Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

But it's hard to read this news story without saying: "Hmmm. Lots of victims who don't know each other telling the same story. A major talent from the entertainment industry. A very effective way to lure victims into his lair." From the June 24, 2009 Daily Mail:

The Oscar-winning composer behind 'You Light Up My Life' raped 11 women he lured to his apartment with the promise of a starring role in a movie, prosecutors said today.

The women read an online ad placed by director, Joseph Brooks, applied for the audition 'and thought this was their chance to become a big star,' prosecutor Lisa Friel said.

Instead, once the women were in Brooks' Manhattan apartment, he plied them with wine and forcibly raped them or used threats and coercive behavior to make them have sex with him, prosecutors said.

I just loved "You Light Up My Life," which was a spectacularly powerful romantic ballad (and a really stupid movie). If convicted, Brooks could become the poster boy for the disconnect between what you can write, and what you actually feel.

One of my longstanding complaints about the series Law and Order is that it has a very, very disproportionately white upper class criminal class--one that is utterly unrealistic, even in Manhattan. But an accurate criminal demographic would be depressing, most of the crimes wouldn't be very interesting, and the show would have been lambasted by liberals for its "racist" portrayal of crime. But here's a case that reads just like a Law and Order episode. I'm sure that we'll see a thinly fictionalized version within a year or two.

Another very troubling aspect to the news story:

Morgenthau said nine of the 11 women were from the Portland, Oregon, and Seattle areas and the others were from California and Florida. He said Brooks paid to fly 10 of the women, who did not know each other, to New York.

He said Brooks' scheme, which ran from at least 2005 to 2008, was enabled by his personal assistant, Shawni Lucier, who helped pick the victims, interviewed them, arranged their travel and made them feel comfortable.

He said that when the women's mothers called, Lucier, of Federal Way, Washington state, would assure them their daughters were fine.

When Brooks was ready to strike, he said, Lucier would leave the apartment 'knowing what the end result would be.'

One of the great disappointments is how often women play pivotal roles in facilitating rape, with no apparent sympathy for the victims. I remember some years ago a case from the Salinas, California area where two adult women, who were having trouble figuring how to make their monthly rent payment, picked up two young teenage girls who were hitchhiking, kidnapped them, and then charged a group of immigrant farm workers $25 each for the use of the girls. Utterly remorseless for their actions--but it paid the rent.

I've Joined The Pajamas Media Stable of Writers!

I've Joined The Pajamas Media Stable of Writers!

Here's a piece that they just published by me about mass murder, mass media, and the failure of deinstitutionalization. And they pay me, too!

Sick, Evil, Counterproductive, Misogynistic

Sick, Evil, Counterproductive, Misogynistic

And not coming out of Islamist insanity, for once. From the March 13, 2009 Daily Mail:

Lesbians living in South Africa are being raped by men who believe it will 'cure' them of their sexual orientation, a report has revealed.
Women are reporting a rising tide of brutal homophobic attacks and murders and the widespread use of 'corrective' rape as a form of punishment.
The report, commissioned by international NGO ActionAid, called for South Africa's criminal justice system to recognise the rapes as hate crimes as police are reportedly failing to take action over the spiralling violence.

As I have pointed out in the past, there is a shockingly high rate of childhood sexual abuse reported by homosexuals, both male and female, enough to give reason to suspect that adult homosexuality, at least for some, is a reaction to premature sexualization. Even homosexual men with whom I have corresponded, while denying that male homosexuality could be such a reaction, admit that it is likely that female homosexuality is such a reaction. And so rape is going to "straighten them out"? If anything, it will aggravate existing problems, and quite substantially.

I do wonder, however, from reading other parts of the article, if this might be a rationalization or justification by rapists for something that they were already planning to do:

The extent of the brutality became clear when Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's national female football squad, became one of the victims last April.
Simelane, one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian and an equality rights campaigner, was gang-raped and beaten before being stabbed to death 25 times in the face, chest and legs.

If this is one of the examples of "rape as cure" excuse, then it makes no sense at all. They murdered her. That presents no opportunity to see this as "cure."

"Release inner vigilante"

"Release inner vigilante"

That's from a headline in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in this July 15, 2008 article. Read the whole article and see that the reporter is having some fun and distorting what the Vancouver police are saying:

Vancouverites urged to release inner vigilante

VANCOUVER -- An eye-gouging fistfight between a good Samaritan and a purse snatcher has prompted Vancouver police to offer qualified support for vigilante action, suggesting citizens should feel free to indulge their inner Batman if they have the martial and physical skills to prevail against bad guys.
The call to action during the police department's daily news briefing yesterday was one that veteran criminologist Neil Boyd found "a little unusual." Police routinely suggest the public back off in such cases in case criminals are armed, he said.
"Traditionally, the police have tended to be reticent or discourage intervention because of the risks involved," said Prof. Boyd, who teaches at Simon Fraser University.
"On the other hand, there's a case to be made for community responsibility," he said. "There's a limitation to how much police can do. They can't be everywhere at once."

