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Crime News - Courts, Celebrity Docket, and Law News from CNN.com
Check out section, "Crime Library", among others. Interesting.
Tags: crime, law, news, sites on 2008-09-29 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.cnn.com
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Putting the Term "Rape" on Trial - TIME
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And according to Clarence Mock, Safi's defense attorney, the term rape seethes with enough emotion to prejudice a jury and is itself a legal conclusion. Once that word is uttered, Mock says, "the skunk is in the jury box and it's hard to get the smell out."
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Mock felt that the ban ensured his client a fair trial. "She, like any other witness, is subject to the rules of evidence," he says of Bowen. "To say that there is a First Amendment right of the witness to say whatever they want in a courtroom is a silly notion."
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The second trial was scheduled to begin last spring. This time, Bowen refused to comply with the court-ordered language ban, which had been expanded to include the terms "sexual assault kit" and "sexual assault nurse."
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On Bowen's behalf, protesters demonstrated outside the Lincoln courthouse, and a petition, which Bowen signed, circulated on the Internet to change Nebraska law.
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Bowen's attorney, Wendy Murphy, says her client had nothing to do with the protest, which was organized by PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), a Chicago-based advocacy group for rape victims.
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But since Bowen has decided to take her language-ban appeal to the federal district court, she and her lawyer have begun soliciting support from PAVE and other national advocacy groups.
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It's significant that this First Amendment challenge regarding the rights of witnesses has originated in a sexual-assault case. Sex crimes, due in part to their intensely personal nature, tap into a complicated set of cultural values and historical meaning; thus, a ban on sex-crime-related words carries a different weight from one on words like "murder" or "embezzlement."
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Michelle Anderson, an expert in sexual violence and the law, and the dean of the City University of New York Law School, notes that rulings like Cheuvront's reflect the way that the courts have traditionally viewed rape cases. "The notion that the word rape is so charged derives from an historical willingness to place a higher burden on rape victims who come forward," she says, pointing out that in the past, rape cases had required corroboration and evidence of the use of force, and instructions could be given to the jury to treat an alleged rape victim's testimony with special caution.
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"It's a way of putting a thumb on the scale because often in acquaintance rape cases, the woman experiences the intercourse as rape and the man experiences it as sex," Anderson says of the language ban. "It's a way of denying the woman's ability to describe her experience as she lived it."
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The third sexual-assault trial has yet to be rescheduled, but in the meantime, Bowen hopes to eventually take her appeal from the federal district court to the U.S. Supreme Court and achieve a national standard for allowable language in the courts — one that upholds a witness's right to free speech without treading on the right of the accused to a fair trial.
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CNN.com - Florida Senate eyes tougher sex offender law - Apr 20, 2005
Tags: article, crime, law, violence, rape on 2008-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
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On a 118-0 vote, the House passed legislation that would require longer prison sentences, lifetime probation and electronic monitoring for sex offenders convicted of crimes against children.
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The bill would punish the molestation of children under 12 with a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life, "followed by probation or community control for the remainder of the person's natural life and subject to a system of active electronic monitoring."
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The legislation also comes less than three days after authorities in Ruskin, Florida, found the body of 13-year-old Sarah Michelle Lunde in a pond Saturday.
Sex offender David Onstott, who previously dated the girl's mother, told authorities he choked the teen and dumped her body in the pond on April 10, Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee said.
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The bill also would make it a third-degree felony in Florida to harbor a sex offender.
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CNN.com - Congress gets Lunsford legislation - Apr 21, 2005
Tags: article, crime, rape, violence, law on 2008-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Members of Congress on Thursday were introduced to legislation that would require states to keep closer tabs on convicted sex offenders not behind bars.
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"While individual states have passed legislation targeting sexual offenders and predators, I feel that we need to have strong federal guidelines for states to follow."
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Currently, states are supposed to send sex offenders an annual mailer with an address verification form.
Under the Jessica Lunsford Act, states would be required to send the mailers semiannually and at random times, so offenders don't know when to expect them.
For those who do not answer the mailers, the legislation would increase penalties to imprisonment and a $100,000 fine. Any offender who fails twice to register with a state or fails more than once to answer a mailer would be required to wear an electronic ankle monitor.
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The bill is currently in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, according to a congressional bill-tracking site. Brown-Waite said 43 lawmakers have signed on.
