I don’t know a bunch on the justice system, but this case caught my attention and made me wonder.
A man’s rape conviction was overturned because a jury member researched the crime on the internet, reports Mirror.co.uk. He will now face a retrial and the jury may be banned from using the internet during the hearings.
It seems that after the conviction was made, two downloaded documents -- “The Feminist Position on Rape” and “Rape and the Criminal Justice System” -- were found in the jury room. Although there was no indication that the documents were discussed among the jurors, the judge told the court that “The internet can provide material which may influence a juror's views. If used for research purposes during a trial, it can just as easily influence the juror's mind as a discussion with a friend or neighbour.”
Thoughts?
perhaps some of our lovely law school feministing editors would like to shed some light...
but my understanding is that when you're in a jury you can't be reading outside shit, yes?
Obviously, I am not one of your law school educated editors ;-) but my understanding of it was that jurors are not permitted to read or listen to accounts of the particular trial they are sitting on. I haven't heard of that being extended to other research materials. I'll be interested to hear what someone who has studied law can tell us about this.
I assume jury relgulations in the UK are similar to those in the US. The only information juries are allowed to get is waht comes from the trial. That includes not only evidence, but also instructions for their deliberation that are given by the judge (and agreed on by defense and prosecution). It would have been unjust not to overturn the conviction.
I'm a lawyer, and I have done some criminal defense. Juries cannot independently research the law.
The judge "charges" the jury, telling them what the elements of the law are. The charges are very carefully considered by both sides, and most of them follow "pattern" jury instructions used over and over. If the jury gets an incorrect instruction, they may have applied the wrong legal standard, so instruction errors often lead to reversals.
If somebody comes into the jury room and says, "I know what the judge said, but the law ought to be something else, here, look at this ..." then I think reversal is proper.
The places for feminist advocacy on how rape is defined is before the legislature, and to the public consciousness. Nobody is supposed to be allowed to influence a jury after they begin deliberations, and that includes us.
thomas--same in the UK?
I really don't think we want jurors in rape trials doing research on the internet. They're just as likely to find men's rights bullshit about how all rape victims are liars as to find feminist analysis.
Jessica: I don't know for sure, but the judge's role in instructing juries in the law is not a recent phenomenon. It's one of those fundamentals that I can't believe has diverged between the siblings that are the U.S. and English legal systems.
yeah, sad but true that's pretty much how it works. I even used that trick a few times myself heh heh heh :)
Say, are any of you ladies from the D.C. Area? You should visit sometime it can be a very exciting place.
Ya, too bad.
Throw them all in jail.
Down with men's Rights.
Oh wait, they don't have any.
I think that's ridiculous. I know you aren't supposed to read or watch news coverage about the case in question, but I don't see why you can't look something up on the internet. These are Jurors - aren't we assuming that they are capable of discerning between varying sources of information? Isn't that what a jury does?
"These are Jurors - aren't we assuming that they are capable of discerning between varying sources of information? Isn't that what a jury does? "
No, it's not. Jurors discern between pieces of information *that a judge has deemed are relevent.* There is considerable wrangling before a jury ever gets in the room about what's relevent and therefore what the jury can see or hear. Many sources of information aren't allowed in the courtroom because the judge thinks they will prejudice the jury.
hmmmmm is feminsim a hate movement???
Women have their faults / men have only two: / everything they say / everything they do."
Popular Feminist Graffiti -
"The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist"
Amazon Odyssey (p. 86) - Ti-Grace Atkinson
"(Rape) is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear"
Against Our Will p.6. - Susan Brownmiller
"We are taught, encouraged, moulded by and lulled into accepting a range of false notions about the family. As a source of some of our most profound experiences, it continues to be such an integral part of our emotional lives that it appears beyond criticism. Yet hiding from the truth of family life leaves women and children vulnerable."
- Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women
"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience."
Vassar College. Assistant Dean of Students - Catherine Comin
"The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things."
SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men.) - Jilly Cooper
" How will the family unit be destroyed? ...[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare."
In "Female Liberation" - Roxanne Dunbarr
"Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it "Her". Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination."
Pornography: Men Possessing Women - Andrea Dworkin
"The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used."
- Andrea Dworkin
"Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and what is left...is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis. The penis is the man; the man is human; the penis signifies humanity."
- Andrea Dworkin
"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig."
