Tag Archives: Victim

News

Woman recants false rape charge, freeing man after 3 years in prison

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Story from CBS News. (H/T Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

A construction worker imprisoned for nearly three years was cleared by an apologetic judge on Thursday after his accuser admitted she lied about being gang raped to make her friends feel sorry for her.

William McCaffrey hugged his lawyer when state Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers – who’d also presided over William McCaffrey’s rape and kidnapping trial – threw out the conviction and dismissed the initial charges. DNA tests also had called the conviction into doubt.

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” the soft-spoken McCaffrey said outside court. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

Biurny Peguero, then 22, originally said three men, led by McCaffrey, raped her at knifepoint after tricking her into getting into their car after a night out in 2005.

She testified at his trial and said at his 2006 sentencing that the “tragedy changed my life forever.” He got a 20-year prison term.

Defense lawyer Glenn A. Garber later persuaded prosecutors to use new technology to retest DNA samples from an apparent bite mark on Peguero’s arm.

The initial tests were inconclusive. The new ones showed the genetic material not only wasn’t McCaffrey’s but came from at least two women, apparently friends of Peguero’s who fought with her.

Peguero confessed her lie to a priest and then to authorities this year. She claimed she was raped because she wanted her friends “to feel badly” for her, and then was afraid to back down from her story as the case continued, prosecutors said in court filings this fall.

My concern about this is twofold. First, it undermines the testimony of women who really have been raped. Second, it makes men mistrustful of women so that men will think twice about forming any kind of relationship. Good women need to speak up about these injustices now… that is, unless they really don’t care that men are imprisoned on false charges of rape.

Why do women make false accusations of rape?

One recent study listed three reasons why women invent false rape accusations.

Excerpt:

A study of rape allegations in Indiana over a nine-year period revealed that over 40% were shown to be false — not merely unproven. According to the author, “These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations.” ( Kanin EJ. Arch Sex Behav. 1994 Feb;23(1):81-92 False rape allegations. )

In 1985, a study of 556 rape allegations found that 27% accusers recanted when faced with a polygraph (which can be ordered in the military), and independent evaluation showed a false accusation rate of 60%. (McDowell, Charles P., Ph.D. “False Allegations.” Forensic Science Digest, (publication of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations), Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 64.)

Please leave a comment below explaining what you think should happen to a woman like Biurny Peguero, who makes a false accusation that sends a man to prison for 3 years, because she wanted to obtain sympathy and attention. And be sure and check the links below for other false rape accusations that cover the other two common reasons for making false rape accusations.

False accusations in divorce trials

False accusations of domestic violence and sexual abuse are also commonly made during divorce settlements in order to get custody of the children, and the attendant benefits.

Consider this article from Touchstone magazine, by Stephen Baskerville.

Excerpt:

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet patently false accusations of both child abuse and domestic violence are rampant in divorce courts, almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of a legal seminar tells divorcing mothers, according to the Chicago Tribune. “You just have to accuse.”

Among scholars and legal practitioners it is common knowledge that patently trumped-up accusations are routinely used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Elaine Epstein, president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases. The Illinois Bar Journal describes how abuse accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” The UMKC Law Review reports on a survey of judges and attorneys revealing that disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence are used as a “litigation strategy.” In the Yale Law Review, Jeannie Suk calls domestic violence accusations a system of “state-imposed de facto divorce” and documents how courts use unsupported accusations to justify evicting Americans from their homes and children.

The multi-billion dollar abuse industry has become “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice” writes David Heleniak in the Rutgers Law Review. Domestic violence has become “a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”

If we care about justice for all, then we have to care about this, too.

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News

Woman who made false rape accusation gets zero jail time

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Story here in the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

A woman who accused a student of rape after dragging him into a public toilet for sex was spared jail yesterday.

Bisexual Sarah-Jane Hilliard, 20, seduced Grant Bowers when the two bumped into each other during a night out clubbing.

[…]She had denied perverting the course of justice.

Mr Bowers – who says he is now afraid to speak to women – said: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. That’s not even a slap on the wrist. She’s been let off and I’m still having to sneak around because there are still people after me who think I did it.’

It was more than a week after his arrest that Mr Bowers discovered he was not to be charged.

But during that time Hilliard, who was in a relationship with a woman, contacted the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in the hope of claiming up to £7,500.

