Brooklyn False Rape Charges: Darrell Dula

Imagine that you (or a man you love) were wrongly accused of raping someone. You're arrested, fingerprinted and thrown into jail to await formal charges. Now in the 24 hours while you're familiarizing yourself with jailhouse protocol over telephone usage, how to avoid unwanted advances, which gang it would be proper for someone of your race and ethnicity to join, when not to look into another prisoner's eyes, the importance of responding promptly to guard commands and other important orientation action items, the victim admits to the police and prosecutors that she made it all up and actually signs a document stating so. 
Well that's lucky for you yes? You won't have to stay a minute more in jail and perhaps you can see about getting everything expunged from your record. No harm no foul. These things happen and maybe you and the arresting officers can have a beer summit at the White House some day.
But wait, now imagine that the prosecutor decides to go ahead with charges anyway because either they think the supposed victim is lying or because they don't like you very much or maybe they figure they need to keep their conviction rates high and you look like an easy win. And in addition they don't tell you or your attorney that the victim lied. And they keep you in jail for a year...
Such things couldn't happen in this country could they?

But sadly of course they do.

A Brooklyn man spent nearly a year behind bars on charges he raped an Orthodox Jewish woman — even though she recanted her accusation a day after making it.
Darrell Dula, 25, was released Tuesday and will likely have the case against him dropped after being in jail since June 28, 2011.
“I feel good. Thank God,” Dula told the Daily News Tuesday night as he played with his 3-year-old son for the first time in a year in front of his Crown Heights home.“I’m glad to be home with my family,” he said. “I’m still in shock. I’m traumatized. It wasn’t a good experience. They took me away on my son’s birthday. It was heartbreaking.”
The stunning turn of events came after Brooklyn prosecutors turned over a newly discovered statement that Dula’s 22-year-old accuser made to cops in which she says he never raped her. The alleged victim made a complaint to police on March 31, 2010, accusing Dula and his pal Damien Crooks, 32, of being part of a crew who raped, beat and pimped her out since age 13.
A day later, the woman told detectives she was a hooker for five years and made up the rape allegation, records show.
“I once again asked [her] if she was raped,” a detective wrote in a police report after the interview. “She told me ‘no’ and stated to me, ‘Can’t a ho change her ways?’ ”
The woman also signed a recantation, but the case proceeded and in spring 2011, a grand jury voted to indict Dula, Crooks and two others who were allegedly part of the crew.

LINK

And of course the prosecutor who directly handled the case, Abbie Greenberger,  is now blaming her bosses for the situation. I guess that makes sense. No one wants to be the scapegoat. I understand and feel the same way. Of course when I mess up no one spends a year in jail....

Greenberger said she found inconsistencies in the 22-year-old accuser’s account, but couldn’t convince her boss there was a problem.
“When I brought the inconsistencies to Lauren Hersh (chief of the sex-trafficking unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office), I was told that I didn’t do my job right and that I’m trying to dismiss the case and that I should work harder,” Greenberger told the Daily News.

See the problem here believe it or not isn't just that the victim lied, although that is bad enough and she ought to face the same criminal penalties that the man faced. No the REAL problem (and perhaps Old Guru and/or The Janitor can weigh in on this) is that the prosecutor did not disclose this information to the defense attorney and/or judge. I'm no lawyer but I kind of thought that the prosecutor had a duty to do justice, not just win a conviction. Maybe not.

Now why did the prosecutor continue with this farce? Could it have been that the District Attorney has gotten a little too cozy with certain elements within the local Orthodox Jewish community? Could the DA have believed the so-called victim was telling the truth before she recanted? Could the DA have believed this fellow was better off in jail, regardless of whether or not he actually committed this crime? Could the DA have been responding to a feminist constituency that doesn't always seem to understand that women are no more moral than men and are just as capable of mendacity?
I don't know. All I know is that I would like to have believed that if I were wrongfully accused and the police and prosecutors knew that then they would take the necessary steps to stop the machinery of justice from moving forward and throw that bad boy in reverse, to right before the time when they told me "You're under arrest". But honestly I knew that was an unreal expectation even before I read this story. All it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time and your life can suddenly change. I don't have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around for bail or attorneys.
How do we fix this?
My ideas are pretty simple. 

