October 12, 2018

"Mom, I really didn’t do this, but I’ll see you in two years instead of 20 if I sign. And everyone here believes her, uncritically."

Imagined dialogue, the last line of "I believe in Me Too, but I believe no one uncritically" by Marc John Radazza in the ABA Journal.

60 comments:

Ralph L said...

In the comments:
"This entire piece amounts to one gigantic strawman masquerading as nuance and reason."

The commenter read the article critically, which is what the author wants xer to do to accusations. I detect bias.

Michael K said...

Brian Banks cannot be reached for comment.

Banks was a standout high school football star at Polytechnic High School (Poly) in Long Beach, California. In 2002, his Junior year, Banks verbally committed to USC.[6] After being falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson, he spent more than five years in prison and five years on strict custody parole, but had his conviction overturned in 2012 after his accuser admitted she had fabricated the entire story.

Of course there is no football career left.

What percentage of rape complaints on campus involve white girls and black guys ?

Birkel said...

The phrase is "believe the victim" assumes a victim.

A proper phrasing would be "don not automatically disblieve the accuser" but that would not give power to Democrats.

Those Democrats are employed across America at universities. They have few otherwise-useful skills. And they are overpaid, freeing money for political donations. The scheme is to be admired for its effectiveness, even as it is dismantled.

traditionalguy said...

Sounds like the Quintez Cephus case. Thank God trial by Jury is still an option.The Jury is the equalizer.

James K said...

I just watched the movie "Marshall," ostensibly about Thurgood Marshall, but mainly about a woman who lied (the Joseph Spell case). Spell faced the same dilemma: Confess to a rape of which he was innocent and get a short sentence, or risk a jury verdict.

Phil 314 said...

Professor, we all know it is not possible to simultaneously hold two seemingly conflicting views at the same time. Either all women are to be believed or all women are asking for it, period.

Wince said...

Sounds like Bohemian Rhapsody, except that was about murder and he actually committed it.

gilbar said...

dr K asks: "What percentage of rape complaints on campus involve white girls and black guys ?"

Now that they've redefined rape as sexual assault, and redefined sexual assault as any of:

* stealing one kiss while on a date
* touching a girl while dancing with her
* telling a girl she's pretty
* asking a girl out
* looking at a girl
* being A MAN! with a PENIS!!!

rape is now much more evenly distributed. Over %140 of all Co-eds are RAPED! Everyday!!!

David Begley said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Curious George said...

"Blogger Michael K said...
Brian Banks cannot be reached for comment.

Banks was a standout high school football star at Polytechnic High School (Poly) in Long Beach, California. In 2002, his Junior year, Banks verbally committed to USC.[6] After being falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson, he spent more than five years in prison and five years on strict custody parole, but had his conviction overturned in 2012 after his accuser admitted she had fabricated the entire story.

Of course there is no football career left.

What percentage of rape complaints on campus involve white girls and black guys ?

Both were black.

Birkel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
rhhardin said...

Legal quandaries sometimes result from idiocy way upstream. Resolving the legal question doesn't help fix the idiocy.

rhhardin said...

Women who lie get rewarded with attention. Let's have more attention.

The opposite approach is make reporting shameful. Then you get less lying. The bad cases get reported and the gropes do not. Problem solved.

ALP said...

Another comment on the article: "I attended a large Title IX summit just last week in Ohio and one of the speakers was from the Women's Law Center. She said, literally, "the reason we cannot have a presumption of innocence for the accused is because that would be presuming that the complainant is lying." I know this sounds like a bad caricature, but I swear I am NOT making this up. And this person was not some yahoo, she was an experienced lawyer. She also stated that the accused does not need to be given a chance to question his accuser, that there was "no reason" to allow that. I wish I were making this up, but it was witnessed by hundreds of attendees. So please don't assume that your fellow #metoos have any respect for due process whatsoever."

Yikes! Ann, how common is this attitude in the profession?

wild chicken said...

I have yet to see a logical argument as to why my own #metoo experience or anyone else's somehow disqualifies Brett Kavanaugh from scotus. It's always assumed in the premise.

Can someone enlighten me?

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, does this mean you are coming slowly around to reality?

Big Mike said...

Because in the real world, women lie.

Rory said...

"They have few otherwise-useful skills. And they are overpaid, freeing money for political donations. The scheme is to be admired for its effectiveness, even as it is dismantled."

And the money coming from students loans.

Henry said...

The opposite approach is make reporting shameful. Then you get less lying. The bad cases get reported...

Or the bad cases don't. That's how shame works.

Shame is especially effective with children.

rhhardin said...

Shame is especially effective with children.

That's why it works with women. Same emotional range.

Gahrie said...

How about the kicker at USC? He was horse playing with his girlfriend in front of their apartment. Someone saw them, and reported him to USC for sexual abuse. He said they were horse playing. His girlfriend said they were horse playing. USC still kicked him out the second semester of his senior year.

Henry said...

Jerry Sandusky welcomes your input.

rhhardin said...

