Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
Duke Case Demonstrates Feminist "Justice"
April 30, 2007 at 6:46 am · Filed under Vox Populi, Feminism, Feminist Justice
The gravity of the Duke university “rape” case has been seriously underestimated, even by many of its staunchest critics. The corruption of the criminal justice system by political ideology is far more advanced than has been brought out by most commentators.
The central point to be made about this case is precisely the one even most critics have not raised: It is far from unique. If such a blatant injustice can be perpetrated against men whose case attracts vast media attention – the supposed “disinfectant of sunlight” – what befalls those who languish in obscurity, victims of rigged justice that is less palpable? “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever,” said one defendant, “I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.” Not what they “would do”; what they are doing.
Conservatives who rightly decry judicial “activism” in constitutional law have trouble understanding the equally serious corruption of the criminal justice system. Long before the Duke case, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence Stratton described this legal underworld in their brilliant but neglected book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Michael Nifong fits precisely the profile of prosecutor presented by Roberts and Stratton. They show how prosecutors and the media collude to ensure their victims are convicted by public opinion before their case ever goes to trial. “News of a forthcoming indictment is leaked to the press to put pressure on the accused by tarring him in the eyes of his friends, family, employer, coworkers, and the general public,” they write. “The charges may be largely made out of thin air, but the prosecutor benefits from the public’s presumption that the prosecution has a case.” This describes exactly what Nifong did. The fact that other prosecutors initially defended him is an open admission that they do it too.
The single-minded hype of the racial dimension had made this case appear exceptional. But the far more powerful ideological force driving this and other miscarriages of justice is not race hatred but institutionalized feminism. Race demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are easy targets for conservatives, but they do not command the institutional clout to politicize criminal justice proceedings on a large scale. There is little indication that white people are being systematically incarcerated on trumped-up accusations of non-existent crimes against blacks. This is precisely what is happening to men (and even some women), both white and black, accused of the kind of family and “gender” crimes that feminists have turned into a political agenda.
For every Duke lacrosse player, there are literally thousands of innocent men forced to stare down the wrong of police gun barrels, hauled off in handcuffs, and incarcerated without trial – all for “crimes,” not only that they did not commit, but that everyone knows did not take place.
Rape accusations have long been out of control. Almost daily, as David Usher has pointed out, men are released from prison after decades of incarceration because DNA tests prove they were wrongly convicted. And they are the lucky ones. While DNA has righted some wrongs, the corruption is so systemic that, as the Duke case shows, hard evidence of innocence is no barrier to conviction. Even the Washington Post has documented how feminist crime lab technicians fabricate and doctor evidence to frame men they know to be innocent. Yet the Post and others invariably blame law enforcement itself. Few point the finger at the very pressure groups that create the hysteria over rape and push for more convictions, as if they are a virtue in themselves.
William Anderson of Frostburg State University and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal have both pointed out the parallel between the Duke case and the child abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, where feminist prosecutors like Nancy Lamb in Edenton, North Carolina, similarly whipped up public invective against parents they had jailed yet knew to be innocent. “The press was transfixed” by Lamb, Anderson writes, “with her flashing eyes and bobbed hair. Lamb was speaking ‘for the children,’ you see, and the press adored her. That she was making preposterous claims and attempting to destroy the lives of seven people despite all good evidence to the contrary was not even discussed.”
Like rape, child abuse has been not simply blown out of proportion but politicized by feminism. This reached its apogee in the Clinton administration Justice Department. “From Janet Reno’s infamous prosecutions of Grant Snowden in Florida…to the McMartin case in Los Angeles, to Wenatchee, Washington in the 1990s,” writes Anderson, “the Edenton case was part of a line of what only can be called witch hunts in which state social workers badgered very young children until they came up with lurid tales – after having denied that those things occurred.” These social workers are, in effect, plainclothes feminist police.
The witch hunts were carried into adulthood through “recovered memory therapy,” another fraud perpetrated largely by feminist perversion of the psychotherapy industry, where wild, preposterous tales of childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory. In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison.
But these are only the tip of the iceberg; at least they required convictions, however unjust. They are dwarfed by “crimes” in which men are removed from their homes and incarcerated without even a trial.