• Hold prosecutors and police personally and criminally responsible when they lie or hide evidence. They do a necessary if often unpleasant job. But they should not be above the law or get a free pass for this sort of thing.
• When someone lies about rape and it can be proven as a lie, send them to prison for the same amount of time that the assailant would have served. 
• Stop with the fiction that women never lie about things. They do. The entire point of the adversarial justice system is to hopefully let the truth come out and in such a way that someone is not convicted of a crime without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. This requires a defense attorney that is going to get after the accuser.
• Stop hiding the victim's (or in this case liar's) name from the public. Perhaps if more people had been aware of who this woman was someone might have come forward earlier. Rape is a horrible crime and should be punished most severely. But in order to do that we must ensure we're punishing the right people. That's why we need as much transparency as possible within the system.

What are your thoughts?

Detroit: Heads Spikes Walls!!!

I used to rush to defend Detroit (and by extension all inner cities) against detractors. I would point out that high unemployment, internalized hatred, a ghettotization of the mind, combined with segregation and a paucity of other opportunities explained much of the problematic behavior that we saw. I would also note that crimes or violations which received probation or a wink and nod in other areas were often prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (and then some) in majority black areas.

I still believe that -at least to an extent but two three recent incidents also made me realize that statistics aside some people are just "evil",  for lack of a better word. It's not because of their race or that their father wasn't around or that they didn't get enough hugs as a child. There are some people who should be in prison permanently. And some people DEFINITELY need to be removed from the planet-thus the Tyrion Lannister quote in this post's title. You put a few heads on spikes and everyone else will get the hint.

I'm tired of defending the indefensible. Unfortunately, some people lack self-control, morality or any sense of future time orientation. The only way to interact with these folks is to impress upon them the certainty of severe, harsh, immediate punishment should they break the law. Currently too many criminals apparently don't fear getting caught or don't fear prison. We can change that if there is the political will to do so but it won't be pretty. Only a small percentage of Detroiters cause problems. Most Detroiters are good decent people who are just trying to get through the day. But it only takes a small number to ruin the lives of a great many. And as the story about the WW2 vet shows, the actions of these few can cause the rest of us to harden our hearts and become uncaring and callous in an attempt to survive.

I want to paraphrase what Stephen King wrote in Salem's Lot:

"And when you get home stay away from Detroit. Things have gone bad in Detroit now".

Detroit Teen Commits Matricide

DETROIT (WJBK)-- There is shattered glass in the front window of a Detroit home on Burns where an act of rage and violence has shattered lives. Family members say 14-year-old Joshua Smith shot and killed his mother, 36-year-old Tamiko Robinson, while she slept on the couch.
"He just shot. Every chance he got a chance to shoot again, he shot again, and there's just buckshot, holes everywhere. He murdered her, and he didn't do it with sorrow or [anything]. He did it like he wanted to do it, like he meant to do it and he[knew] what he was doing," LeShaun Roberts, the victim's brother, told us.

WW2 Veteran Carjacked-Video shows he was ignored as he crawled across gas station lot 

The 86-year-old World War II Air Corps veteran, knocked to the ground during a carjacking on Detroit's west side, crawled across the gas station parking lot as people walked by. No one stopped to help, he says. Aaron Brantley, who worked for 31 years as a welder at a Chrysler plant in Hamtramck, recalled the ordeal Friday, two days after he was robbed outside the BP gas station on West McNichols at Fairfield, just east of the University of Detroit Mercy campus. 

Brantley estimates that at least four customers walked past him as he struggled for help, unable to walk because his leg was broken.  "I never bothered anybody, and I always try to help somebody else when I could," he said Friday from home, his leg in a soft cast to his hip and not a tinge of bitterness in his voice.  Brantley was on his way home from Bible study at Corinthians Baptist Church in Hamtramck, where he's a trustee, when someone hit him from behind and grabbed his keys at 10:40 a.m. Wednesday. The thief drove off in Brantley's 2010 Chrysler 200 -- bought to replace another car recently stolen.

