Not defending the Stanford swimmer in any way, but I’d suggest a couple of things.
First, the veracity of any defendant’s statement depends on many different factors. Was the defendant sober when he gave the statement? Was he sober enough when the events happened to be able to speak accurately about them afterward? Did he give the statement freely? Or were they in response to questions asked by a deputy? Was it videotaped? Was the videotape started BEFORE he was brought into the interrogation room, or did the deputies speak to him before the camera was turned on? If written, did the defendant write out his own statement, or did a deputy write the statement which was later signed by the defendant? Was a lawyer present? Were any warnings given? All of these things matter in how much credence to give a statement. The two articles I read shed no light on any of these issues.
Second, the actions of the Swedish students were heroic, IMO. That said, eyewitness testimony can be notoriously unreliable. This isn’t to cast any aspersions whatsoever on the two men. It happens time and time again that people think they see something, but didn’t, or at least didn’t quite see what they thought they saw, or what has been suggested to them. Especially at night. What actually happened may have been much worse than what they said they saw, or not as bad.
As imperfect as the judicial system is, one of the reasons we have it is to at least try to settle these issues.
And what if it turned out AFTER the trial that the boy who assaulted your daughter was the look-alike cousin of the boy who was expelled? Facts need to come out in a manner that is fair and respectful to all parties.
In the Stanford case in particular, however, I don’t think there is any doubt as to the identity of the young man. Nor has there been any suggestion that he was actually giving the young woman CPR.
I think Hunt has it right about the probable outcome.
It’s a study about how rape cases were handled by the police and prosecutors by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. They looked at all reports for 2005-2009.
I’m reading it now, and recommend it to others in this thread. It’s gold. It’s difficult to excerpt because the entire summary is filled with facts that are relevant to our discussion here.
There were 5031 rapes and attempted rapes reported to LAPD in this time period. Of those, 390 resulted in a conviction, and over a third of the convicted felons got probation. There were 2269 rapes and attempted rapes reported to LASD in the time period. Of those, 317 resulted in a conviction, and over a third of the convicted felons got probation.
Fang – those numbers don’t surprise me. 7% conviction rate in LAPD cases is probably higher than I would have guessed. After you take non-reports into account, the real conviction rate is even lower. Probably more like RAINN’s estimate that only 2% of rapists ever see jail.
Let’s say we somehow could double or triple the conviction rate by reforming criminal processes and encouraging reporting. You would still wind up with a pathetically low number. It will always be pathetically low no matter what you do. We all know that. You just cannot litigate your way out of this. Not at the courthouse. Not at the college either. In fact, there’s good reason to think that colleges will likely be worse at this than the real criminal justice system.
That’s why, especially for colleges, the far better thing to do is to put effort into reducing attacks in the first place. You will never ever get there through litigation reform. Can’t be done. You can’t get there from here. So while you don’t give up on making the criminal justice system better, thoughtful folks like me say you should focus on something else that is more promising.
Somehow there has been (if you believe the stats) a 50% reduction in attacks over the past 20 years. Wow – that’s HUGE progress. We should study how that happened and figure out how to do more of those things that have been proven effective.
A far more productive path than focusing on litigation processes. Which is my beef with DOE OCR. They are litigators. So they incorrectly see the campus rape problem as a nail that will be solved with the litigation hammer. .
Just talking about one aspect of arresting and convicting rapists…
There is a multiplier effect because most rapists rape more than one person. So…when you arrest and convict somebody for a sexual assault… you are probably convicting somebody who has committed other sexual assaults.
When you convict somebody of a sexual assault, because most offenders commit multiple crimes, you are likely decreasing sexual assault in the future.
If 7 percent of the guys commit 90 percent of the assaults, putting 1 percent of these guys away can have a material affect on crime. ( I don’t remember the actual numbers).
So…there are reasons to arrest and convict sexual assaulters.
I think RAINN is correct. We should educate people. I like the bystander idea. I think the vast majority of guys do want to do good and help. It is a positive idea and people respond to positive ideas. Having men and women work together will work. We see this in the Stanford case with the male heroes. In the OXY case, there were multiple male heroes watching out for the victim. Almost worked.
That is what a variable is. I thought what I wrote was pretty clear. In case I wasn’t, though. The variables in the DOJ statistics did not change over time. eg, the types of incidents did not change. The definition assigned to the particular type of incidents did not change, etc.
I never said it meant that all rapes were decreasing. If you go back and re-read my posts you will see that I specifically said that you could trust the trend of that type of rape that they were measuring. I believe at one point I said that my guess was that forcible rapes were being measured with more accuracy than acquaintance rapes.