These are “domestic violence” accusations, where no evidence, formal charge, or trial are necessary for the plainly innocent to be hauled away in handcuffs. Defendants are passed by the thousands through mass processing centers that bear little resemblance to a court of law or receive summary punishment without the benefit of media scrutiny. Patently false accusations are not only permitted but rewarded in divorce courts, largely because they are effective weapons in lucrative custody battles that are the bread and butter for venal judges and lawyers, who do all they can to encourage more.
This is now so blatant that even the legal establishment has been forced to recognize it. “Michigan courts do not provide a fair, or impartial, tribunal for any domestic relations litigant,” according to Michigan Lawyers Weekly. “Instead, they customarily and regularly deprive litigants of due process of law.” It is now common knowledge that obviously trumped-up abuse accusations are frequently used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Thomas Kasper describes in the Illinois Bar Journal how knowingly false accusations readily "become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” “Whenever a woman claims to be a victim, she is automatically believed,” says Washington state attorney Lisa Scott. “No proof of abuse is required.” Writing in the Rutgers Law Review, David Heleniak describes domestic abuse as “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice.” Heleniak identifies six separate denials of due process in one state statute, which he terms “a due process fiasco”: lack of notice, denial of indigent defendants to free counsel, denial of the right to take depositions, lack of evidentiary hearings, improper standard of proof, and denial of trial by jury. One family court judge was caught instructing his colleague to violate the constitutional rights of male defendants. “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating as you grant a restraining order,” New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell stated at a government training seminar recorded by the New Jersey Law Journal: “Throw him out on the street... They have declared domestic violence to be an evil in our society. So we don’t have to worry about the rights.”
Let's remember that when it's this asshole's neck in the noose.
Also similar to the Duke case, the open politicization of scholarship by domestic violence advocates with an ideological agenda is also simply accepted. Domestic violence has become “a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory and failed intervention programs,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”
These are not the excesses most people associate with feminism, which is precisely why they receive little scrutiny or opposition and why the feminists have been able to wreak such damage.
Many were appalled that the Duke faculty should publicly demand that the lacrosse players confess – as if professors are prosecutors, judges, and jurors. Yet precisely this modus operandi has long characterized “women’s studies” programs, hotbeds of trumped-up accusations that have polluted the curricula of thousands of higher education institutions with political ideology masquerading as scholarship, turned students and faculty into police informers, and incited young women into believing that every personal hurt is a crime of “violence.” “If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape,” opines one graduate of such programs, “she may have had reasons to. Maybe she wasn’t raped, but he clearly violated her in some way.” A Vassar College assistant dean thinks false accusations contribute to a man’s education: “I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women? If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’” Such views have long been dismissed as belonging to the extremist margins, but we see the fruits of them at Duke.
This is mob justice at its most incendiary, because it is perpetrated by the educated. It vindicates James Madison’s observation that “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
Conservatives cannot afford to be smug, for many have colluded in this degeneracy of the criminal justice system. When it comes to anything labeled as “crime,” conservative skepticism crumbles. The demand for conviction becomes unanimous and unchecked by any voice of restraint or reason.
Conservatives are correct that criminals often go free. What many fail to understand is that this happens because of a politicized judiciary that also sends the innocent to prison. The acquittal of Andrea Yates, convicted of capital murder in 2002 after admitting to drowning her five children, is the other side of the ideological justice coin. Yates was defended by feminists like Rosie O’Donnell, who expressed "overwhelming empathy” with her, and by the National Organization for Women. "One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women,” said Deborah Bell, president of Texas NOW. "We want to be there with her in her time of need.”
More than a decade ago, Michael Weiss and Cathy Young warned of this trend in their Cato Institute paper, Feminist Jurisprudence. Seen in the larger context of feminist justice, the Duke case demonstrates that the corruption of the criminal justice system by political ideology is now the greatest danger to American freedom, surpassing both Islamic radicalism and government measures against it. Judicial corruption – where avenues of legal redress are not only blocked but turned into instruments of injustice – is the most debilitating corruption, because it cripples the means to redress injustice elsewhere.