Ice And Fire - Andrea Dworkin
"On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom."
Pornography: Men Possessing Women - Andrea Dworkin
"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies."
- Andrea Dworkin
"The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations - for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right - these institutions are real and they must be destroyed."
- Andrea Dworkin
"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership."
- Andrea Dworkin
"Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo."
in The New York Times Magazine - Jodie Foster
"I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father's concubine...What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What's more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal."
- Sylvia Fraser
"My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter."
The Woman's Room - Marilyn French
"All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey."
The Woman's Room - Marilyn French
"All men are rapists and that's all they are."
Author; (later, advisor to Al Gore's Presidential Campaign.) - Marilyn French
"As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women...he can sexually molest his daughters... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE."
(Her emphasis) - Marilyn French
"The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations...obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign."
- Marilyn French
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children...."
"Functions of the Family," WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969 - Linda Gordon
"Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release."
- Germaine Greer
"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference."
Rape: The All-American Crime - Susan Griffin
"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..."
- Sheila Jeffrys
"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it."
Former Congresswoman - Barbara Jordan
Catharine MacKinnon (...) maintains that "the private is a sphere of battery, marital rape and women's exploited labor." In this way, privacy and family are reduced to nothing more than aspects of the master plan, which is male domination. Democratic freedoms and the need to keep the state's nose out of our personal affairs are rendered meaningless. The real reason our society cherishes privacy is because men have invented it as an excuse to conceal their criminality. If people still insist that the traditional family is about love and mutual aid -- ideals which, admittedly, are sometimes betrayed -- they're "hiding from the truth." The family isn't a place where battery and marital rape sometimes happen but where little else apparently does. Sick men don't simply molest their daughters, they operate in league with their wives to "breed" them for that purpose.
The Princess at the Window; (in a critical explication of the Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinhem et al tenets of misandric belief.) - Donna Laframboise
"There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of 'sex acts'...includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder."
summarizing comment on the WAS document,
(A southern Women's Writing Collective: Women Against Sex.) - J.Levine
"Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence."
- Judith Levine
"Men's sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can 'reach WITHIN women to fuck/construct us from the inside out.' Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women's own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, 'even if she does not feel forced.'"
(explicating comment profiling prevailing misandry.) - Judith Levine
"I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, 'hate in love,' for the men women share their lives with -- husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, coworkers."
My Enemy, My Love - Judith Levine
"You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs."
(Prominent legal feminist scholar; University of Michigan, & Yale.) - Catherine MacKinnon
"In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent."
quoted in Professing Feminism:
Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies - Catherine MacKinnon
"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman."
- Catherine MacKinnon
"We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."
From Sisterhood Is Powerful, (ed), 1970, p. 537 - Robin Morgan
"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan
"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire."
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan
"And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism -- the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group, specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group -- skin, color, sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters, but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism -- the oppressed have no alternative -- for they have no power but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men -- but in the short run it's going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women -- kill your fathers, not your mothers"
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan
"We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women."
- Katha Pollitt
"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex."
SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men.) - Valerie Solana
"'To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo."
Scum Manifesto - Valerie Solanas
"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men..."
One Woman, One Vote, Wheeler, p. 58 - Elizabeth Stanton
"All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck"
Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator, quoted by Richard Dinsmore, who brought a successful civil suit against the University in the amount of $600,000. - Unknown
www.razberry.com/raz/
"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference."
Rape: The All-American Crime - Susan Griffin
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children...."
"Functions of the Family," WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969 -
"Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it "Her". Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination."
Pornography: Men Possessing Women - Andrea Dworkin
"In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent."
quoted in Professing Feminism:
AGain with 15 thousand convictions of rape per year in a population of 300 million is hardly a problem that feminists make it out to be. You use rape to further your malicous campaign against all men of this great nation.
To further womans marriage to Uncle Sam and the undermining of any disconsent to the blindly following of the elite of this nation.
Here are some female rapists we need to be on the lookout for!!! Bring your kids in and lock the doors ladies!!!
