The Wounds that Time Forgot to Heal

The Wounds that Time Forgot to Heal

© 2021 Ross Williams

I was taking my daughters somewhere several years ago. They were maybe 11 and 14. One of them made a reference to a story that was in the news at the time about a woman who was accusing some semi-famous or otherwise fairly wealthy man of rape many years before. Needless to say, there was no longer any physical evidence of anything, and it was devolving into a classic “Yuh-huh/Nuh-uh!!” I no longer recall the individuals involved, though I do believe that it ended up with the guy being “proven” guilty so as to extract a pound of his wallet if not also some amount of his life. At least one of my daughters was thrilled by this. It was “justice served”.

I, on the other hand, was not thrilled. And I informed my girls as to why I was not. It's not that I doubt it happened; I had no clue. It may very well have. It's that there was no earthly way of proving it. When you can't prove something but determine guilt and assign punishment anyway, you have nothing more or less than a witch hunt which, in our system of jurisprudence, is entirely prohibited. And I informed my daughters that if anything similar should happen to them, they mustMustMUST report it immediately irrespective of any shame, guilt, embarrassment or other such feelings they may have; I would stand behind them and help them every inch of the way.

But if they waited and only made an issue out of it later, after years or even months, I would take the side of whomever they were accusing. Sympathy is not a sound legal footing. It is crude, crass politics and there is no place for it in Justice.

My daughters, not yet at an age where they could be self-righteously petulant and concoct a verbal barrage to do so convincingly, simply pouted.

Bill Cosby was released from prison last week. He'd been found guilty of molesting a woman who had only officially brought it up years after it supposedly happened. She had brought it up only for the purpose of extracting money from him – in a different country. The prosecutors in this country had said that no criminal charges would be filed if he were to waive his 5^thAM rights in a second civil trial where the only thing at stake was his money. So he did. He admitted to a portion of the woman's accusations: he acknowledged that he spiked her drink. Prosecutors took this semi-confession and filed criminal charges anyway. Illegally.

Still, the criminal trial built upon the partial self-incrimination coerced by the indian-giving state ended in a hung jury because there was no actual evidence of anything, and the confession didn't cover the criminal conduct. So the prosecutors decided to try him again, only this time gaining the testimony of other women with similar complaints about him. The judge determined that this was an acceptable legal maneuver, ignoring the required judicial obeisance to both Rule of Law and Due Process. In the second trial The Coz was found guilty of “aggravated indecent assault” and sentenced to 3-to-10 years in prison.

Cosby maintained his innocence even after conviction.

Earlier this year he was offered some kind of reduction of sentence if only he'd admit his guilt and profess his remorse. He refused to do so. He also refused the counseling made mandatory for all such sex criminals. And then last week the PA Supreme Court issued its ruling that the prosecution had broken its word on his 5^thAM rights and obtained a tainted verdict; he must be released immediately and [I presume, due to Double Jeopardy exclusions] could not be tried again.

While the PA Supreme Court was correct, of course, they missed a massive unconstitutionality in the conviction. And anyone with enough honesty and integrity to be able to switch around the gender roles in this subject [using, naturally, the two genders that exist and not the myriad pseudo-genders that have been invented] can easily see the problem the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ignored.

Let's review the relevant legal principle as we know it: Just because a woman is a slut in general does not mean that she wasn't raped in this specific instance. Ergo, you cannot bring in defense witnesses to testify that the plaintiff alleging rape had previously been a slut; it biases the jury against the plaintiff... which is called, in rhetorical logic terms, poisoning the well. With me so far? Good. This is legal form in sexual assault cases for the last two generations.

Now, let's apply it: Just because a man is a womanizing cad in general does not mean he was a womanizing cad in this specific instance. Ergo, you cannot bring in prosecution witnesses to testify that the defendant had previously been a womanizing cad. The second criminal trial, obtaining a criminal conviction built off the testimony of non-criminal plaintiffs, was a transparent abuse of our system.

Why does anyone need to be reminded of this?

Why did the trial judge find it acceptable to allow the prosecutor to poison the well? and to pretend it was Justice he was serving in doing so?

Why did the PA Supreme Court willfully ignore this blatant abuse of our system and rely upon a weed-dwelling technicality to nullify the improper conviction? Oh, gosh, the prosecutor went back on a promise to illegally gain a semi-confession! That's so-o-o-o much worse than using unsupportable innuendo and character assassination in obtaining a guilty verdict.

Let's stop with the self-pitying pretense: the whole thing was wrong from the start. There can be no criminal trial without evidence. Period. Tears and weeping are not evidence; they are play acting. They are play acting, Christine Blasey Ford. You missed your chance with Kavanaugh by roughly 3-½ decades.

And decades is about average for the MeTooists. Of the fifty-seven women who have specifically accused Bill Cosby of sexual predation, the average length of time it took between the date of the sexual assault and the date the assault was reported to authorities was 32.6 years. Only three women reported the incident within a decade, and only two reported it in terms that could even begin to be described as “immediately”.

Of the two “immediate” police reports, one had been consensual pawing [#47 in the link] up until the woman decided she'd had enough; Cosby didn't force anything and no charges could be filed. The other [#46], didn't file a criminal complaint in Pennsylvania where the incident took place, but instead reported it in Canada, in order to file a civil suit in Ontario. The Canadian tort was settled out of court.

The type of sexual assault alleged in this instance – groping – rarely leaves physical evidence and would rely upon witnesses, recording devices or a confession for corroboration, even if it were immediately prosecuted. It was this case in which criminal charges were filed – 14 years after the fact – using a quasi-confession illegally obtained. Even then, it didn't gain a conviction. It still needed the well-poisoning theatrics that any first-year law student, under any other set of circumstances, would recognize as grossly out of bounds in a US court of law.

Once again, I don't doubt that a large share of the reports against Cosby [and those like him] are – more or less – accurate. For the record, I also don't doubt that a portion of them are fame-seeking piling on, or exaggeration. But a system of justice where actual justice is served cannot – and must not be allowed to – be built upon evidenceless tears and hysterics, corroborated only by innuendo and assumption.

That is not justice. It is the crass politics of witch hunting. So, man up, ladies. If these things happen to you, report it immediately. Time is not on your side.