But what is most alarming is the complacence. At one time, the incarceration of the knowingly innocent would have incited outrage from Americans, who were known, even among Western societies, as staunch defenders of civil liberties. Today there is little outcry. Few have been concerned to know if this case is typical of many more or why the criminal justice system of what was once the freest society on earth is so compromised that law-breaking officials sit in judgement on law-abiding citizens.
This is where “social” justice has led us. Decades of pursuing this illusory, subjective, and politically defined “justice” have left Americans so incapable of distinguishing guilt from innocence that we are now inured to the most open injustice.
Stephen Baskerville, PhD, is president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, will be published in the summer by Cumberland House Publishing. The views expressed are his own.Here are some of the comments I found interesting:
amfortas said,
The rot is so deep, the complicity so broad, the people involved so many, the length of time so long, the institutions infected from top to bottom so comprehensive and essential, that 'reform' will never happen. Far too many people have made their living from this systematic societal misery. They will justify and lie and claim to be 'obeying orders'. They are so guilty that they will never admit to their wrongdoing. So they will fight to preserve the rotteness.
Dr Baskerville and others who are ramping the arguements up to new levels, will not be given credence by those in power. Things will not change through arguement and showing the Truth.
I am a great believer in Truth. To believe that Truth matters is also to believe what happens when Truth is systematically corrupted. Society rots like an apple with worms. The apple cannot be rescued. It cannot be made whole again. It has to be thrown out.
The mendacious, the liars, the running dog lackies of the feminsts will never willingly give up. The worms. They are at all levels. They are everywhere. They control one another is an unholy informal alliance. They will continue their evil because there is no other way for them.
They will need to be overthrown. Burnt.
The apple sorter cometh.
April 30, 2007 at 8:25 am It looks like what I said about revolution may be coming true. I talked about it here
mruffolo said,
Duke Case: Unusual Only Because The Prosecutor Got Caught
Since most of those falsely accused of rape lack the resources to defend themselves, the system convicts many innocent men. Even when the accuser later owns up, the system resists correcting the injustice. Consider Illinois' notorious prosecution of Gary Dotson. Dotson's accuser spent half a decade guilt-ridden over having put an innocent man in prison. When she finally confessed, prosecutors didn't want to hear it. They had reason to stonewall. State police forensic scientist Timothy Dixon had given perjured testimony.[1]
Wrongdoing by the city of Marlborough, Mass. resulted in a $13.6 million judgment against them for causing the imprisonment of an innocent man. Eric Sarsfield, who spent nearly a decade in prison for a rape he did not commit, says he and the rape victim were "manipulated, cheated, and betrayed by law enforcement officers more interested in closing a case and getting a conviction than in playing by the rules."[2]
Nifong is no "rogue prosecutor". In too many places in the country, Nifong's behavior is standard operating procedure.
Our system has become so disinterested in protecting the rights of the falsely accused that some people now think making false accusations is a good business plan. In Sacramento, Calif., Jessica Langshaw falsely accused three men of rape and five others of sexual assault in order to extort $500,000 from them.[3]
Objective research indicates that about half of reported forcible rape accusations are false.[4],[5] That also means that about half are true. A blanket policy of treating all accusations as true causes just as much harm to innocent people as would be caused if the policy were to treat all such accusations as false.
In a democracy, we get the government we deserve. Make your voice heard!
Last week we asked you to contact your Congressperson to ask if he or she has issued a statement about the Duke case. This week we'd like you to ask your two Senators the same question:
You can find both your Senators' phone numbers by going to http://www.senate.gov/ and entering your state, or by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.If your Senator has issued a statement, have them send you that statement, and then forward it and the Senator's name to info@mediaradar.org.If not, politely request that your Senator issue a statement regarding the case.
http://www.mediaradar.org/alert20070430.php
1 http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/exonerations/Dotson.htm
2 http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061007/NEWS/610070361/1116
3 http://www.da.saccounty.net/pr/030417_langshaw.htm
4 McDowell CP. False allegations. Forensic Science Digest, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 1985
5 Kanin EJ. An alarming national trend: False rape allegations. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1994 http://www.sexcriminals.com/library/doc-1002-1.pdf
April 30, 2007 at 9:41 am
Denis said,
From http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/Vanishing-Rule-of-Law.pdf:
Rule of Law, or Feminist Jurisprudence?
