rape

The “Too Handsome To Rape” Defense

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
Sharper, Mathis, Ted Bundy.

Sharper, Mathis, Ted Bundy.

For whatever reason, there have been a lot of attacks on the legal profession lately—and some from within the legal profession—because of so-called “disgusting” and “frivolous” arguments by lawyers who are zealously representing their clients. These range from outrage over the so-called “affluenza” defense (which, it apparently does no good to point out, was explicitly rejected by the judge in that case), to the law suit against the Glendale, California memorial to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese in World War II, to the argument that Red Sox broadcaster Jerry Remy was complicit in his son’s allegedly murdering his girlfriend because Remy hired a lawyer who mounted a vigorous defense in the son’s earlier domestic abuse arrests.

Lawyers are ethically obligated to advance whatever non-frivolous arguments and theories that are most likely to achieve their clients’ objectives, whether it is avoiding prison or rationalizing the crimes of the Japanese army. That is their job and societal function, and it is essential to our avoiding a jack-boot system where any of us could be thrown in jail by popular opinion or government edict. The laws are there to be used by every citizen, even when the citizen’s objectives are unethical, or when the citizen is a cur.

Our rights are all protected well by this principle, and it’s high time we stopped bitching about it.

Undeterred by this, however, yet another defense attorney is being savaged in the news media and blogosphere, as well as by women’s rights advocates, for making an argument in defense of his client that they find offensive. In Georgia, Darriuos Mathis and his legal team are making the argument, among their efforts to show that the evidence against him is not sufficiently conclusive, that Mathis is too attractive--fit, handsome, sexy– to have to resort to kidnapping and raping a 24-year-old woman two years ago, which is what he charged with.

Continue reading →

KABOOM! Does Everyone Upset About The “Affluenza” Sentence Feel Better Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
Top: Morris. Bottom: Me.

Top: Morris. Bottom: Me.

Today we travel cross the pond for a head explosion-prompting episode. A charming young woman and mother named Loren Morris, now 21, began having sexual intercourse  with an 8-year-old boy five years ago, and continued for two years until he was ten years old, involving about 50 forced sexual acts.

The boy, now 14, was overheard bragging about his premature sex life at school, and that led to his molester’s arrest and trial. This week a judge today gave Morris a two-year prison sentence at Worcester Crown Court. She will be eligible for release on parole after only a year.

This case is relevant to a couple of recent Ethics Alarms controversies. Presumably Morris is being sentenced leniently on the basis of her horrific crime being committed while she was a juvenile, even though she is an adult now. As I asserted in the stateside case of the juvenile assault ripening into a murder, I think a juvenile whose crime is only discovered and proven after he or she enters adulthood should be tried and punished as an adult. Continue reading →

Ethics, Justice and Punishment: The Don Collins-Robert Middleton Case

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Collins

Several readers sent me this case, which is as odd as it is horrible. In 1998, Don Willburn Collins allegedly attacked, possibly raped, and set on fire an 8 year-old boy named Robby Middleton when Collins was 13, and Middleton was only 8. Collins spent several months in juvenile detention but was released when prosecutors decided they did not have enough evidence to convict him. Middleton survived, permanently scarred and maimed, his health ruined. In 2011 he died of skin cancer, which doctors attributed to his burns. Shortly before he perished, he gave a video deposition accusing Collins of the crime.

Now a judge has ruled that Collins can be prosecuted for Middleton’s murder, since he died as a direct consequence of the attack 13 years earlier. Moreover, the judge said, he can be charged as an adult, though he was a juvenile when the attack took place.

The case raises many legal issues, and I am neither prepared nor interested in exploring those. I suspect that the task facing prosecutors is insuperable, given the time that has passed, issues of proof and law, and the gut feeling many jurors will harbor that such a conviction would be unfair.

I will render this ethics verdict, however: If Collins was the attacker, I believe it would be fair, just and ethical for him to be punished for it now as an adult, for that is what he is. Continue reading →

Of COURSE There’s An Unwed and Pregnant Catholic School Teacher Principle….Don’t Be Silly.

/ Jack Marshall / 250 Comments

pregnant nunButte Central teacher Shaela Evenson says she is planning on suing the Montana Catholic middle school that fired her for getting pregnant without the benefit of a husband. Whatever it is she is thinking (and whatever it is her lawyer is encouraging to keep thinking), it’s unethical, and I doubt the law will have much sympathy with it either.

