Group Sex fantasies make rape OK? (29)

It's also possible that there was moralising about group sex fantasies going on in the other direction; police officers and/or CPS assuming that the men must be guilty because they couldn't see any possibility of a woman consenting to group sex.

Absolutely. This is sort of what happened in another recent case that i wrote about:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/06/tiger_po...

i have written out what i "know" from talking to police, cps and defendant...but there are still a few bits to this that i can't mention because there are follow-up charges and chances are i could open myself to a charge of contempt of court if i let rip right now (wait til after the second charge gets heard i March for the full story....).

However, the time track of this case suggests a similar working-out of events.

Guy gets raided. Police lift naughty film. Police interview guy: police decide, on basis of statement and film evidence t put matter forward for charging.

police forward film - but not soundtrack - to CPS.

CPS agree with police and matter proceeds to court. At first Crown Court hearing (effectively a hearing for directions) the soundtrack is mentioned.

Defence, prosecution and judge watch vid with soundtrack in place.

Prosecutor has a severe "eeek!" moment. Drops charges like a hot brick...judge asks CPS why the hell they ever brought chrges in the first place.

So...to get back to the case in this thread...first, we don't know what details the reporter has withheld either to make the story sexier OR because reporting restrictions forbid further reporting ...

and second, you don't know which bits of evidence turned up when...and it may simply be that the police didn't hand over the weblogs until the eve of prosecution, whereupon the CPS changed their mind.

Bottom line, though, as MQ says...where sex is admitted and the only issue in play is whether there was consent, the case boils down to the credibility of the principal witness.

If that witness's credibility is shot to pieces because some detail is contradicted between log and statement, it would be an act of sheer cruelty to put that witness on the stand to be torn to pieces in front of a jury.

After all...what is worse? The trial not proceeding or....assuming she actually HAS been raped...the trial proceeding and her being made out to look like a liar and the defendants walking free?

It is quite possible that the CPS withdrew charges not simply because no conviction was likely, but to protect her from further harm, irespective of what went before.

j

Edited 28 Jan 10, 1:27 PM by Jane_Fae

The first had three contested parts to it:

1) Was it domestic violence? The altercation in question occurred between two men who had never been in a relationship with each other, but there was a claim that it impacted the ex-partner of one of them.

2) Was it self-defence or assault?

3) Was the complainant injured as badly as he said?

The case proceeded through a decision to charge and two pre-trial reviews on the basis of evidence that was forthcoming but hadn't actually been received by the CPS yet. By the time it got to court some of the new evidence hadn't appeared, some of it had but wasn't of the quality claimed. The CPS ended up offering no evidence.

The second case concerned a suspected smuggler having a quantity of money that he couldn't account for. His proof of where it came from and a counter claim were both summarised to the CPS rather than being given in their entirety until very near to the trial. When the case came to trial the CPS had to offer no evidence after looking through the actual documents.

Both of these look to me as being a systems failure rather than the fault of individual people, although there is the possibility of people playing the system to cause maximum inconvenience to someone they think is guilty (or to massage their own statistics). I'm also aware that (at least as of 2003, and possibly now) anyone who knows the date of a pre-trial review can stop charges being dropped by making plausible allegations that impact the case just before the review, causing any decision to drop charges to have to be postponed while they are investigated.

Then, considering how overworked the CPS is, if this is done again at a second pre-trial review, there is (or at least was) a good chance of getting the case to trial without enough evidence, just because nobody was in a position to stop it without seeing whether there was any truth to the new allegations.

I'd suspect, given that they previously didn't have access to the online messages, that that was the prosecution's case, yes, but whether moralism came into it is impossible to tell from the information we can access. We don't know whether there was any other evidence (DNA samples, etc), but given that the men had been detained in prison for several months before trial, lawyer pals of mine think it's likely there was. I believe the woman said she had consented to sex with the man she'd been communicating with online, but not the others.

"Well-behaved women rarely make history"
http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk

Edited 28 Jan 10, 3:49 PM by verte

I'm as guilty of that as you are, but in the end I don't think we really know much of anything about the case, just what our own political beliefs are.

I think everyone should like everybody ..... Andy Warhol

In THEORY recent legislative changes should have made a complainant's previous sexual history LESS not MORE relevant to a rape case. The defence can even struggle to have admitted evidence of previous consensual sex between the defendant and the complainant. At the very least the judge in this case should have been more careful with his words since the way it was reported implied that the complainant's previous sexual fantasies made her unreliable as a rape complainant.

S.x.

Any reference to this ever happening? You need a court order to search, I can't see many judges signing that one off.

And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!

Yes, this could be sinister and improper, it could also be perfectly right and correct. The difference between the two is determined by the information we don't have, and that in all likelyhood we will never have.

We, on this forum and other forums, need to have the self discipline to say "we simply cannot draw a valid and meaningfull conclusion here". I sometimes wish Peter Tatchell had similar self discipline.

Toak

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