From Boston.com:
The DNA that had cleared Anthony Powell, 38, of Boston of rape eventually led prosecutors to Jerry Dixon, 35, who was arraigned yesterday in Suffolk Superior Court in the same rape case, along with one other. [...]
In 2004, investigators searched an FBI database that linked four unsolved Boston rape cases but did not reveal a perpetrator. Based on the forensic findings, a Suffolk grand jury indicted an unknown subject, listed as John Doe, for three rapes that occurred in September 1989, March 1991, and July 1991. [...]
Authorities said Dixon was matched this summer to each of the four cases when he submitted to mandatory DNA testing before being released from the Suffolk House of Correction.
This case brings up many important issues about general procedures which get talked about and studied by groups which are dedicated to the wrongly convicted and by so-called pro-men groups which love to slander girls and women who report being raped. However, issues like statutes of limitations for rape — the reason 3 cases were charged to John Doe — are often neglected because those limits benefit defendants. Or at least they seem to.
If older rape cases which were committed before rapists realized they were leaving important evidence behind are filed away because the statute of limitations has expired — even though a match was later found as in these cases — then those rapists are likely to remain free to commit crimes where an innocent man may be placed under suspicion or even charged.
If a stranger rapist, who benefited from the statute of limitation, rapes and then kills an innocent man’s girlfriend without leaving detected DNA that man who just had someone he cared about raped and murdered will suffer even if he is never formally charged or named as a suspect.
He’s innocent and many people are focused on his needs but his girlfriend was raped and murdered by someone who should have been in prison. To me that doesn’t seem like an outcome which benefits him in any way. It certainly doesn’t seem like an outcome which supports justice.
This outcome doesn’t seem to be a good outcome for any innocent man. Yet many people fight those like me who want to eliminate the statute of limitations for rape because they claim that removal would be bad for innocent men.
I blogged late last year about the Kansas Supreme Court hearing an appeal which sought to reinstate charges against a man on death row who was originally charged as John Doe in multiple cases because of the statute of limitations in that state. But the court ruled that those indictments were not specific enough while upholding the general legality of John Doe indictments. So if Douglas Belt has his current murder conviction overturned for any reason, including procedural errors, the 7 rapes associated with him will be meaningless.
Dixon was previously charged with rape in a 1996 case in Newton but was found not guilty, prosecutors said. He also faced similar charges in Roxbury District Court in 1999, prosecutors said, but those were dismissed.
These charges against Dixon which did not result in convictions raise more questions which are often overlooked by those who focus only on the criminal justice system from the defendant’s perspective. The key one is that rapists who get away with rape will likely continue to commit crimes and their real crime victims who did report them will face the wrongful suspicion that they filed false police reports.
This is a taint which many of those who focus on innocent men in rape cases actively contribute to because the outcome seems to support common claims about all those women who lie about rape.
If the supposedly innocent man is later proven to be a serial rapist, most of these people will not apologize to the innocent women they attacked and they certainly won’t apologize to those who became crime victims because a guilty man wasn’t convicted.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 16 comments }
You seem to be conflating men who are found not guilty of rape, for whatever reason, with men who are genuinely innocent but are wrongly convicted. The two are not the same at all.
In any case, the fact that some men are wrongly convicted of rape doesn’t mean that the victim “lied,” only that she was mistaken. Erroneous identifications are a chronic problem for all sorts of crimes. Being mistaken does not make a crime victim a liar.
But I agree with you that there shouldn’t be a statute of limitation on rape, given the horrid nature of the offense and the potential for storing and using DNA evidence.
Hey, legal schtuff–my favorite!
DNA evidence is extremely reliable (though as with all evidence, is not by any means a sure thing.) But what DNA evidence tends to prove is existence or presence at a scene.
So, DNA can prove that John’s semen was on Jane’s panties. But it can’t prove whether John and Jane had consensual sex (one of the most common defenses to rape–even, oddly enough, in violent and stranger rape, where it strains credulity to even hear the claim.)
Anyway, DNA evidence can shred the “it wasn’t me!!” defense, but it doesn’t do a thing about the “she was asking for it!” defense.
Now that we’re all on the same page with that, let’s look at how that affects the SOL (statute of limitations.)
The purpose of the SOL is usually twofold:
1) It allows people to “go on with their lives” as if, I dunno, they never raped anyone? I don’t really get this, but it is in fact a claimed purpose of the SOL. OK, to give it a better spin, it allows you to move on without the worry that someone will sue you for having raped them. I don’t get this, either. Enough of the spin. I don’t feel a lot of sympathy here; #2 is where it’s at.