  • She signed a contract promising “to respect the moral and religious teachings of the Catholic Church in both her professional and personal life”—a bit broad for my tastes, but this episode was pretty obviously exactly the kind of thing such a clause was designed to forbid, and nobody forced her to agree to it.

  • As Patrick Haggarty, the superintendent of Catholic schools for the diocese, said,  Evenson “made a willful decision to violate the terms of her contract.” It’s hard to argue that getting pregnant before marriage isn’t a willful decision, if she wasn’t raped.

  • Haggarty also notes, “The Catholic moral teaching is that the sacrament of marriage is a holy union between a man and a woman.” That sounds about right. Continue reading →

What A Hollywood Journalist Calls “Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments
Listen to me, Roger, and I mean this in the nicest way: stick to gossip.

Listen to me, Roger, and I mean this in the nicest way: stick to gossip.

The Hollywood wagons are already circling around Woody Allen, accused—again, but now as an adult who can speak for herself—by Dylan Farrow of sexually abusing her when she was only 7 years old. Reading some of the statements issuing from Tinseltown, I am struck again by the ugly opposition any non-celebrity victim must face when accusing a powerful industry figure of wrongdoing. Luckily, many of the most vociferous defenders signal their desperation and their lack of basic comprehension of the issues, undermining their arguments.

Exhibit A is veteran Hollywood journalist Roger Friedman, who was quick to issue an article alleging, as he has for 20 years, that Dylan’s story is all part of a Mia Farrow plot to destroy innocent Woody. On his website, Friedman headlines his piece, “Mia Farrow Uses Close Pal Journalist in Woody Allen War: Writer of Latest Piece is Close Friend.” Friedman’s concept of what constitutes a “conflict of interest” is intriguing. His argument is that Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, who published Dylan’s open letter on his blog, is friends with Mia Farrow (Friedman implies that they are romantically involved while specifically saying that he isn’t implying it–his evident journalistic sliminess would undermine even a fair article, which this is not), and that this makes Dylan’s letter less credible. What he doesn’t explain, since he can’t, is why the same letter would be any more credible or reliable whether Kristof published it or someone else did. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Dylan Farrow (and Observations On Her Open Letter To Woody Allen’s Fans)

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

dylan-farrow

Dylan Farrow was 7 years old when, she alleges, her adoptive father Woody Allen began sexually molesting her. Although this became the focus of the legal and public relations battle between her mother, actress Mia Farrow and Allen as their once romantic and domestic relationship—-already destroyed by Allen’s courtship, seduction and marriage of Dylan’s older, also-adopted sister Soon Yi—exploded onto the scandal sheets more than 20 years ago, the now-married Dylan has never spoken out about it herself, though her mother and other siblings have. Allen avoided any criminal charges despite an investigation that found probable cause, and his popularity among film-goers and his stature in Hollywood seemed to be undamaged. Last month, however, a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes (accepted by a fawning Diane Keaton) re-opened the unhealed wounds for the Farrows, and Allen’s Oscar nomination last week for his original screenplay for “Blue Jasmine” was apparently too much.

Now Dylan Farrow has decided to tell her own story, and has done so in open letter form, published on the blog of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

I ask that you read it now, here, before you read anything else. Her courage in writing this powerful statement earns the right to have it received on its own terms.

Observations: Continue reading →

The Good News: For Once, A False Rape Accuser Was Sent To Jail. The Bad: The Sentence Is Ridiculous

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

And while we are on the topic of offensively lenient sentences to horrible and dangerous criminals:

"The Flaying of Marsyas" by Titian

“The Flaying of Marsyas” by Titian

In Michigan, St. Clair County Judge Daniel Kelly sentenced Sara Ylen to at least five years in prison Friday for falsely accusing two men of rape. She’s a vicious serial liar: a few days earlier, she pleaded no contest to a cancer scam in a separate case.

Thirty-eight-year-old Ylen had accused a construction company owner and a mental health worker of invading her home and raping her after she drove her children to school in 2012. To help frame them, she went to the extreme of  using makeup to create what looked like bruises and carving an epithet in her arm. They would have been charged, too, except that both men had airtight alibis.  While working to ruin the lives of the innocent pair (they went to the same church as her ex-husband), Ylen also accepted thousands of dollars from supporters while claiming to have end-stage cervical cancer that had spread throughout her body.

