August 4, 2008



Violence Against Men

A British taxi driver was robbed of everything -- his family life, his social life, his credibility, his livelihood, his money, and the well-being of his children. The perp, a 17-year-old girl who falsely accused him off rape, got off with a two-month wrist-slap: two months in jail. And they won't even print her name in the paper. Joe Sinclair writes in the Yorkshire Evening Post:

Taxi driver Aftab Ahmed, 44, of Allerton, Bradford, was accused of rape in January last year after driving the girl home. The 17-year-old had been out drinking in Bradford city centre with her sister and friends before they put her in his taxi. The girl, from Shipley, West Yorkshire, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice when her case came to trial last month. Speaking after she was sentenced to a four-month detention and training order at Bradford Magistrates' Court, Mr Ahmed said the girl had "destroyed" his life. The teenager was told she would serve two months in custody, but the married father of 11-year-old twin daughters said: "Today is the worst day of my life, I can't imagine that the person who destroyed a whole family got only two months. ... She should be named and shamed."

She absolutely should. And I believe those who can be proven to have falsely accused someone else of rape should be made to serve the time the falsely accused would've, and pay restitution as well.

That said, how, really, do you ever give this guy back what he lost and repay him for the pain he and wife and his kids must have gone through? And, all because he picked up the wrong drunk brat and tried to get her home safely.

Here's a ruined life a little closer to home: a doctor who lost everything after being accused of rape, and under the most unbelievable circumstances, in an excerpt from a Pulitzer-winning piece by the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz:

They were, indeed, remarkable charges. If the accusation were to be believed, the defense attorney pointed out, Dr. Griffin had decided in the midst of his examination, to place his tongue in a vagina swimming in fecal matter thanks to the condition in which the patient arrived for her colonoscopy. And he had chosen to do this in a thinly curtained room surrounded by staff workers four feet away, a room in which his assistants could enter any moment. Dr. Griffin had, in his career, performed close to 9,000 colonoscopies and endoscopies without ever having shown such proclivities -- and now, the defense argument went, of all the women he might have violated he had decided to sodomize one in this condition? ... There would be an additional charge of sex abuse, on Ms. Jeffreys's complaint, that while performing her colonoscopy the doctor touched her vagina. On the stand Ms. Jeffreys told of the apprehension she had felt about testifying, the strength she had needed to endure. As became clear early in the proceedings, the complaining witness had nothing to fear in this courtroom, where she was given singular protection from questions that might raise questions about her credibility. Judge Kahn prohibited the defense from raising instances of the complainant's alleged perjury in the civil case against her landlord, and in testimony before the Office of Professional and Medical Conduct. The defense could not raise her prior meritless litigation, her history of financial trouble, her string of bounced checks, nor could the jury know the millions she was asking in her suit against the doctor -- all issues that could establish motive and a willingness to lie for financial gain.

Shockingly, Griffin was convicted. The conviction was reversed. Shockingly, the Manhattan D.A.'s office mounted another trial:

The atmosphere of the second trial and the rulings from the bench bore small resemblance to that of the first. Unpreoccupied with imperatives like the need to encourage rape victims to come forward, Judge Jeffrey Atlas afforded the defense the standard rights of cross-examination. The judge also precluded any attempt to inject the race of the complaining witness, a black woman, as prosecutor Fleming had done at the first trial. At this trial, attorney Callan described the effects of Demerol and Versed, a drug known to produce memory loss and sexual fantasy -- noting, for instance, that women going into labor are not given Versed because its power is such it will wipe out the memory of the birth. When it was all over, five weeks ago, and the verdict of the jury due, Dr. Griffin went to church to say a prayer and then to court where he waited, head bowed. He did not have long to wait before the jurors filed in, looking straight at him, some smiling, and then the foreman announced his acquittal. The doctor broke down in tears and there were tears, too, in the eyes of some of the jurors -- whose views of the prosecutors' case was evidently shared by the judge. After the trial, Judge Atlas asked attorney Callan why the doctor hadn't waived a jury trial. "I would have had your client acquitted two days ago," the judge told him. Uncertainly gathering the shards of a career, the doctor -- still stripped of his medical license -- has, as they say, no immediate plans. It will take a lot more than a license to restore the world lost to him when the tort lawyers and the District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit descended.

via Glenn Sacks

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