Mr Bowers’s father Tony, 48, said: ‘My son was facing up to ten years in prison for rape on the strength of her lies. The least I expected was for her to have been given a prison sentence.

[…]Hilliard’s lie began to unravel when police were unable to find CCTV footage of the pair leaving the club.

A friend admitted they had been at another nightclub called Colors and detectives found CCTV evidence of Hilliard and Mr Bowers, who was 19 at the time, kissing and holding hands.

How should men feel about stories like this?

ECM had sent me this article from the ABA Journal a few days back.

Excerpt:

A judge’s race or gender makes for a dramatic difference in the outcome of cases they hear—at least for cases in which race and gender allegedly play a role in the conduct of the parties, according to two recent studies.

The results were the focus of a program about “Diversity on the Bench: Is the ‘Wise Latina’ a Myth?,” sponsored by the ABA Judicial Division at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Orlando on Saturday afternoon.

In federal racial harassment cases, one study (PDF) found that plaintiffs lost just 54 percent of the time when the judge handling the case was an African-American. Yet plaintiffs lost 81 percent of the time when the judge was Hispanic, 79 percent when the judge was white, and 67 percent of the time when the judge was Asian American.

The comprehensive study, by professors from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, examined a random assortment of 40 percent of all reported racial harassment cases from six federal circuits between 1981 and 2003.

A second study (PDF), looked at 556 federal appellate cases involving allegations of sexual harassment or sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The finding: plaintiffs were at least twice as likely to win if a female judge was on the appellate panel.

Are courts impartial?

Mentoring

What has Michele Bachmann got that third-wave feminists haven’t got?

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First, take a look at this video of Michele Bachmann discussing her little debate with Democrat Arlen Specter, and keep a count of the things that she does that strike you as admirable.

What do we learn from this video?

My biggest problem in trying to get along with SOME women is the fact that I feel enormous pressure to only say things that women agree with. They only want to hear compliments, never criticisms. But I don’t like that – I want the freedom to be myself and to say whatever I want.

In a recent post that I was talking about William Lane Craig’s advice on how to have a happy marriage. He recommended that couples learn how to argue properly. And I think in that video we learn several tips on how to argue properly.

Here are some questions to ask about this video:

  • Does Michele feel offended or victimized during the debate?
  • Does Michele lose her temper during the debate?
  • Does Michele make gender an issue during the debate?
  • Does Michele focus more on arguments/evidence or feelings/motives?
  • Does Michele accept apologies and try to move on?

For me, a fun thing to do with a woman is to get into a good argument without having to censor myself. This happened to me recently where I was getting into some very long debates with a woman I really liked and the more I was able to be myself and have her not censor me, the more I just wanted to grab her and hug her. It became a really powerful feeling that I had a LOT of trouble resisting.

I distinctly remember at one point we were having a real scrap and I was pleading with her every hour to see whether she was feeling OK with the degree of sustained disagreement that we were engaging in, and I’ll never ever forget what she said. She said that she was fine, but that she was willing to stop if I needed a break. We had been debating a bunch of things for about three hours. (a typical date)

The experience of being myself and being accepted is so different than what I hear other men saying about women that it really makes me sad. It turns out that men lie a lot to women in relationships – telling them what they want to hear and hiding their real views in order to get sex. I just think this is demeaning to women and men. A much better idea is to argue it out with her and treat her as an equal.

And that doesn’t mean that there is no place for feelings. I remember one day this woman tried to clobber me on some obscure point of theology and she took a very adversarial tack. And I was surprised that I just felt wounded and attacked, so I asked her to adjust her approach, and she did. So I do think that there is a time for talking about feelings, but not to use them as an argument.

I think that when a person is hurt (male or female), the thing to do is to get the other person a gift, and have them sit down with the gift and then you explain to them that you love them and that something they said or did hurt you and explain how it made you feel. But I don’t think that hurt feelings should be used as a substitute for an argument in a debate. Debates should be about truth, not who “wins”.

So the main point I am trying to make is that the way that a woman approaches debates can actually be a powerful way of getting a man to really like her. The experience of being able to be yourself with a woman and to express your views in a heated discussion without getting attacked or censored by her is exciting and addictive. It makes a man like a woman because he feels that she understands him.

Consider these wise words:

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
– Winston Churchill

Women have the capacity to make a man like them without having to resort to sex.  One last point – I also think that the experience of leading another person to try something new that’s morally good or serves God’s interests can also be a bonding experience.

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