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The Florida Senate is now considering a bill, also called the Jessica Lunsford Act, that would impose longer sentences and tougher penalties for convicted sex offenders. It would mandate that, after their release, the offenders be electronically monitored for the rest of their lives. The Florida House unanimously approved a similar bill Tuesday. (Full story)
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Rep. Ted Poe, a Republican Congressman from Texas, has introduced legislation that would make the FBI's database of sex offenders available to the general public, Brown-Waite said.
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"The reason we're here is because of a little girl who was 9 years old and lived in Florida," Poe said.
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CNN.com - Teen pushes change in youth sex offender laws - Jun 9, 2005
Tags: article, activism, crime, rape, law, violence on 2008-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A teenage girl who was abused as a child and convinced Wisconsin lawmakers to make public the records of juvenile sex offenders, urged Congress Thursday to create similar federal regulation.
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"The simple truth is that juvenile sex offenders turn into adult predators. Kids all over the country need the same kind of protection as in Wisconsin," she told the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
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Critics say opening the records of juvenile offenders would scar them and diminish chances for rehabilitation.
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Wisconsin's law requires police chiefs and sheriffs to assess the public risk of each person on the registry whose offenses occurred as juveniles and notify the community about those considered likely to re-offend.
Rep. Mark Green, R-Wisconsin, plans to introduce federal legislation similar to Wisconsin's law.
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Amie, her father Mark Zyla and supporters, took their fight to the state Legislature in January after seeing 23-year-old Joshua Wade, the man convicted of assaulting her nine years ago, on local news as a suspect in a similar crime.
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In an aside to child victims, she advised, "stand up to your abusers. Abuse does not have to affect your whole life. If I can overcome the hurt and trauma, then so can you."
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Bosnian 'Rape Camp' Survivors Testify in The Hague
Tags: feminism, rape, war, human rights, violence, law, crime, article on 2008-07-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.womensenews.org
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Run Date: 07/19/00
By Jerome Socolovsky
Special to WEnews -
In the first international trial focusing on rape as a war crime and a crime against humanity, 16 Bosnian Muslim women confronted their alleged rapists, speaking out about the systematic assaults for a war crimes tribunal--and for the history books.
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The women, identified only by codes, were among the 16 survivors who testified for the prosecution in the Foca rape trial, named after the southeast Bosnian city overrun by Serb forces at the outset of the ethnic war that lasted from 1992 to 1995.
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An estimated 50,000 girls and women were raped during the conflict.
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The proceedings have been going on since March at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, an ad hoc court set up by the United Nations, down the street from the International Court of Justice in this seaside Dutch city of The Hague.
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Almost every night in the summer and fall of 1992, Serb soldiers would enter the detention centers and select their victims
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Some were kept as personal sex slaves by former neighbors--much older men whose wives and families they knew.
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Foca's women's prisons have come to be known at the war crimes tribunal as the "rape camps" or "rape factories" of the Balkan conflict.
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Although rape has been part of warfare since men began doing battle, what distinguished it in the Bosnian conflict was its perpetration in a systematic, widespread manner with official encouragement.
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Now, prosecutors in The Hague are trying for the first time in history to make rape punishable as one of the most serious crimes under international law.
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In her book, "War Crimes against Women," scholar Kelly Dawn Askin says Bosnian Muslim women were prized targets because, in their patriarchal culture, communal pride was inextricably linked to their virginity--or their fidelity as married women.
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Because the transmission of identity is patrilineal in both Serb Orthodox and Muslim traditions, the women were taunted about the Serb babies they would bear as a result of the rapes.
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"It's about domination, power, violence," says Patricia Viseur Sellers, a former attorney with the Philadelphia public defender's office, now the tribunal's expert on gender war crimes.
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"It's the same motivating factor that would make someone torture someone in a jail cell in Argentina. That person probably runs a newspaper stand during non-wartime and would never think that they're either capable or would want to do that," she said.
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When it was established in 1993, the tribunal marked the first international prosecution of war criminals since Nazi and Japanese leaders were put in the dock after World War II.
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In the Tokyo trials, it was not recognized as a full-fledged war crime even though it would have been one of the easier prosecutions of atrocities.
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At the Nuremberg trials, rape was never prosecuted.
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Today, the Foca case is not the only international trial to include rape charges, although it is by far the most significant.
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On July 21, the Yugoslav tribunal will rule on an appeal by a Bosnian Croat paramilitary fighter, sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for failing to prevent the rape of a woman prisoner by a subordinate.