Deinstitutionalization and Murder

Deinstitutionalization and Murder

This June 9, 2008 Wall Street Journal article by E. Fuller Torrey points to some recent research about the consequences of destroying the mental health system:

Numerous studies have documented the tragic effects of releasing hundreds of thousands of seriously mentally ill individuals from state hospitals while failing to ensure that they receive treatment.

The latest, carried out by Jason Matejkowski and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, found that individuals with serious mental illnesses are responsible for 10% of all homicides in Indiana. That translates into approximately 1,700 out of 17,034 total homicides in the U.S. in 2006. Over the past 20 years – during which time the public mental-health system has progressively deteriorated – that would mean 38,000 of 388,311 total homicides.

The University of Pennsylvania study examined the records of 723 individuals convicted of homicide between 1990 and 2002 in the Hoosier state. The results were published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

Examples of such homicides include Joseph Corcoran, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who shot four people in Fort Wayne because he thought they were talking about him. And Frank Salyers, also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who killed a policeman in Goshen after his parents tried unsuccessfully to get treatment for him at a local mental-health facility.

Although the Indiana study is the largest research of its kind in the U.S., two earlier but smaller studies reported that seriously mentally ill individuals were responsible for 10% of homicides in Contra Costa County, Calif., and 29% of homicides in Albany County, N.Y.

Most of these homicides were preventable, since the perpetrators in most cases were not being treated. Nontreatment, a past history of violent behavior and substance abuse are strong predictors of potential dangerousness in this population. We have proven options for decreasing such violence, including outpatient commitment. These programs require mentally ill individuals at high risk for violence to continue taking medication as a condition for living in the community.

I'm not happy that Fuller is still using the misleading comparison of:

In 1955, there were 559,000 individuals in America's state mental hospitals. By 2005, there were only 47,000 state hospital beds left in the country, a number that continues to fall.

It's true, but leaves out that some of the decline was because of other factors.

1. Transinstitutionalization--moving of the largely senile elderly from state mental hospitals to nursing homes as a result of passage of the Medicare Act.

2. The near disappearance of syphilitic insanity in the 1960s because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s.

3. The rather dramatic increase in private mental hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s.

His point is still valid; his use of these numbers exaggerates somewhat a very real and tragic change.

The Problem of Violence is Cultural

The Problem of Violence is Cultural and Moral

And this article from the May 30, 2008 London Evening Standard really captures this well, describing how their equivalent of emergency rooms are being overwhelmed by stabbings:

One of Britain's leading trauma surgeons has told how one in three of his Accident & Emergency patients is now a stabbing victim.
Karim Brohi, a consultant surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, said the proportion of injuries from knives and guns was now on a level with - if not greater than - cities such as Los Angeles or Chicago.
He described how, on occasions, the wards in his hospital resembled "a war zone" with some patients being treated for their second or third knife wound.
And - in a letter to the Evening Standard - Mr Brohi, along with two senior trauma medics, called for more prevention strategies to solve the underlying causes of knife crime.
He said there was a real "potential" for surgeons and doctors to help in the fight against crime through a variety of schemes - such as doctors visiting schools to talk about knife injuries.
Mr Brohi spoke out as an Evening Standard survey showed how casualty wards across the capital were bearing the brunt of the rise in knife crime and treating hundreds of victims each year.
A snapshot survey of wards reveals at least 424 knife victims have been treated in hospital for stab wounds so far this year, 227 of which were serious cases. The true number of victims is even higher because each hospital records cases of stabbings in different ways.

Of course, the rest of the article suffers from the usual delusion that education is going to solve the problem. It will not. There is a serious cultural and moral problem that has developed, and no amount of education is going to fix this.

Honor Killings

Before you get too upset, yes, I know that most Muslims do not engage in "honor killings," such as the one described below. But the very nature of such murders--done because of what other people in the community would think if a woman were allowed to get away what she did--tells me that these aren't a bizarre deviant part of Islam, but something only a little out of the mainstream. Read this article from the July 21, 2007 Australian Age, and afterwards I will point out why this can't reflect the values of say, less than 0.1% of the British Muslim community:

The father and uncle of a woman who was brutally murdered for falling in love with the wrong man were sentenced to life in prison in London today.

The 2006 murder of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod, 20, who was strangled after two hours of torture and sexual abuse, was the latest in an increasing trend of so-called "honour killings" in Britain, home to about 1.8 million Muslims.

Mahmod was a member of an Iraqi Kurd family which had emigrated to Britain in 1998.

Her father, Mahmod Mahmod, and uncle Ari Mahmod, were sentenced after being found guilty of ordering the killing.

A third man, Mohamad Hama, who had pleaded guilty to taking part in the killing, was sentenced to at least 17 years in prison.

Mahmod's family accused her of shaming them by ending an abusive arranged marriage, becoming too Westernised and falling in love with a man who did not come from their village.

The elder Mahmods ordered the killing after discovering she was having a relationship with an Iranian Kurd.