9 month baby murdered because of fight at baby shower

Detroit — A fight over a seat at a baby shower triggered the killing of a 9-month-old boy, according to the victim's grandmother. Delric Miller IV died Monday as he slept on the couch in his home on the 8400 block of Greenview Avenue. Police said someone fired at the house with an AK-47-type assault rifle about 4:30 a.m., leaving behind 37 shells. One of the rounds hit the baby, who was pronounced dead at Sinai-Grace Hospital. 

Delric's grandmother, Cynthia Wilkins, said she believes the shooting was retaliation for a skirmish Sunday at a baby shower at Club Celebrity on Plymouth Rd. in Detroit. "The shower was overbooked, and there was an argument because there weren't enough seats," said Wilkins. Her daughter, Diamond Salter, attended the shower, which was thrown by a friend, Wilkins said."A woman got mad because she couldn't find a seat, so she started knocking tables down, and it escalated from there," Wilkins said

Questions
1) What should be done about inner city violence?
2) Was Rudy Giuliani right? Do we need police that harass people and ignore the Bill of Rights within certain areas?
3) Do we need an expedited and public death penalty? 

Obama's Indefinite Detention Bill

President Obama is poised to sign a bill (The National Defense Authorization Act-NDAA) which really honestly leaves me almost unable to write because I'm so angry. To put it mildly this is a very bad bill.
It codifies and regularizes indefinite detention of American citizens without trial within the United States of America. Yes that's right. Theoretically you could be minding your own business, running your blog, sending naughty IM's to your SO, chatting with various people across the blog-o-sphere and suddenly jackbooted black helmeted thugs could break down your door, tase you and seize your pc and other private effects and documents, blind you, gag you and prevent you from hearing anything and leisurely drag you off to the local military base (or as far as I know private detention center) where military or national security personnel could keep you imprisoned for as long as they like.

Lawyers? Warrants? Habeas corpus? Bump all that!!!! Of course I'm sure that they wouldn't like torture you or threaten to torture your loved ones because that would be illegal. And with the effective right to a speedy trial guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment , your rights to due process and protection against self-incrimination guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment and especially your protection against warrantless arrest and search guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment you can certainly tell the large humorless men with guns and nightsticks that as they have NO right to hold you you're walking out of there. Yes.


Of course before they start the waterboarding they will probably inform you that under the NDAA the country just collectively squatted and relieved itself over the Bill of Rights. The military, law enforcement and national security personnel don't need to worry about such quaint details anymore. And if THEY don't YOU certainly don't.


It is ironic that people from across the political spectrum from left-wing black nationalists to white racist paleocons to right leaning libertarians to classical liberals to radical socialists can all see the dangers in this bill, soon to become law. Unfortunately the larger American citizenry doesn't see the danger because otherwise something like this would never have been passed in the first place. Certainly the bipartisan Beltway elite don't care because as they well know this bill is not aimed at THEM. It's aimed at YOU.

Laws like this are usually passed because politicians claim to want to keep us safe. The problem is there is no such thing as complete safety. And by trying to reach it you inevitably attack freedom. We all know the Benjamin Franklin quote.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

But it's worse than that. It's not just well-intentioned people making mistakes out of fear. President Obama may or may not possess the discipline and wisdom to use "responsibly" the powers granted in this new bill. But what about future Presidents? Based on his statements about arresting judges who rule in ways that he finds faulty do you think a President Gingrich could be trusted not to indefinitely detain a few "pointy headed liberals" he doesn't care for? Would a future President Chris Christie find it amusing to indefinitely detain national union leaders who wouldn't sign on to his Social Security plan?  Would a future feminist President order a dismantling of the men's rights movement? Heck, were I President, could I be trusted not to immediately detain Gloria Allred?