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At another U.N. tribunal on the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, judges held that sexual violence could be considered an act of genocide.
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Jurisprudence from these trials will provide the underpinning case law and form the building blocks of the statute for the International Criminal Court, currently in the ratification process. That tribunal is intended to prosecute atrocities anywhere in the world.
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One of the more important precedents established at the Yugoslav tribunal is that witnesses who have suffered traumatic experiences are not necessarily considered unreliable, as has been the case elsewhere.
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The court's statute is considered progressive on gender crimes, requiring no corroboration for the testimony of sexual assault victims.
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"He wanted to hurt me. But he could never hurt me as much as my soul was hurting me."
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Jerome Socolovsky covers the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague for The Associated Press.
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To Obtain Permission to Reprint or Repost This Article: :
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Copyright 2008 Women's eNews. The information contained in this Women's eNews report may--with the prior written authorization of Women's eNews--be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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Women's eNews is a nonprofit independent news service covering issues of concern to women and their allies.
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Systematic Rape in Bosnia: a Tool of Genocide
Tags: statistics, rape, violence, feminism, human rights, war, law, article on 2008-07-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: Articles
more fromwww.haverford.edu
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The site of these crimes, known as the Partizan sports hall, was in the center of Foca, a small, predominantly Muslim town in eastern Bosnia. At time, it was used as a transit facility for women and children about to be deported from the town. But for two months in 1992, between June and August, it functioned as a rape camp, holding 74 people, including about 50 women.
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Partizan was but one of dozens of Serb rape camps in Bosnia - some are said to be still in operation
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A special mission of the European Community estimated that 20,000 or more Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Serb forces through the end of last year; numerous investigations by other governmental and non-governmental organizations all have concluded that rape has been widespread.
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In Sarajevo, the besieged capital of the devastated state of
Bosnia, the State Commission on War Crimes, headed by Croat Stjepan Kljuic,
is in investigating all three men. Its allegations against Ostojic alone
read like a page from the Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes Tribunal. -
Seven victims at a refugee camp at Kirklareli, Turkey, and in
southern Serbia retold the story of systematic rape in and around Foca and
of the rape camp in the heart of the town. Written statements by 10 others
were made available by the gynecologist who first examined them after their
release last August -
According to Bosnia Muslim sources, Ostojic played a critical role
in establishing a pattern of abuse of women. Alija Delimustafic, who was
Bosnia's interior minister at the time of the capture of Foca, said he had
received direct evidence from wiretaps that proved Ostojic had ordered the
raping of women in Foca. -
Delimustafic left the Bosnia parliament some
months ago and is now working in Vienna as a private businessman. -
that was the beginning of the
night of the long knives against the Serbian prince, -
Both Pilaff and Omerdzic said their information came from refugees
or the families of women still being held in Bosnia. Omerdzic believes
those taken to Velecevo either were killed there or still are being held.
He also estimated that thousands of Muslim women are still held in Serb
camps inside Bosnia, where widespread rape continues. Newsday was unable to
confirm assertions. -
Karadzic said that he had not heard that women had been held and
systematically raped nightly over two months at Partizon hall
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Amazon.com: "rape camps": Key Phrase page
Tags: statistics, rape, violence, feminism, human rights, war, law, article on 2008-07-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: Articles
more fromwww.amazon.com
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Amjad and I had been married for six months when I read a story in TIME magazine about "rape camps" in Bosnia- Herzegovina and Croatia where women were being held and raped day and night, ... "
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... with hatred and destructiveness? How are we, at the start of the twenty-first century, to think about the recurrence of rape camps, torture camps, and ethnic camps? Just what is the answer to Einstein's famous question: `Is there a way to liberate ... " -
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HUMAN RIGHTS: Waking up the world - Rape: weapon of war
Tags: statistics, rape, violence, feminism, human rights, war, law, article on 2008-07-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: Articles
more fromwww.newint.org
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The traditional human-rights image is of a male prisoner of conscience.
