Letters to the Editor
Ben Dover
Published Letters: 534
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Basis for a rape prosecution:
[Read the article: District attorney won't take gang rape case]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]1. THAT A RAPE REALLY DID FUCKING OCCUR! (It didn't at Durham in regards to the Duke Lacrosse Athletes, GOT IT!)
2. That there be physical evidence of rape (Not a fucking dream sequence where you are suspended from the bathroom ceiling while it happened, which Crystal Gail Mangum claimed! Typically you aren't stripping at the local titty bar the next night after being raped, which Crystal Gail Mangum was doing!). There was no DNA. There were no injuries. There was nothing.
3. That you have a credible witness and story that doesn't change. (Which Crystal Gail Mangum modified herself and upon instruction from the PD and DA's office multiple times).
4. That you have lineup that is accepted as being proper. Which it wasn't.
I could go on, but it is pointless.
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Rape is a violent crime, by
[Read the article: District attorney won't take gang rape case]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]definition, and a horrible crime. That being said people do make false claims of rape.
"False reporting
A contemporary American textbook on rape investigation observes that "little is published which addresses the issue and concept of false allegation." There is no standard definition and cases where the victim recants the accusation may be classified as false allegations, along with cases where investigation shows an accusation to be false. [6]
A 1997 article in the Columbia Journalism Review dealing with the debate surrounding false reporting, noted that wildly different figures, from 2% to 50% of all rape reports, have been presented:[7]
"... one explanation for such a wide range in the statistics might simply be that they come from different studies of different populations... But there's also a strong political tilt to the debate. A low number would undercut a belief about rape as being as old as the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife: that some women, out of shame or vengeance ... claim that their consensual encounters or rebuffed advances were rapes. If the number is high, on the other hand, advocates for women who have been raped worry it may also taint the credibility of the genuine victims of sexual assault." [7]
In her work, "The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault", Michelle J. Anderson of the Villanova University School of Law states: "As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown."[8] The FBI's 1996 Uniform Crime Report states that 8% of reports of forcible rape were determined to be unfounded upon investigation,[9] 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.[10]
In 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences, in one small urban community, of false rape allegations made to the police between 1978 and 1987. Unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to "seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits". The falseness of the allegations was not decided by the police, or by Dr. Kanin; they were "... declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false." The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period. The figure of 41% forms a lower estimate of the total number of false rape accusations given to the police during this period. It is unlikely that a significant number of valid rape complaints were recanted. All accusers were told that false accusations were a crime and that they faced prosecution upon recantation. An accuser could have simply dropped the case, without formally recanting, and would not have faced the possibility of prosecution. It is possible, however, that some false accusations were never recanted and even resulted in a conviction. In Dr. Kanin's research, the complainants who made false allegations did so (by their own statements during recantation) for one or some combination of three major reasons:
providing an alibi. Dr. Kanin's report describes a woman who got into a bar fight and, fearing that this might prevent her from regaining custody of her children, filed a rape complaint to account for her injuries.
a means of gaining revenge. Dr. Kanin's report describes an 18 year old woman who engages in consexual sex with a boarder staying at her house. After he refuses to continue their relationship she accuses him of rape.
a platform for seeking attention/sympathy. Dr. Kanin's report describes a woman who becomes attracted to her therapist and in an attempt to elicit sympathy from him fabricates a story of rape and is subsequently pressured by him to report it to the police.
Dr. Kanin also looked at the police records of two large midwestern state universities and found that, of the 64 rape accusations, 32 (50%) were eventually recanted. Unlike the city police in the other study, the university police did not use polygraph examinations and the investigations were all performed by female officers. This figure also forms a lower estimate of the total number of false accusations reported to the police during this period and it is similarly possible that there were false accusations that were never recanted and resulted in convictions. However Kanin warns against reading too much into his results: "Certainly our intent is not to suggest that the 41 percent incidence found here be extrapolated to other populations, particularly in light of our ignorance regarding the structural variables."[11]
It is possible that a woman could use a claim of rape to try to escape consequences for her own sexual choices. In a 2007 case, for example, a woman named Tracy Denise Roberson is accused of falsely claiming rape in order to avoid being discovered as an adulterer."
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Convicted by juries, exonerated
[Read the article: District attorney won't take gang rape case]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]by science:
http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/dnaevid.txt
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1719