they were going to the station to give a statement.
ETA- to me it would be a case of body language. I highly doubt the officers body language conveyed that they thought a rape victim was a threat or a suspect.
“I guess if the accused has nothing to hide and is completely blameless and innocent, it doesn’t matter what he says in the college trial as it won’t make him look any worse to the cops, and may in fact help him.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. It’s not the cops’ view that matters; it’s the view of prosecutors that counts. A smart lawyer can put almost anything to good use against a defendant.