Google day care scandals.

Gahrie said...

Jerry Sandusky welcomes your input.

Not as much as Roman Polanski.

Henry said...

Based on my evidence and yours, the shame construct prevented actual crimes from being reported while allowing hysterical overreaction to non-crimes.

rhhardin said...

You want actual crimes to go unreported. It's the 9 guilty go free instead of one guilty convicted standard.

Henry said...

Not as much as Roman Polanski.

Another good example.

Henry said...

You want actual crimes to go unreported.

You mean "I".

rhhardin said...

There was a problem with steam engine boilers. The water leaves as steam but the impurities don't, so impurities build up higher and higher in the boiler.

The solution was put a slight leak in the boiler, so that everything leaves sooner or later. The size of the leak determines the base level impurity in the boiler.

The leak is analogous to conviction of the guilty. Sooner or later you get them even with a 1 for 9 ratio of letting them go.

Ralph L said...

I thought Sandusky was a top.

FleetUSA said...

In my career I've never had to deal with rape or murder cases, but I imagine those to be the toughest psychologically unless there is clear proof, e.g. witnesses, DNA, etc.

Mike Sylwester said...

Our country's universities are leading the way in preaching that female accusers must be believed.

Caligula said...

Plea bargains are an exercise in expediency, and not an exercise in justice. They let guilty defendants get off easy even while punishing the innocent. Of course, juries will always be unpredictable; therefore, few will choose to risk a twenty-year sentence.

Plea bargains are expedient for without them criminal court dockets can't be cleared, and thus defendants must either be released or denied their right to a speedy trial. Nonetheless, they must be the starting point of any attempt to reform criminal justice.

Of course, there remains a vast gap between defendants' due process rights in a criminal trial as compared with a campus Title IX adjudication. And, if defendants risk less in a campus tribunal than in a criminal trial, these proceedings still have the power to levy heavy punishments against defendants.

Does it really take the ABA to point out that distinguishing between guilt and innocence is an essential part of all systems of justice, and that any system based on "always Believe the accuser" must inevitably fails at even at this very basic and essential level?

Sebastian said...

"Because in the real world, women lie."

But not if they display an emotional state to their husbands. That's all the evidence we need.

rhhardin said...

You don't get to choose the reporting level of actual crimes without also determining the lying level about non-crimes. The only question is the balance. How many false convictions per true conviction. If you reward reporting, you get more false convictions. If you unreward reporting, you get less.

Make people decide about reporting based on the severity of the crime, given the reward structure.

It's not the law's function to stroke women's ego and make unpleasant things go away.

Bobb said...

The dilemma is not just "Confess to a rape of which he was innocent and get a short sentence, or risk a jury verdict." It also involves the possibility of substantially financially harming yourself, your family and friends, if they believe in you and fund a defense. The financial cost is there even if you win.

Big Mike said...

@wild chicken, ask Althouse. I never got the connection myself, but I have always known that Ford is lying.

Mike Sylwester said...

Imagine that an African-American man were nominated for a high government position.

Imagine further that the mass media were running many stories in which people tell that they have been assaulted at some point in their lives by African-American young men.

Imagine further that the mass media treated these stories sympathetically as proof that the nominated African-American man must have assaulted someone long ago in his life.

James K said...

My broader point about "Marshall": Much lore of the pre-Civil Rights era revolves around white women lying about sexual assaults (to one degree or another) by black men. If women are to be believed, what happens to all that history? Down the memory hole, I guess.

Rory said...

ALP reported: "She said, literally, 'the reason we cannot have a presumption of innocence for the accused is because that would be presuming that the complainant is lying.'"

This reveals one of the problems: it's the state that prosecutes, not the accuser, and the state has inexhaustible resources with which to attack an accused party. The presumption of innocence is required because the state might be lying. The same argument applies in a college proceeding, because colleges have a state-like leverage against students.

SeanF said...

rhhardin: You want actual crimes to go unreported. It's the 9 guilty go free instead of one guilty convicted standard.

You accept that some actual crimes will go unpunished. You don't really want it, and they don't need to be unreported.

(And the standard is to compare guilty going free with innocents being convicted)

rhhardin said...

As the report reward goes up, so do false convictions, because you get more false accusations in the mix.

rhhardin said...

Imagine the opposite argument. It doesn't matter when women lie a lot because the justice system will sort it out correctly.

buwaya said...

Boiler scale is a huge problem.
Its the main lifespan and maintenance issue with steam systems.
There are industries devoted to dealing with it.

Its not a terrible analogy for institutions.

Your feed-water needs to be filtered and treated before use, to head off problems.
You need proper scheduled maintenance to clean out or replace components, else you risk catastrophic failure.
And ultimately it contributes to, eventually, condemning the system and replacing it.

The worse you do at pre-treatment and maintenance, the shorter the lifetime of the whole.

Original Mike said...

Blogger Big Mike said...”@Althouse, does this mean you are coming slowly around to reality?”

Penance.