Using this logic then you could say that virtually any trend is worthless from any survey. Hopefully you are enough of a statistics expert to realize that is not true.
I’m enough of a statistics expert to know that you can detect trends from repeated REPRESENTATIVE samples. But you have given me no reason to suppose that the rapes reported to the DOJ/BJS survey constitute a representative subset of all rapes. I’m enough of a statistics expert to know that trends in a subset of a group identified by some characteristic are not the same as trends in the entire group. I would have hoped that this would have been obvious to you, too, but apparently not.
Here’s an example of why we can’t use the DOJ/BJS reports to determine a trend for all rapes: Suppose we wanted to know about cars on a particular road. We did this by repeatedly recording the number of red cars on a certain road. We noticed that the number of red cars went up over time. Does this mean that the number of cars on the road was increasing? Maybe, but maybe not-- perhaps red had become a more popular car color, and while the total number of cars on the road decreased, the number of red ones increased. Can we deduce the proportion of sportscars among all cars on the road, by looking at the proportion of red cars that are sportscars? No, of course not. Red cars are not a representative sample of all cars.
As far as litigation in the absence of force/assault i would hazard a guess most people would give someone a chance. The Missoula example the accused had two different people telling a similar story which is very powerful. Even though criminal court is different than civil court it’s hard to “weed out” a jury that doesn’t have some tiny sense that if both people are voluntarily drinking they both don’t deserve a chance…the victim and the accuser both deserve alittle something and hope springs eternal by juries (and judges) that neither of their faces will ever be seen again. I agree, you don’t litigate your way out of this and very few people have such a hardened view of mankind that they are willing to toss someone into a jail situation if they aren’t 100% certain that person is a risk to other people. So while in civil courts some assignment of guilt can occur that isn’t the case in criminal court, but you can’t ever escape the issue that most juries have feelings about people in general.
As far as the student dropping out of college, I think I said on a different thread, if one of mine were embroiled in some legal issue I’d pull them out immediately. They don’t need to be dealing with “college” when they have bigger issues to deal with. This kid’s family probably could have made that decision in a split second as they should have. The last thing he needs is a college running some sort of parallel investigation and parallel adjudication and the record will show he dropped out.
Never said they were. Do you not actually read the posts? Do you read them but not understand? Or, do you purposely make things up? I specifically said that the survey did not constitute a representative sample of all rapes. How could you have missed that? Seriously. It makes me wonder about your motives.
Again, read my above response. And, again, your response makes me question your motives, or your ability to comprehend a complete sentence. Here is why I say that. This was the quote you responded to:
However, if you measure the number of red cars over a long period of time you have more confidence in your trend. Red cars may go in or out of fashion like you stated, but over long periods of time those trends are all smoothed out.
By the same token, if you wanted to measure the proportion of sportscars on the road over time you could get a pretty good idea of that by measuring the increase or decrease in red sports cars over a long period of time.
I am not saying those are the perfect methods, but you can tell a lot more than you seem to think by measuring over time and using that to smooth out short term variations.
You could not! This is why I am an expert in statistics and software, and you aren’t. This would not work, and would be a terrible experimental procedure. Trends in sportscars and trends in red sportscars are not the same. You have no reason to think that trends in car colors even out, and in fact, they don’t. If they did, we’d be back to all cars being black at some point.
If you saw more fewer red sportscars, that might mean that there were fewer sportscars overall, or that red had become an unpopular color for sportscars, or that there was exactly the same proportion of sportscars but fewer cars overall. You wouldn’t be able to conclude anything.
I’ll apologize ahead of time if this topic has already been addressed in detail in this thread, I simply can’t read through 67 pages of posts to find out, but I’m wondering what percentage of these rapes involve alcohol? Is there any data on that?
OK. Just like you are a grammar expert and editor. “If you saw more fewer red sportscars”
JK as the kids say, but I had to get that dig in there
Forgive me if I do not believe you about being an expert. For example: someone asks you to get a rough idea if traffic is increasing or decreasing on a California highway throughout the year. The only person you can find to count the cars is a poor kid who was born with a congenital condition where he can only see red. He reports 10 cars the 1st month; 20 cars the 2nd month; 40 the 3rd month; 100 the 4th month; the 12th month he reports 10,000 cars. Can we trust his observations (and thus the survey) to be completely accurate? Of course not. Can we have increased confidence that the total number of cars has increased over the course of the year? yes.
I thought what I wrote was pretty clear. In case I wasn’t, though. The variables in the DOJ statistics did not change over time. eg, the types of incidents did not change. The definition assigned to the particular type of incidents did not change, etc.