At trial her attorney, David Heyboer, argued (zealously, as is his duty) that she was obviously disturbed, and that a single year in the local jail was sufficient punishment, even though this was her second set of false rape accusations. He made this argument without laughing, too. That’s a professional. Continue reading →

The Fifth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2013 (Part Three)

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Jill-Greenberg

Unethical Artist Of The Year

Photographer Jill Greenberg, whose art requires parents to make their children cry. Runner-up: Peeping Tom photographer/artist Arne Svenson

Kaitlyn Hunt

False Allegation Of Anti-Gay Bigotry Of The Year

Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents, who spun a false tale of anti-gay prejudice to portray their sexual predator daughter as a victim after she was accused of statutory rape by the parents of her under-age target. Hunt’s parents even managed to suck the ACLU into their web and the liberal-leaning press portrayed her as a martyr to anti-gay bias. But Hunt’s lies ultimately caused her cover-story to unravel.

 Unethical Hoax Of The Year

Oberlin students Dylan Bleier and Matt Alden, aided and abetted by  Oberlin College and its president, Marvin Krislov. The two students, self-proclaimed progressives, posted a series of racist and anti-Semitic posters, graffiti and anonymous emails as “an experiment.” Krislov and Oberlin, after cancelling classes and engaging in campus-wide navel-gazing, continued to allow the media and the public believe that this was the work of racists on campus well after it had learned who the real miscreants were.  Runner-up: The horrible Meg Lanker-Simons, former University of Wyoming student (now admitted to law school—I don’t want to talk about it) who threatened herself with rape and used the bogus threat to show that her campus was violent and sexist.

Most Unethical Use of Social Media Continue reading →

Dear Legal Profession: How Can We Respect And Trust You When You Police Yourself Like THIS?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Justice_broken3

I’ve been defending my profession a lot here lately, but I also recognize that there is a very good reason why such incidents as the surprisingly generous sentence in the “Affluenza” case and the drug court judge who suffered an alcoholic relapse on the bench are wrongly interpreted as proof of inequities and double standards in the legal system. The reason is that those who oversee the system do inexplicable things that appear to the outside world as not only a lack of integrity but also the apparent inability to realize how such conduct undermines the public trust.

Both of these recent news stories are cases in point:

I. The Imaginary Government Lawyer

In 2012, the Nebraska state supreme court disbarred lawyer David Walocha for not paying his bar dues and proceeding to practice law for 13 years with a suspended license. At the end of 2013, the District of Columbia Bar had to decide what to do with former Justice Department attorney Laura Heiser, who practiced 21 years with a suspended license in the District. What was her punishment? She received an informal admonition, which is the least severe form of disciplinary action.  Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Awarding An Accused Rapist The Heisman Trophy

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

jameis2Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston was cool, collected and funny delivering the “Top Ten” on David Letterman last night, but to me, the hijinks seemed out of sync with reality, fairness and justice somehow.

The 19 year-old-Florida State University star quarterback became the youngest Heisman Trophy winner ever when he was named college football’s most outstanding player Saturday night in New York. He is also the youngest accused rapist to be awarded the Heisman.

That award  symbolizes football’s ongoing ethics problem. The pro game’s brutal, uber-macho and “the ends justify the means” culture that has players maiming each other as the crowd cheers and multiple felons on the field in most games has reached into the lower reaches of football, with both colleges and high schools breeding arrogant, entitled jerks who get special treatment through their pampered academic careers and too often emerge from from the football machine as polished sociopaths. The Penn State horror story was a symptom of this. Is Winston’s award another?

It hasn’t been featured in many of the exultant stories about the Heisman winner, but a year ago, on December 7, he was accused of rape by an FSU co-ed. Last week the prosecutors—just in time for the Heisman!—declared that they had not found enough evidence to convict him, which means that they did not have enough evidence to ethically prosecute him. The accuser’s attorney, Patricia Carroll, immediately condemned the decision and the  investigation that led to it, detailing multiple irregularities in the the handling of evidence and testimony. Writes Slate’s legal reporter Emily Bazelon: Continue reading →