"This was a barbaric and callous crime," said Judge Brian Barker. "You are hard and unswerving men to whom apparently the respect from the community is more important that your own flesh and blood."

There are actions that people do entirely in secret--out of fear that others will find out, and you will be shamed. For example, child molesters work very hard to keep what they do a secret--even when they are in prison, surrounded by other felons. There aren't a lot of other really shameful acts anymore (maybe voting Republican in San Francisco), but it wasn't that many years ago that the vast majority of Americans would put considerable effort into keeping it a secret that they had cheated on a spouse, or had a drug addiction or alcoholism problem. Now, as P.J. O'Rourke observed a few years ago, if you call a Hollywood celebrity a drug-addicted philanderer, his response is likely to be, "Thank you for reading my autobiography."

Honor killings are done to earn the respect of other members of the Muslim community--to expiate shame for what their daughter (apparently, never the son) has done. By this fact alone, it tells us that honor killings are considered acceptable or even necessary by some non-trivial fraction of the Muslim community in Britain.

It isn't terribly PC, but there are differences between cultures and religions. Not all religions or cultures are equally valuable or positive. My previous book, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger Press, 1999), dealt with the question of how the back country South's honor culture made for a very ugly and unpleasant place--and how it was eventually replaced with a less savage culture. I don't see any room for Islam in civilized societies until the honor culture that brings these savage acts has been removed.

Remember: The Victim Asked For It

This reads like something out of a feminist diatribe about the evil old days of the 1950s. Except it is from that progressive liberal utopia of Britain:

A PEDOPHILE who raped a 10-year-old girl will be free in just four months after a British judge said his victim had "dressed provocatively".

Window cleaner Keith Fenn, 24, could have been jailed for life after twice attacking the girl in a riverside park.

Judge Julian Hall was at the centre of a storm over the "pathetic" sentence he imposed after hearing the girl had appeared much older than her age.

The same judge caused uproar earlier this year by setting free another paedophile and telling him to give his victim money "to buy a nice new bicycle".

In the latest case, Oxford Crown Court heard harrowing details of the assault on the 10-year-old. She was attacked in a park in South Oxfordshire by Fenn and his accomplice Darren Wright, 34, on October 14 last year.

Fenn removed all her clothes and raped her, then Wright took her to his home and sexually assaulted her.

Yet Judge Hall said the case was exceptional because the "young woman" had been wearing a frilly bra and thong.

The girl has been in local authority care since the age of four.

She was on her own when she met the pair in the street. They went to the park together. The judge said he faced a moral dilemma.

The court heard that the girl regularly wore make-up, strappy tops and jeans.

"It is quite clear she is a very disturbed child and a very needy child and she is a sexually precocious child. She liked to dress provocatively," the judge said.

"Did she look like she was 10? Certainly not. She looked 16."

He gave Fenn concurrent two-year and 18-month sentences but he will be free in just weeks after spending eight months in jail awaiting sentence.

Wright is a free man because he too had served eight months on remand.

My Mind Swirls At What This Says About the State of Texas Justice

I went over here to vote in one of those stupid online polls about whether Texas Governor Perry's proposal to abolish most of "gun-free" zones was a good idea or not.

Then I noticed this poll about another legislative proposal that just makes my brain spin:

A compromise bill in Austin would allow the death penalty for child predators twice convicted of raping a child 13 or younger. Do you support allowing the death penalty for repeat child sexual abuse offenders?

What makes my mind boggle is the idea that someone who has been convicted of raping a child 13 or younger would ever be allowed outside of a prison cell.

NAACP Official Takes the High Road

I am so glad to see this guy taking the right position, and calling this tragedy what it is--a failure of the black community to deal with a moral failure that is entirely within its power to fix:

CLEVELAND -- The Cleveland NAACP responded Friday to criticism surrounding the shooting death of a teenage boy during a robbery.

NAACP President George Forbes and Cleveland Councilman Zach Reed said the black community failed 15-year-old Arthur Buford, NewsChannel5 reported.

They said Buford was wrong for allegedly trying to rob Damon Wells at gunpoint on Saturday.

Wells opened fire and killed Buford at East 134th Street and Kinsman. Police said Wells had a valid weapons permit and used the gun in self-defense.

"Then you have a 26-year-old young man who had every right to protect his life, protect his fiance and protect his property. But he has to life with the fact that for the rest of his lie he shot a 15-year-old boy," said Reed.

"That man had a right to do what he did. If he didn't do it, we'd be sitting here today mourning him rather than the 15-year-old," said Forbes.

They pointed out that homicide is the leading cause of death for black men 15 to 24.

Forbes said that if we saw those kind of numbers for an illness, the community would be outraged.

He said the community should also treat this as an epidemic.

I remember some years ago the NAACP (I think) ran a commercial very briefly that showed a Klan rally somewhere, and then showed the number of black people that various hate groups had killed in the previous year--and then a stereotypical black gang member, and the number of black people that this bunch had killed in the previous year. It was like 10 to 10,000. There was a storm of protest--but the point was made: too much focus on white supremacists, not enough on the criminals who are destroying the black community.