November 1994 Debi Mercer 42 / 11.1994/ Former teachers aide and district attorney's wife/Convicted and SENTENCED 5 years probation in July 1994, after pleading guilty to first-degree official misconduct and third-degree sexual abuse involving a middle school male student. She was brought before the sentencing judge again after she admitted she entered a school to leave her daughter a uniform. The judge warned Mercer that he would revoke her probation if she violates her probation again. (Source: www.oregonlive.com)
June 1996 Mary Kay Letourneau, 34, begins a relationship with Vili Fualaau, 13, a 6th grader in her class that she has known since 2nd grade in 1989. (He is two years older than other 6th graders). Her 80 day sentence is served in place of her original 89 month sentence, which she serves when she violates the conditions of her parole. Schmitz
February 1998 Minnesota high-school teacher Julie Ann Feil, 32, pleaded guilty in 1998 to having a three-month sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy in her English class. Sentence: 7-years.
November 1998 Deborah Ann Christopher. Plead guilty to sexual conduct with a minor stemming from a 5-month sexual relationship with a 15-year old boy. Sentenced to a year in jail and lifetime probation.
June 1999 Beth Friedman, in which the teacher allegedly gave gifts to a student she met in her study skills class to encourage a sexual relationship. The 42-year-old Florida teacher is convicted of having an 18-month relationship with a 14-year-old. Sentence: One year probation plus psychological counseling.
August 1999 Robin Sharp. Plead guilty in August, 1999 to indecent liberties with a 14-year-old hearing impaired boy. Sentenced to 3 years' probation and ordered to undergo psychological testing.
June 2000 Lora Rodriguez. Plead guilty to a felony count of sexual conduct with a student and a gross misdemeanor count of child abuse and neglect. Sentenced to probation.
November 2000 Catherine Peay. Plead guilty to child abuse and a second degree sex offense in. Eligible for parole in 2 1/2 years. She faced a maximum of 35 years but nonbinding state sentencing guidelines in the case called for five to ten years. Sentenced to five years in prison on each count and ordered to serve sentences concurrently. She is required to register as a sex offender and have no contact with children under 16 without an adult around.
April 2001 Nakia Matthews 26/ Las Vegas, NV/ 04.2001/ Hall monitor at West Middle School/ Pleaded guilty to having a two-year sexual relationship with a student beginning when the boy was 12 years old. SENTENCED: PROBATION by District Judge Lee Gates SOURCE: Las Vegas Review
May 2001 Kimberly Merson, 24, a substitute teacher and cheerleading coach at Francis Scott Key Hight School, Carroll County, Minn, was charged with inappropriate sexual conduct after she allegedly got eight boys between 15 and 17 drunk, brought them to her home, stripped for them and had sex with them. Sentence: 18 months in the county detention center.
May 2001 Tracie Mokry, 21, a student teacher in the art department (of the same Francis Scott Key Hight School), was charged with bringing seven male students to a weekend party where she drank with them and had sex with a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old. The charges against her were eventually dropped.
June 2001 Linda Jane Dingler, 44 /Lincoln/ 6.01/ Former history and Drivers Education teacher at Lincoln High School/ Dingler was a 15-year employee of the Talladega County School System/ Arrested 1.2000 and charged with one count of transferring obscene material to a child by computer and on one count of soliciting a child by computer. The victim was a 15-year-old female. Plead guilty. SENTENCED: 10 years for each charge to run concurrently. She was given another 10 years for second-degree sodomy in a second trial in Calhoun County. That sentence will run concurrently with the rest.
October 2001 LUBBOCK, Texas. Former teacher charged with sexual assault --(Avalanche-Journal )--A former Cavazos Junior High teacher was charged Thursday with three counts of sexual assault. Warrants also were issued for Kara Kilborn, 25, of Lubbock, who is accused of sharing vodka and having sexual relations with three Cavazos students in May.
Sources:
http://www.priority2.org/alabama2.htm
http://www.priority2.org/alabama.htm
http://www.nssa.us/nssajrnl/22-2/htm/16.htm
http://www.misbruikdoorhulpverleners.nl/Ar...Buitenland.html
http://news.google.com/
http://news.search.yahoo.com/search
I really don't think we want jurors in rape trials doing research on the internet. They're just as likely to find men's rights bullshit about how all rape victims are liars as to find feminist analysis. By sally.
So, when men speak of rape from a defense position - it's automatically b/s in your eyes. When feminists speak of rape, such as 'all men are potential rapists', '1 in 4 have been victims' and so on, it's "analysis". Equality & feminism just do not go hand in hand at all.