Seriously the point is that NO ONE should have to ask those kinds of questions. The entire point of this republic is that no one (wo)man should have that power. Power is supposed to be limited and split among the three branches of government-with the balance held by the people. When one branch of government (or one person) has that kind of power the temptation to use it against political enemies is overwhelming. The act of doing so becomes inevitable. It's not just cheap hyperbole to say that this is the twilight of the republic. On this issue it doesn't matter whether it's Bush or Obama. They are both horrible on civil liberties. Frankly, Obama is sliding into "worse" territory.


There is an excellent analysis of this bill's dangers by legal scholar Glenn Greenwald here. I implore you all to go read it in full as he has the legal knowledge which I lack to put all this into depressing perspective. Some highlights

• The NDAA codifies into law indefinite detention
• The NDAA does not exclude American citizens
• The NDAA permanently expands the scope of the War on Terror.

What’s particularly ironic (and revealing) about all of this is that former White House counsel Greg Craig assured The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer back in February, 2009 that it’s “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” Four months later, President Obama proposed exactly such a law — one that The New York Times described as “a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free” — and now he will sign such a scheme into law.

So far I've only seen one national political figure who has the stones to speak out against this new bill. You may not like him for other reasons but on this issue he's dead on target.

Ron Paul speaks out.

h/t Jonathan Turley

QUESTIONS
1) Do you think President Obama will sign this bill? If so why?
2) Are civil liberties a concern for you personally? Why or why not?
3) Do you think American citizens should be immune from military detention without trial?

He Say, She Say: The DSK Case

Rich man flirts with poor woman. Flirting becomes aggressive sexual advances. Agressive advances become F*** me and I'll pay you. Poor woman sees the payday and agrees. After it's all over she decides to cry rape.

Sound familiar?

No this isn't the scenario of the latest episode of Law & Order: SVU this is the case of one of the most powerful men in the world Dominique Strauss-Khan former head of the International Monetary Fund.

Nearly two months ago the man was pulled off his plane to Paris and arrested on sexual assault charges. The accusation was made by a hotel maid. Working in television news,I have followed this story closely. Immediately after his arrest, I ran a story in my show from France with women's reactions there. The general consensus was that this arrest was coming because he's always been a playboy; the kind of man that gets whatever girl he wants even if it is by force.

He was arrested, charged, spent a day in jail, and then released on a six million dollar bond, and put on house arrest in a penthouse in TriBeCa. As he stay holed up in luxurious confinement the case against him began to fall apart.

It was found out that the 32-year-old Guinean woman accusing Strauss-Khan of rape waited to report the incident. She cleaned Strauss-Khan's room, as well as another room, and then made a phone call from a pay phone saying she was about to get paid, all before reporting her rape to the police.

Furthermore, the Guinean woman is now found to be an illegal immigrant, one who did not gain asylum to be in this country and may find herself deported when all of this is over. Meanwhile, Strauss-Khan may be able to save his political career and run for President of France; another sexual assault case in his home country not-withstanding.

So what have we here, a potential rape victim who's lost all credibility because she's told more lies than Casey Anthony, and a playboy regaining his only slightly blemished reputation day-by-day by doing nothing.

This is a problem not only for rape victims and the justice system but the way society looks at such crimes as a whole. For the better part of the summer, women in the United States, Canada and elsewhere around the world have been holding "Slut Walks." The initial protest was against a Toronto cop's statement at a college campus safety event. The cop said, "Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

The sentiment is not one that women haven't heard before. The line of questioning for a rape victim that goes, "What were you wearing? Did you in anyway suggest sex?" For true rape victims these questions, I assume, are humiliating. No woman wants to be forced into sex against her will.

Yet when cases such as the one against the Duke Lacrosse Players or Dominique Strauss-Khan come about, the validity of rape as a crime as a whole is undermined because the victims have ulterior motives even if they are truly victims.

Strauss-Khan now joins a long line of men who have been able to take advantage of women, either by force, coercion, bribery, or charm and get away with it even after an investigation is initiated.

No one is winning in these cases. Not the men who get off freely or the women who are reduced to greedy whores and gold digging sluts. We are all losing. A violent crime is reduced to a game of who touched who first and how will the alleged victim profit from it.

