Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 449 Editor's Choice: 87
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Suing the father
[Read the article: Sexual assault victim sues defense attorney]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While it may not be morally right, I think Jane Doe has a legal right to sue the father even if she deliberately chose to get drunk at his son's parties, because she is a minor. For the same reason that people under the legal age of consent can voluntarily have sex and then later bring statutory rape charges against an adult they had sex with, a minor can voluntarily get drunk and then sue the responsible adults who provided her with alcohol, because providing a minor with alcohol is against the law. Her consent to get drunk is irrelevant to the law, as legally she *can't* consent to get drunk.
If there was GHB or some other date rape drug involved the moral case becomes clearer, but even if she chose to get smashed out of her mind (and how many young teens actually know their own alcohol tolerance well enough to know at what point they're going to pass out?), it was the father's responsibility to make sure alcohol was not served to minors in his home, and he fell down on that. He could get off with evidence of due diligence -- if he made any attempt to prevent his son from throwing these wild parties in his absence or if he had no good reason to believe his son might do such a thing -- but if there was more than one such party and any evidence of complaint about it before Jane Doe's rape, he could well be hosed in a civil suit.
As for Cavallo, there is no excuse whatsoever for his behavior (which also includes publicly referring to her as "trash" while justifying going through her garbage.) I believe a PI should have the right to investigate a rape accuser in order to ensure that the defendant gets the best defense possible, but fliers spreading her name around? Visibly following her? The behavior was designed to emotionally traumatize someone who had already been through a horrific experience, and plainly, given that there was videotape evidence of the rape, it was done because the only hope these boys had of escaping punishment for their crimes would be to get the victim to drop the charges or refuse to testify. (Porn star? Jesus H Christ, if you have to try to argue that a normal teenage girl who was shown brutally raped and violated with objects while unconscious, on videotape, consented because she wanted to be a porn star -- despite being visibly unconscious -- to get someone acquitted, just drop the damn case. There are defense strategies that are not worth pursuing.) Cavallo should be sued out of business as a deterrent to PI's and lawyers who try to defend indefensible cases by torturing the victim.
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Focus on the density, not the family status
[Read the article: We are a family]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If there are 27 related people living in the same house, and the house is a single-family unit with three bedrooms, there are going to be problems. Insanely high densities are, I think, something it is reasonable to legislate against. However, three unrelated people in a single-family home is not even close to that level.
I do not approve of laws that dictate that only family may live together. Frankly, not only is it discriminatory to homosexuals and unmarried couples, but it implies that *friendship* is an unimportant human connection. I wouldn't live in a place where I couldn't let a friend stay with me indefinitely to help me out with the rent.
The most effective way to handle this is probably to enforce fire code laws (which have to be absurdly high -- it is not a fire risk to have eight adults living in a single-family home, but having twenty might be a different story), and to enforce existing laws against disorderly behavior, poor house grooming (never mowing your lawn... if I can get a 60 dollar ticket for not mowing my lawn because my mower was stolen, in a big city, how come a town can't enforce mow-your-lawn laws?), trash in the yard, etc. It's not the number of people in the house, it's the impact they have on the neighbors. Eight quiet, responsible adults leading peaceful lives in a single-family dwelling are better neighbors than one married couple that are constantly having loud drunken parties and equally loud, violent fights with each other, on the lawn, at 3 am. Enforce the number of cars you're allowed to park on the street and you can even control parking space issues that would otherwise come up with eight people in a house. But most of this should be handled by existing laws penalizing the actual behavior that is a problem, not what's seen as the source cause of the behavior. And trying to prevent two unmarried adults and their three respective children from living in a four-bedroom house is insane. This country's laws already offer too damn little support for close friendships.