Yet the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia show that it’s often women
who suffer most. -
Inside, the 22-year-old former textile
worker stood charged with 32 murders and 16 rapes, including the murder of 12 of his 16
rape victims. The date was Friday, 12 March 1993 and Herak was the first Serb to be put on
trial for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina. -
No-one will ever know the exact number of women and girls raped during the
conflict in former Yugoslavia. -
Though all figures must be treated with caution in a
war so plagued by propaganda, these witnesses tell of the organized and systematic rape of
at least 20,000 women and girls by the Serbian military and the murder of many of the
victims. Muslim and Croatian – as well as some Serbian – women are being raped
in their homes, in schools, police stations and camps all over the country. -
The sexual abuse of women in war is nothing new. Rape has long
been tolerated as one of the spoils of war, an inevitable feature of military
conflict like pillage and looting. -
What is new about the situation in Bosnia
is the attention it is receiving – and the recognition that it is being
used as a deliberate military tactic to speed up the process of ‘ethnic
cleansing’. -
In many cases the intention is ‘deliberately to make women pregnant and
to detain them until pregnancy is far enough advanced to make termination
impossible’. -
Women and girls aged anything between 6 and 70 are being
held in camps throughout the country and raped repeatedly by gangs of soldiers.
Often brothers or fathers of these women are forced to rape them as well.
If they refuse, they are killed. -
‘Any rape is monstrously unacceptable,’says Semra Turkovic, who
works with survivors of rape in Zagreb. ‘But what is happening at this very moment in
these rape/death camps is even more horrific. This can only be considered as
genocide.’ She believes that the number of women raped in Bosnia exceeds even the
highest estimates recorded by human-rights investigators. -
To Mubera Zdralovic, who is developing a programme of assistance in Zagreb
for women left pregnant by rape, the torment endured by the thought of giving birth to a
child of mass rape is often too much to bear. -
Speaking of the Pope’s recent warning to these women that they must
not seek abortions, but learn to ‘accept the enemy into them’, she has only
quiet disbelief. -
Amnesty International has no firm evidence on whether rape is
being used as a strategic weapon but is clear that local leaders must have
condoned it.2 -
Catherine MacKinnon, Professor
of Law at the University of Michigan, claims that rape is being used to help
make Bosnia a Serbian state by implanting Serb babies in Muslim mothers. The
international community, she says, is refusing to face up to the true nature
of the conflict there – that this is not just a campaign of Serbia against
non-Serbia but is a form of genocide directed specifically against women. -
Muslim and Croatian woman are facing
twice as many rapists with twice as many excuses and two layers of impunity
serving to justify the rapes. This is ethnic rape by official policy of war
– rape as ethnic liquidation.’ 3 -
Yet these violations are not unique to Bosnia. In March this year
Nobel Peace Prize winners Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams testified to
the UN Human Rights Commission about the repeated rape of Karen women by government
soldiers in Burma. -
And during the night: ‘every woman must confront
the same problem. My ladies have been raped brutally by at least eight soldiers
of the SLORC (the ruling junta) every night. Some women couldn’t continue
to walk because of the hurtful raping and torture so they were shot and died.
Those who were able to walk have to face the same thing every day and night
until they’ve been raped to death.’ -
To Zainab Jama, the Somali writer and former BBC broadcaster, the silence
surrounding such violence is a measure of its effectiveness. Her research on her own
country indicates that acts of unspeakable brutality are being carried out against women
in the civil war raging there. -
Rape is unlawful in both international conflicts and civil war. But,
according to Amnesty International, many governments do not uphold these norms and are
often complacent in the face of such abuses. -
On a visit to Peru’s Ayacucho department
in 1986 -
What can be done to protect women from such violations? According to
Françoise Hampson, lecturer in international law at the UK’s Essex University, what
is lacking is the will to prosecute. ‘The act, rape, must be punished. Nothing should
be allowed to jeopardize the prosecution of those alleged to have committed rape.’ -
To Catherine MacKinnon the issue goes even deeper than this.
‘Human-rights principles are based on experience, but the experiences have not been
those of women,’ she says. ‘What most often happens to women escapes the
human-rights net. Whether in war or in peacetime, at home or abroad, in private or in
public, by our side or by the other side, man’s inhumanity to woman is ignored.’ -
Governments must face up to the fact that rape in war can no longer be
tolerated. Women’s groups from all over the world are campaigning vigorously for the
prosecution of rape as a war crime and, as the World Conference approaches, petitioning
the UN to recognize women’s rights as human rights. -
f human rights are to be
universally respected and protected, they say, then they must apply to the lives of over
half the human race – women. -
Angela Robson is a London-based freelance journalist specializing
in human-rights issues.
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