2) It keeps witnesses fresh, or reasonably so. this IS actually a pretty huge deal. Witness testimony is already notoriously unreliable (betcha didn’t know that, did you?) Witness testimony which is extremely old, and over time it can become biased and cemented by the telling and retelling of the story–complete with inaccuracies–of the event. One may REALLY BELIEVE (no intent to lie) something which was actually not true, and which was known to be different.
You all know this, it’s probably happened to you on the giving or receiving end (though not with a rape claim I hope!)
Anyway…
This is particularly an issue with testimony. It also makes it very, very, difficult to properly confront witnesses and to attempt to find inconsistencies in their testimony. It blurs the line between “lying” and “doesn’t remember” and “readjusted their memory a month before trial, to match their 20-year old written statement.” This is NOT NOT a problem endemic to women, or rape victims, or anyone else, it’s just an issue of memory.
There is no particular reason to discard good physical evidence which happens to be old, so long as the age hasn’t degraded the testimony. But there may be–MAY, not IS, I don’t know for sure–a good reason to discard all or some testimonial evidence. This is especially important in light of recent Supreme Court rulings on confrontation of adverse witnesses.
Bitter Scribe, I’m not conflating anything. I’m talking about how lack of enforcement and lack of rightful convictions contribute to situations where other men can be wrongfully convicted. These areas too often get neglected by those who focus on wrongful convictions.
You may understand that a wrongful conviction says nothing about the victim in that case, but many people do assume that if a man is wrongfully convicted that the alleged victim lied either about the crime itself or about who did it.
You may understand that having rape charges dropped or having a defendant found not guilty by themselves say nothing about the honesty of the alleged rape victim or whether or not a rape really happened, but many people do assume based on lack of conviction that the suspect or defendant was wrongfully accused and just barely escaped being wrongfully convicted.
And from there they advocate against believing rape victims and against properly funding training sex-crime investigators and against investigating all rape reports.
Lack of training which these people oppose as a waste of time can mean that the investigators don’t know about more reliable ID processes and therefore use processes which can lead rape victims and witnesses to ID the wrong person.
You may understand that a wrongful conviction says nothing about the victim in that case
Um…. why not?
Chances are that her testimony was critical in the false conviction.
It’s hard enough to convict people for rape, even when they did it. Chances are that if someone gets convicted who was INNOCENT, that the witness said a lot of incorrect stuff, and someone paid for it. Perhaps it was not malicious (see my above comment regarding the problems with witness testimony in general) but it was false, untrue, a lie….
This happens incredibly rarely. As noted, rape convictions are hard to get; false ones must be even harder. But when someone gives testimony which results in a false conviction, I am not sure why we should refrain from making negative judgments about her based on her false testimony. Seems like pretty reprehensible results. As this is so rare, it obviously makes no sense to generalize it to “all victims” or “all women” though.
Often it is the police who track down a rape suspect and based on THEIR evidence, the suspect is convicted. Not so much to do with the victim’s testimony, you know? But she still gets the grief for it.
And how dare you assume a victim knowingly gave false testimony.
Sailorman wrote: “It’s hard enough to convict people for rape, even when they did it. Chances are that if someone gets convicted who was INNOCENT, that the witness said a lot of incorrect stuff, and someone paid for it.
This connection between genuine cases where the rapist got away with it and genuine cases where the wrong person was convicted is a false one. Therefore, this conclusion about what the witness said is faulty at a basic level and contributes to unfounded accusations being directed at rape victims who cooperated with law enforcement to the best of their ability.
It’s often the hardest to convict people for rape when IDing the rapist is not an issue at all. The defense in these cases is basically that no crime was committed. If there is DNA evidence then the described actions are defended as consensual and the alleged victim is either a liar or deluded. If there is no DNA evidence then the defense is that rape victim is a liar.
To use attitudes which wrongly dismiss the testimony of real rape victims as a reason to make negative conclusions against other rape victims is wrong and it uses one wrong done to rape victims to justify another.
These types of wrongful accusations made against genuine rape victims are largely ignored by many people who claim to be against all wrongful and/or unfounded accusations.
Because eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable and stress can seriously screw with your memory for details, it is *quite* possible for a woman to pick a man out of a lineup in the sincere belief that he was her rapist. If she is white and he is black, the fact that he had a good alibi might not even be adequate defense, given the racism of most courts. So then the DNA evidence comes along and proves no, he’s not the guy. Did she lie? Hell no — she sincerely believed, based on the lineup she was given, that he was the man who raped her. But she was wrong, because humans can be wrong, and if it was dark she might have gotten details wrong, and especially if it was interracial she may have a harder time telling individuals apart, and even if it was broad daylight and he was the same race as she was simply the stress of being raped could screw with her memories, not of what he did to her, but of what he looked like exactly. Presented with a man who sorta kinda looks like the guy, desperately wanting justice, and trusting that the cops wouldn’t have picked this fellow for the lineup if there was no chance it was him, she says, yeah, I think it was him. And then an innocent man goes away for years, and a guilty man rapes again. No one’s fault. But it happens.