Real victims are losing out at the hands of high profile would-be suspects and less than witness stand ready victims. The charges against DSK may be dropped come his next court appearance on July 18th, and his accuser may be deported, but what happens to the women just doing their jobs as a hotel maid, a secretary, a waitress, a teacher, an executive Vice President or even a CEO that is approached for sex by a colleague, a friend, or even a stranger and the advance is more sour than sweet, more power than love, and the aftermath is hatred and humiliation, shame and embarrassment? What happens to those women and their cases?

If we've learned anything from this DSK case it is that it is not the named suspects and victims that we should concern ourselves with over their guilt or innocence, but the ones whose names we don't know, whose statuses are not front page news, whose backgrounds are average, who are just like us, who are hurting more than any rich man and his accuser that sees dollar signs.

Questions:

1. Do you believe DSK actually raped the Guinean woman?

2. Do you think the crime of rape is being trivialized by every high profile sexual assault case that falls apart?

3. If there was any blame who does it fall on?

Is Leon Walker a Criminal?

If I call from work and the phone is busy

I never, never, never, never, never ask who was on the line (oh no)

If I get home late she don’t ask any questions (no she don’t, you know why)

Cause she’s got her thing going and you know I’ve got mine

-Isaac Hayes “One Big Unhappy Family”

Married people lose some freedom of action and privacy. That’s life. A marriage where one spouse is constantly telling the other one to mind his or her own business is one that probably won’t last. Her business becomes his business and vice versa. On the other hand married or not, people still are individuals and have some expectation of privacy, don’t they?

Leon Walker worried that his wife Clara was cheating on him with her allegedly abusive second husband. He decided to check her email accounts. He found proof of her affair and notified her first ex-husband, who decided to use this information in a custody dispute. Ex #1 was supposedly concerned that his child was being exposed to possible abuse by Ex #2. Leon was also allegedly apprehensive about his own child's safety.

So what right? This is nothing new. Some happy or trusting spouses have joint email accounts which either may use. They sometimes share their passwords with each other. Less trusting or more private spouses often keep an eye on each other and may even occasionally surreptitiously check emails, text messages, voicemails, etc. Morally such actions may be somewhat dubious but it’s not like the police are going to arrest you or the local prosecutor will try to convict you of hacking or spying or anything like that. Well not usually anyway….  

 

Free Press Article 

Legal experts say it's the first time the statute has been used in a domestic case, and it might be hard to prove. "It's going to be interesting because there are no clear legal answers here," said Frederick Lane, a Vermont attorney and nationally recognized expert who has published five books on electronic privacy. The fact that the two still were living together, and that Leon Walker had routine access to the computer, may help him, Lane said.

"I would guess there is enough gray area to suggest that she could not have an absolute expectation of privacy," he said.

About 45% of divorce cases involve some snooping -- and gathering -- of e-mail, Facebook and other online material, Lane said. But he added that those are generally used by the warring parties for civil reasons -- not for criminal prosecution.

I would think similar actions could take place in almost any breakup as people seek information that they can use for greater leverage in divorce or custody hearings. Both men and women have been known to lie. What was sharing a password two years ago when the marriage was happy could become an invasion of privacy when the couple decides to divorce. It appears to me that the prosecutor is using the law incorrectly here. So far judges have refused to throw out the charges.

Computer Crime Law 

I don’t understand how a man can be charged with hacking into a computer that was either paid for by him or may be joint marital property. The computer also exists in a location that is either his or jointly owned/rented.  This criminal case could make divorces even more contentious than they already are since the option of jailing someone along with divorcing them would be incredibly tempting for many people who aren’t saints. And I don’t know too many saints.

BTW Adultery is still against the law in Michigan.  It is a felony.

But the prosecutor has not charged the woman with the crime of adultery.

Is this an appropriate application of the Michigan computer crime law? Does this man deserve five years in prison? Would you change your opinion if the genders were reversed and the woman was facing possible incarceration for snooping? Does a spouse have a right (legal or moral) to know if his or her partner is cheating? Should the woman be charged with adultery?