The New York City "Rape Cop" verdict

This past week, two former New York City police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, were acquitted of raping a woman while on duty. As I have not followed this case, I really cannot comment on the specifics of the charges except to say that the events the woman described and the reality of the investigation were two different things.

In other words, the "victim" lied. Of that, I have no doubt. Like the Duke Lacrosse Case in which Crystal Mangum described a 30-minute assault complete with ejaculation and being beaten with fists, the forensic evidence simply did not match the story. Despite the best efforts of the prosecutors to, frankly, suborn perjury, the jury was not buying the fantasy that the government was trying to conjure up.

Now, the cops were convicted of three counts of official misconduct for entering the woman’s apartment, and that was inevitable, given that the officers had gone to the apartment when they should have been doing their normal duties. That conviction cost them their jobs and may well result in jail time, but there was no evidence that they had raped the woman and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, keeping with the theme that made the NY Times a laughing stock during the Duke case, we see the newspaper continues with the same narrative: a woman accused them; therefore, they are guilty. The article declares:

For Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, the verdict was an unsatisfying conclusion. The decision, after a trial that lasted almost two months, also comes at a critical juncture for an office that is navigating the biggest case of Mr. Vance’s brief tenure: the sexual-assault charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

The jury’s decision also underscores the difficulty of obtaining favorable results for women who say they were sexually assaulted, and who often are subjected to scrutiny and skepticism that keep many of them from speaking out. In this case, defense lawyers pounced on the credibility of the woman because she was very drunk on the night in question and did not remember many details.

So, we see that this is about the politics of rape and sex, not about justice. It is about the promotion of the political career of the son of Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, and about prosecutors that decide that evidence does not matter, only politics.

What these cops did was bad and certainly a dereliction of their duties. However, what the prosecutors did was worse, for while Moreno and Mata violated their legal duties, the prosecutors suborned perjury, which is a felony and goes to the very heart of the system.

Unfortunately, the NYT and the political elites favor the felons.

Obama's campus kangaroo courts

When Barack Obama ran for president, he spoke somewhat eloquently (when he had his teleprompter in front of him) about due process and all of the other things that the Bush administration was eviscerating in the name of "security." As one who vociferously criticized Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft (who now is an "ethics" adviser to the murder firm formerly known as Blackwater), I don't believe that justice is or should be partisan and it certainly should not be political.

The Obama administration, however, has "jumped the shark" with a new Department of Education order to colleges and universities that receive federal money to adopt new "standards" when deciding sexual harassment and sexual assault cases against students, faculty, and employees. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports:

Under the new regulations, announced in an April 4, 2011, letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities receiving federal funding must employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard—a 50.01%, "more likely than not" evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. Institutions that do not comply face federal investigation and the loss of federal funding.

In other words, the government is demanding that more males on college campuses be offered up on the altar of Political Correctness and Feminism. There is no other explanation.

For years, feminists have tried to lower legal standards for criminal convictions in rape and sexual assault cases, and they really don't care that such actions result in wrongful convictions and innocent people being sent to prison. (To most hardcore feminists, there is no such thing as an "innocent" male.)

FIRE's press release continues:

"The Office for Civil Rights' unilateral revision of campus codes across the country is unquestionably unjust. Students accused of serious crimes like rape should not be tried under the same standard of proof used for a parking ticket," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "OCR is proceeding from the fallacy that reducing protections for the accused will somehow increase justice. This is a dangerous and wrongheaded idea that will undermine the accuracy and reliability of the findings of campus courts."

OCR is the federal agency tasked with enforcing federal civil rights laws, including Title IX, in educational programs and institutions that receive federal funding. OCR's April 4 letter decrees that under Title IX, the "prompt and equitable resolution" of student complaints regarding sexual harassment and sexual violence requires that "school[s] must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred)"—a requirement not previously discovered in the 39-year-old law. OCR explicitly rules out the use of higher standards of proof, stating that university judicial systems maintaining the "clear and convincing" standard—which requires accusers to prove that "it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred"—are "not equitable under Title IX." Both standards of proof fall far short of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required in every criminal case in the United States.

My sense is that this is the Obama administration's answer to the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case which fell apart when it became obvious that not only was accuser Crystal Mangum lying, but police and prosecutors -- Durham County D.A. Michael Nifong even was disbarred for his role in the case -- were in on the Big Lie. The outcome was not popular either with civil rights groups and feminists, who believed that the three defendants in the case should have gone to prison for what they WERE, not what they did or did not do.

After the charges were dismissed in 2007, the Marxist and feminist sites were seething, and the North Carolina NAACP continued to claim that the lacrosse players raped Mangum. (Now that Mangum is charged with murder, the Marxists, feminists, and civil rights advocates have been a bit more silent.)

So, we now have the government's answer to the Duke case: turn campus disciplinary hearings into kangaroo courts -- if it is possible to make them even bigger farces than many of them are at the present time. If the law did not put the Duke boys into prison, then maybe a future young man accused of rape (and who is falsely accused) can have his life ruined.

As I see it, many colleges and universities are welcoming this ruling, and not because it has anything to do with justice. Instead, it will further strengthen the atmosphere of Political Correctness that already rules in higher education.

Now, given the prevalence of alcohol and drug consumption in the contemporary college scene, and given the fact that the current generation of young people don't seem to have many sexual inhibitions, I hardly am surprised that there are going to be unwanted, or at least regretted, sexual encounters. However, keep in mind that colleges, through the unabashed handing out of condoms everywhere and through their constant promotion of the Sexual Revolution, also are helping to bring on this collision course.

So, how are we to handle a bad situation? Obama has the answer: create more kangaroo courts. In other words, deal with the decline of civilization by attacking one of the last bastions of civilized society: due process of law.