Good grief!

Court Requires Disabled Rape Victim To Prove She Resisted, Calls For Evidence Of ‘Biting, Kicking, Scratching’

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 3, 2012

In a 4-3 ruling Tuesday afternoon, the Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned the sexual assault conviction of a man who had sex with a woman who “has severe cerebral palsy, has the intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old and cannot verbally communicate.” The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define physical incapacity for the purpose of sexual assault as “unconscious or for any other reason. . . physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act,” the defendant could not be convicted if there was any chance that the victim could have communicated her lack of consent. Since the victim in this case was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” the Court ruled that that victim could have communicated lack of consent despite her serious mental deficiencies:

When we consider this evidence in the light most favorable to sustaining the verdict, and in a manner that is consistent with the state’s theory of guilt at trial, we, like the Appellate Court, ‘are not persuaded that the state produced any credible evidence that the [victim] was either unconscious or so uncommunicative that she was physically incapable of manifesting to the defendant her lack of consent to sexual intercourse at the time of the alleged sexual assault.’

According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), lack of physical resistance is not evidence of consent, as “many victims make the good judgment that physical resistance would cause the attacker to become more violent.” RAINN also notes that lack of consent is implicit “if you were under the statutory age of consent, or if you had a mental defect” as the victim did in this case.

That's the 3-paragraph limit. I'm disenheartened that a court would do this. If anyone knows or has family members in this condition, resistance is not what is going to happen. It makes me too sick to say anymore, but you guys judge. More at link:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/10/03/947981/court-requires-disabled-rape-victim-to-prove-she-fought-back-calls-for-evidence-of-biting-kicking-scratching/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021474289

'Legitimate rape' is what the GOP calls it. Trumad's OP shows they are still winning, although Akin is gone.

When I was at the point of writing my dissertation in graduate school, after a difficult road since my adviser had absconded to greener pastures several years prior, an administrator in my department switched the dissertation year fellowship I had been nominated for by the chair of the department with his own choice. He was able to get away with this because he submitted the nominations, and he got the call asking which of the two was the valid one. For those unfamiliar with the ramifications of this: it means I lost a year's salary, and by the time I found out it was too late to make other arrangements, so I would have been forced to take out loans.

I tried to complain at the graduate school level, but after months of keeping me on tenterhooks, in which I was working to support myself rather than writing my dissertation, they kicked it back to my department. The department only made the professor write a letter offering to "recuse" himself from further affairs pertaining to me. Since the stakes were so small, I couldn't find any lawyer to take my case or any advocate who understood this as any sort of important in justice. Losing a year's salary and having no way to make it up on the spot, with no offer of reparations or even an apology, was a huge injustice to me. I took antidepressants to try to cope: they either didn't work or made things worse: I ended up leaving graduate school after 7 years and with my dissertation mostly written.

Since I was disabled and really needed the stable health insurance I had in graduate school, and had no training to go right into a stable professional situation with benefits, this had major ramifications on the outcome of the rest of my life.

No, a Letter of Reflection is not enough.

If you do something that causes major damage to someone else, that may have ripple effects that go on throughout the rest of their lives, you have to make an effort toward AMENDS.

Your failure to make amends will not only cost the other person whose life you ruined, it will cost that person's family and the rest of society as they are forced to pick up the pieces for what you did.

Writing a Letter is cheap. It is not the responsible thing. It is not the moral thing. It is the cheap and sleazy way of con artists and sociopaths.

*Above story is not to compare my situation with rape in any way.