Bay Area Guy said...

1. Rape is a terrible crime
2. The false accusation of rape is a terrible crime.

Look at the evidence, in each case.

Michael K said...

"Both were black."

And both were in high school, genius.

The question stands.

Michael K said...

USC still kicked him out the second semester of his senior year.

I think he is suing.

JohnAnnArbor said...

Look at the evidence, in each case.

A fair percentage of liberals won't. It's all about the group. The "identity."

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Michael K said...

USC still kicked him out the second semester of his senior year.

Well, why not? His last season of football was done. What more use did they have for him?

Bruce Hayden said...

"Because in the real world, women lie."

The absurdity there is that we all know that women lie, and on average lie more than men do, esp about sex. Or maybe to qualify that, men lie more to have sex, and women lie more about having had sex. Esp about not having had sex, when they have. And a lot of that is because of the inherent conflicts between the two competing sexual strategies utilized by human females. In the older one, the one that predominates with lower orders of animals, females mate with dominant males for superior genes in their children, while in the newer one, mostly they marry beta males to help them raise their kids. Since the beta males don't want to be cuckolded, and thus spend their scant resources raising some other male's children, cheating wives have to lie to their husbands about the paternity of their children. Everyone knows that females lie more. Or at least everyone who has survived junior high, where the boys practice competing physically, while the girls are practicing manipulation through lying. Ever watch a soap opera? This form of entertainment, so beloved of so many women (and disliked by most straight guys), pretty much revolves around sex and lying, and esp lying about sex. Our oldest stories, even to Adam and Eve in Genesis, essentially involve women lying about sex. Pretending that women would never, or even rarely, lie about sex, flies in the face of all of recorded history, when they have, indeed, repeatedly lied about sex.

Darrell said...

I thought Eve ate an apple.

Michael K said...

Well, why not? His last season of football was done. What more use did they have for him?

No, he had another season of eligibility. SC has had trouble with kickers.

A couple of years before, the SC kicker fell down a cliff in San Pedro and killed himself. This season the punter has been awful.

I couldn't believe the guy was on scholarship.

The guy who was kicked out had won the Rose Bowl game for them.

n.n said...

Confess that you're a warlock, and hope the social justice adventurists deem you worthy.

Anthony said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Matt Sablan said...

I will never take a plea deal. No matter how good of one it is, if I'm innocent. Prove it. In court. And if my public defender insists I should take the plea deal, screw them, get me another. If the court won't, fine. I'll do it myself.

Anthony said...

(I just said many, many bad words because after deleting to edit the ^*&$@^$ browser didn't copy the old text. . . .grrrrrrr)

This line struck me: “Well, dude, I believe you, but in this day and age, someone with this accusation is just not someone we can have around.”

Similar thing happened to me in 1985 at the height of all the McMaster's daycare crap. When I was an undergrad (at UW Madison!) I helped a friend out by filling in at the daycare she worked at. I never much cared for kids, but I mostly enjoyed it. I learned a lot, like how to change 15 diapers in 20 minutes, what 2-4 year olds were really like, etc.

Anyway, then I moved out to Seattle for grad school and though I might take it up again part time. So I applied to a place, they had me come down and see how I interacted with the kids for a couple hours, etc. Went great. The other teachers thought I did well, and even expressed some amazement that the little girl who usually hated male teachers was grabbing my hand to go out and play at their little recess.

At the end the director (female) said I did great with them, etc., but wouldn't hire a man because of all the controversy lately.

Maybe that was just an excuse and she didn't like me for whatever reason. I dunno.

So, yeah, #MeToo.

JohnAnnArbor said...

At the end the director (female) said I did great with them, etc., but wouldn't hire a man because of all the controversy lately.

There are moms out there that flat-out won't let their kids have a male elementary school teacher.

prairie wind said...

I will never take a plea deal. No matter how good of one it is, if I'm innocent. Prove it. In court. And if my public defender insists I should take the plea deal, screw them, get me another. If the court won't, fine. I'll do it myself.

I believe you mean every word. I tell myself the same thing.

When you know that 97% of federal cases end with a plea agreement, you have to know that innocent people were caught up in that 97%. There is no way that federal prosecutors are SO GOOD that they arrest only guilty people.

Faced with a choice between a plea agreement that will mean going to prison for 2 years or going to trial and
1) being charged with far more offenses than the plea agreement includes or
2) being charged with offenses that all carry mandatory minimum sentences,
you will realize that you could easily spend decades in prison.

I'd like to think that I could stand on principle and refuse the deal. Really. I think I'm tough enough.

Gotta wonder how much of that 97% is people like you and me who thought they would never take the plea.

Leigh said...

This NPR broadcast (from yesterday) discusses sexual assault on college campuses and the Kavanaugh nightmare. The slant is, of course, that accusers never lie. But it also touches on how Betsy Devos is changing the way these cases are handled. Interesting. Plug it in for your commute.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/656509317/how-notions-of-sex-power-and-consent-are-changing-on-college-campuses