false accusations

Jonathan Montgomery: Victimized By An Unethical Tag Team Of A Vicious Teenager And An Officious Attorney General

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
What now qualifies as a rising star in the Virginia GOP.

Atty. Gen. Cuccinelli: What now qualifies as a rising star in the Virginia GOP.

Jonathan Montgomery was recently pardoned by Virginia Governor Bob McDonald for a rape he never committed. This inherent contradiction—“We know you’re innocent, and we forgive you” —was made necessary by a sequence of events that could have been devised by Kafka, Stephen King or Mel Brooks, but unfortunately really happened. They happened because of two individuals who were absent the day basic ethics were handed out.

First and foremost in this wing of the Hall of Ethics Shame was Elizabeth Paige Coast, from the Tawana Brawley school of sociopathy.  When she was a teenager in 2007, her parents caught her surfing internet porn. To deflect their anger and avoid punishment, she concocted a story about how her sex drive had been addled as a result of being sexually molested when she was ten by a neighbor hood 14-year-old, Montgomery. She thought, since his family had moved away, that nothing would happen to him. Wrong. He was arrested and she testified against him to avoid telling the truth to her parents, putting him in jail for four years before she finally decided to recant her accusation. We are told that she has been charged with one count of perjury, and was fired from her job with the police department. Not enough, not by a long shot.

Then Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli decided to pick up where Coast left off. Continue reading →

Condemning Wanetta Gibson

/ Jack Marshall / 179 Comments

There’s no treatment harsh enough for Wanetta Gibson

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t receive a nasty and haughty message attacking me for harshly judging the unethical conduct of another. “Who are you to judge?,” the critic will write. “Are you so perfect? Have you never made a mistake? How can you know what was going on in that person’s life, or how bad she (or he) feels? What right do you have to find fault with someone else?” My answer, if I bother to send one, seldom varies. I tell these correspondents that all of us have a duty to judge others so that we are qualified to judge ourselves, to make certain that societal standards are carefully considered and vetted, and to identify conduct that we believe is destructive to society. Refusing to judge others makes it easy for the predators around us to take advantage of our ethical laziness, and people get hurt as a result.

And in those dark moments late at night, after a difficult day when my confidence is at low ebb, as I begin to doubt the purpose of my life and question my own values, I think about people like the horrible Wanetta Gibson.

From the New York Daily News: Continue reading →

In Brooklyn, Another Nightmare Prosecution

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Prosecutors intentionally robbed Darrell Dula of a year out of his life. What should happen to them?

We continue Unethical Prosecutors Week with this jaw-dropping horror story from Brooklyn, New York.

In June 0f 2011, the accusations of a 22-year-old prostitute led to Damien Crooks and Jamali Brockett being arrested on charges of forcing the woman  into prostitution when she was a 13-year-old girl, and then raping, assaulting and sexually trafficking her for the next 8 years. She also accused  Jawara Brockett and Darrell Dula of raping her. They were also arrested and charged.

The day after she fingered Brockett and Dula, however, the 22-year-old prostitute confessed to detectives that she concocted the accusations against them.  “I once again asked [her] if she was raped,” a detective wrote in a police report after the interview. “She told me ‘no’…”   Then she signed a recantation.

Never mind. Even though they knew a conviction would be impossible after the alleged victim and accuser had recanted her own account, prosecutors continued to pursue the case. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: What To Do With a Bad Seed?

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

A horror story from Cowlitz County, Washington:

Little Rhoda didn't know what she was doing was bad! Suuuuuure she didn't...

When she was was 11 years old, Cassandra Ann Kennedy decided that her father didn’t love her enough, and that she would have a happier life if he wasn’t around any more. So that she made up a story that her father had raped her, told police, and..voila! In 2002 her father was convicted of rape and  sent to 15 years in a Washington state prison.

In January of 2012, Cassandra, now 23,  confessed that it was all a lie. “I did a horrible thing,” Cassandra told detectives. “It’s not OK to sit and be locked in this horrible place for something you didn’t do. It’s just not right.”

Figured that out all by yourself, did you, Cassie? Continue reading →

Scylla and Charybdis in the Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is Scylla. Charybdis is in the teachers lounge.

Responding to one of the recent posts here about the deteriorating relationships between students, teachers and administrator, teacher Brook Styler alerted us to his own crisis, a situation right out of “The Children’s Hour” in which vengeful female students, aided and abetted by parents, circulated rumors that lost him his job.

Styler has launched a website, Teacher Hunt, to collect the experiences of teachers, who, like him, have been victimized by false accusations from students. I plan on visiting it often. But the site appears at a time in which teachers using their students for sexual gratification is either on the rise, or is being uncovered with remarkable efficiency. Every day, one or more cases of teachers preying on students is in the news. Yesterday, it was Rachel L. Farrell, 25, a  Bangor, Maine  high school teacher  charged with having sex with a 17-year-old student on “numerous occasions” while she was supposed to be tutoring him in English. Authorities believe she had sexual relations with as many as three other students. Today, it was the still unfolding horror of Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in the Los Angeles community of Florence-Firestone, who was charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children after over 400 photos were discovered by a CVS clerk, showing pornographic conduct involving his students (age 7-10) over a five year period. Berndt, now being held on $23 million bail, regularly told his students that they were going to play a “tasting game,” in which children were blindfolded and, in some cases, gagged with tape, authorities say. They were then fed the teacher’s semen, administered to them on a blue plastic spoon and, according to one alleged victim’s father, on cookies.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings, can you? Continue reading →

Strauss-Kahn and His Accuser, Victims of The Postman

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The accuser of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF head who has been devastated by her sensational rape charge, now admits that parts of her original account of the incident and an earlier accusation of rape she made to seek asylum in the U.S. were false.

The Altantic’s Megan McArdle sums up the Ethics Train Wreck thusly:

“There are two possibilities here, neither of them good:

1) A woman with an unsavory past, who has done desperate things to get out of terrible economic conditions, was raped by a prominent figure, and he’s going to get away with it because of her history.
2) A serial cad had consensual sex with a chambermaid, and she attempted to destroy him with a false rape allegation for personal gain. And because of the presumption that women don’t lie about rape, she has succeeded in destroying him . . . though not so much in the personal gain part. To quote Ray Donovan, ‘Where do I go to get my reputation back?'” Continue reading →