TIME:
Permissive age or not, it is unwise to be too understanding of rapists even in a relatively liberal university town like Madison, Wis. Judge Archie Simonson learned that lesson last week while handily losing his $36,000-a-year seat on the Dane County (Madison) bench in the first judicial-recall election held in the U S in three decades.
Simonson, 52, a plain-spoken jurist with some mod ideas in other areas of law, became the feminist equivalent of Anita Bryant last May. That was when he announced that "whether women like it or not, they are sex objects" as he set free on a probated sentence a 15-year-old youth who had raped a 16-year-old coed in a high school stairwell. Simonson explained the soft sentence as a message to women to "stop teasing." It was time, he added, for "a restoration of modesty in dress and elimination from the community of sexual-gratification businesses."
This was way back in 1977 and Simonson's idiotic sentence -- as well as the reasoning behind it -- became a national news story. The election may have been held here, but the calls for Simonson's head came from across the nation.
How things have changed. Another judge in another state is treating a rape victim just as egregiously and you know where I first heard of the story from? As It Happens, a Canadian radio show from the CBC. Clearly, this isn't as big a news story in the US as Simonson's was back in the 70s.
Not that this one is any less stupid.
Lincoln Journal Star (Lincoln, NB):
Tory Bowen says she knows what happened to her on the morning of Oct. 31, 2004.
But she won't be able tell her story to jurors -- at least not in a way that's truthful to her, she says -- because a judge's order bars witnesses from using words like "rape" and "sexual assault" in the trial of Pamir Safi, who is accused of sexually assaulting Bowen.
"In my mind, what happened to me was rape," said Bowen, 24. "I want the freedom to be able to point (to Safi) in court and say, 'That man raped me.'"
Last month, Lancaster County District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront denied a motion by prosecutors that would have prohibited Safi's attorneys from using words like "sex" and "intercourse" when describing the encounter between Safi and Bowen.
In other words, on the stand, Safi will be able to claim that he and his alleged victim had 'sex' -- implying consent -- and Bowen will be forced to agree...
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