In 1780, John Adams of Massachusetts advanced the notion that the fledgling American democracy should be a “government of laws and not of men.” Indeed, rule of law is considered to be a prerequisite to democracy because it promotes fairness and justice. Rule of law rests on the notion that legal offenses should be defined by concrete actions and verifiable harms, and are amenable to subsequent legal verification or refutation.Beginning in the 1980s, feminist lawyers set out to reverse centuries of legal tradition.11
Attorney Martha Chamallas advocated that equal protection under the law should be phased out in favor of “an asymmetrical approach that adopts the perspective of the less powerful group with the specific goal of equitable power sharing among diverse groups.”12
April 30, 2007 at 10:08 am
scottkirk said,
the police in my town in effect, are arms of the women helping battered womens shelter...These women like mother figures come in and tell these boys that if there arresting more than 5% of women in domestic violence calls..that they must be doing something wrong...who put these women above the damn law...
April 30, 2007 at 6:45 pm
conservativation said,
It is the same dynamic at work be it gender or government philosophy or whatever. Assume for example that one is a conservative in the U.S. I've made a cursory study of publically available voting data and demographics, and the conclusion is this. Only about 12% of the American population is both informed and on the side I consider to be the right side...that being the conservative side. That speaks to overall government, entitlements, war, etc. Break away even further those who are aware of the MRA and it's issues and you are in low low single digits.Whatever your persuasion, the ignorant and apathetic constituencies are massive. It is deserving to blame ourselves as men for allowing this creep to occur, however now, it is so much more then a matter of combating wrong with right, or left with right, or whatever.Half our voting age populace doesnt vote....apathy and ignoranceThe other half is split left and right....On the left the portion of the vote that is utterly and hopelessly ignorant is truly frightening, they know it, and they use it.Our half, if I may say, has its share of uninformed voters as well, those being single issue voters, and the demographic that votes for purely stupid reasons, like the soccer Moms who liked Al Gore because he kissed his wife a certain way on stage at the convention. Those silly gals exist on the left and the right. In fact our local gal Joyanna is a diamond among this rough crowd, both well informed and well considered....if only more of her voted.
Now look to whats left, starting with 25% of the voting age population on the conservative side and eliminate the ignorant (not so many apathetic right leaning voters) and there is scant little remaining.
We are looking to expand the right to vote to felons etc. not contract it. No basic civil service test, no land ownership, no tax paying requirement, mainly no horse in the race EXCEPT what one can get FROM the government. These people are scary and dangerous, very. In my home town most people collect some kind of entitlement, welfare, disability SS (made up) etc. If asked they would say the govt has its own money, they can discuss this with me, a rare escapee, and not have a clue its my money they speak of...they havent a clue.The stupidity of the "undecided" voters is trotted out every four years, it makes my ears bleed to listen to them.
So as to the govt we deserve, thats a hard call. There are a few that deserve better then what we have, but most not only deserve what we have, they prefer it, because their nest is feathered another year.
Then come MRM guys, a loud and pasionate bunch, but like Custer, facing a sheer face behind us and an overwhelming army of those in opposition and their useful idiots charging at us.
There will be no convincing a man to give up his check, no way to pry the cold 40 ouncer from the fingers of the crowd at the c store parking lot, and no way to interupt their ex wife or girlfriend at home from what see needs and deserves...no way.
We've read it in Theodore Dalrymples examples in the UK, which actually served to make me feek better about certain of our lower class problems here in the US. It is documentable, predictable, and unstoppable in the morass of a system that has manifested as a result of essentially ignorant people being given some sway over their lot at the expense of others.
Shame really, that the MRM issues are exactly driven by the same values that drive the conservative believers but we divide again by those who know and understand, and those who dont.
I used to think tere was a certain peace to the ignorant, but Ive seen the pollution and pain it brings, not just my life but my society.
We go round and round about men leading. There are so few of us who would even half way understand the issues that we are indeed completely swallowed up in the feminist socialist anarchist whateverist rest of the world as to need each of us to be Ultra Uber Mega Super Duper Leaders.
Almost tempting to sit and wait...isnt it.
May 1, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Source:
here
