Does the Law Take Rape Seriously Enough?
This (Garrido case) is not the only case than makes me think that the answer is in the negative.
One shouldn't make any very definite pronouncements about such things without some experience with actual legal proceedings, I suppose--so my thought ought to come out as a question rather than an assertion...so here it is:
Why was this psycho ever let out of jail in the first place?
My intuitive reaction is that the death penalty would have been appropriate. But the 50 year sentence doesn't seem unreasonable I suppose. Getting out in less than eleven years does, of course, seem unreasonable.
A good friend of mine who is a public defender once told me that rape cases are complex because false charges of rape are so common. However, there seems to no real doubt that Garrido committed the 1976 crime, and seems very likely that he committed at least one rape (of a 14-year-old) prior to that.
Given how brutally violent such crimes are, and given how devastating they can be to the victims, and given how likely sex offenders are to repeat such crimes, I'm strongly inclined to think it would be sensible to lock them up and throw away the key.
We do not even know how many lives this Garrido person has destroyed, but three seems to be the bottom-limit, ultra-conservative guess, even excluding the families and friends of his victims.
I wonder what the laws would be like if such crimes were more often perpetrated against males (outside of prison, that is)? I expect such people would not get out after ten years...
This (Garrido case) is not the only case than makes me think that the answer is in the negative.
One shouldn't make any very definite pronouncements about such things without some experience with actual legal proceedings, I suppose--so my thought ought to come out as a question rather than an assertion...so here it is:
Why was this psycho ever let out of jail in the first place?
My intuitive reaction is that the death penalty would have been appropriate. But the 50 year sentence doesn't seem unreasonable I suppose. Getting out in less than eleven years does, of course, seem unreasonable.
A good friend of mine who is a public defender once told me that rape cases are complex because false charges of rape are so common. However, there seems to no real doubt that Garrido committed the 1976 crime, and seems very likely that he committed at least one rape (of a 14-year-old) prior to that.
Given how brutally violent such crimes are, and given how devastating they can be to the victims, and given how likely sex offenders are to repeat such crimes, I'm strongly inclined to think it would be sensible to lock them up and throw away the key.
We do not even know how many lives this Garrido person has destroyed, but three seems to be the bottom-limit, ultra-conservative guess, even excluding the families and friends of his victims.
I wonder what the laws would be like if such crimes were more often perpetrated against males (outside of prison, that is)? I expect such people would not get out after ten years...
posted by Winston Smith at
5:14 PM
5 Comments:
I'm curious about the assertion of false rape charges. Are there statistics to back that up? Are there more false rape charges than, say, false assault or theft charges? Is he conflating "false" with "unsucessful"? (One assumes, in a perfect world, that verdicts are always decided on the pure factual merits of the case, implying that any acquittal means the charge was filed falsely, but in reality the biases of the judge and jury are a real factor. In many cases, a jury might acquit a guilty rape defendant where they would convict an assault or robbery defendant, all evidence being equal, because e.g. they felt that the victim "deserved" it. Thus, we get an acquittal although the charge was not made falsely.)
False, not merely unproven. At least in certain rather rough and rural parts of VA, false charges of rape are apparently just one small (but common) part of a swirling chaos of backwardness, drugs, violence and feuding that tends to bring the same individuals and families into repeated contact with the legal system.
Needless to say, such false charges are appalling in and of themselves--I can't really think of something more horrible to falsely accuse someone of--but they also undermine the legitimacy of veridical charges of rape.
Incidentally, note that this might vary from area to area. I only know one person who can speak with authority on this matter, and he can only speak about one area, an area which is in many ways unrepresentative of the country as a whole.
I found this in the Wiki about Rape statistics:
The FBI's 1996 Uniform Crime Report states that 8% of reports of forcible rape were determined to be unfounded upon investigation,[11] but that percentage does not include cases where an accuser fails or refuses to cooperate in an investigation or drops the charges. A British study using a similar methodology that does not include the accusers who drop out of the justice process found a false reporting rate of 8% as well.[12]
Link
Actually, credible estimates of false accusations of rape apparently range from 2% to around 50%, and (as I guessed above) seem to vary across communities.
One weird thing here is that there is, according to the intertubes, a great deal of controversy about this point.
Left to my own devices, though, I would never even have guessed as high as 8%.
How that compares to other crimes, I do not know.
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