In acquaintance rape cases, DNA is less useful because the defense that the sex was consensual is much more common than the defense that it didn’t happen, but it’s acquaintance rape cases that are both pretty ironclad in terms of the victim’s memory (if you know the man who raped you, you’re not going to pick the wrong guy out of a lineup) and really easy for the rapist to get off by claiming she wanted it. Stranger rape is easier to convict in the first place, but also easier to be mistaken about who did it.
So yes. It is *very* possible for a woman to accidentally send the wrong man to jail with her testimony, if it was a stranger rape, while having actually been raped by a different person who’s still free, without the woman being a lying bitch. Uncertain vague “maybe it was him” statements can be turned by the cops into declarations of certainty if they just get the feeling that the accused is the perp, and cops are under a lot of pressure to solve cases quickly, so either they will quickly move to declare that a rape didn’t happen and they’re not gonna prosecute, or a rape did happen and here’s the rapist, if those options are available to them.
So, why couldn’t a statute of limitations parse for different kinds of evidence? “This testimony is inadmissible because it comes from someone with dementia and the defendant is alleged to have been on those premises at that time twenty-seven years ago, but this evidence remains in force, as it is DNA from another person entirely and meets the DNA clause of the statute.”
At risk of hijacking the intent of this thread — I’m getting heated up about all this — I don’t get the whole dance the patriarchy does around victim-blaming in what was supposed to be a progressively civilized civilization. Why is rape of a fellow soldier in a war zone during time of war not prosecuted as treason, since the perpetrator is knowingly weakening the combat effectiveness of the unit in the face of the enemy? (…other considerations, such as why there is an enemy, set aside for the moment.) Those who hold our common welfare in their meaty little hands — judges, court officers, lawyers, police officers, Federal agents, legislators, even pastors and priests — hopefully, usually, not perps themselves — almost universally horribly underestimate the impact of rape — except when it is in there own families — and even then, their estimation of the impact is usually self-referenced. It is one of our primary shames as a species that this is going on, and on, and on, with winks and nods — when we could all be working together to find a way to live beneath our vines and fig trees, “in peace and unafraid.”
The articles seem to indicate that John Doe warrants are being effective to toll limitations where prosecutors have DNA evidence against otherwise unidentified assailants. Therefore the argument the original post seems to be making (as I read it at least) applies mostly to past rapes where the statute has run and no warrant was filed or as in the one case filed but faulty.
Anyone know if retroactively changing a statute of limitations runs afoul of the prohibition on ex post facto laws or other due process limitations.
Risa bear asked: So, why couldn’t a statute of limitations parse for different kinds of evidence?
The problem here is that there is no way to know all of the valid permutations in advance. With new advances in DNA detection a case which was originally viewed as having no forensic evidence may be reviewed using new technologies.
There is no statute of limitations on murder yet all of the same issues people use to justify having short statutes of limitations for rape cases apply to murder cases.
The burden of proof is on the prosecutor so the issues I’ve seen listed would make it harder to get a conviction, not easier.
Antinome, while I talked about cases where John Doe warrants were used because the statute of limitations were about to expire in their respective states, my point applies to cases where the statute of limitations have not yet expired, but may expire before a DNA match is made if current statute of limitations for rape cases are not eliminated.
Cold cases have had physical evidence processed prior to the statute of limitations but that DNA result wasn’t properly filed before the statute of limitations expired. Other cases have only unprocessed DNA evidence and these cases can’t be kept alive via John Doe warrants.
I believe that in the US that once the statute of limitations expires on a case, there can never be a conviction in that case no matter what changes are made to a jurisdiction’s statute of limitations. To have this change would I believe be a constitutional issue.
I can’t help but feel that you are
Yes, people do make mistakes. A false ID isn’t the same as a maliciously false accusation which targets someone.
But the degree to which one acts, or says one is certain, is controlled. The degree to which
Marcelle, you said
This connection between genuine cases where the rapist got away with it and genuine cases where the wrong person was convicted is a false one. Therefore, this conclusion about what the witness said is faulty at a basic level and contributes to unfounded accusations being directed at rape victims who cooperated with law enforcement to the best of their ability.
But I don’t see the “because…” part. If you think it’s a false connection: why?
Are you saying that you think that people who misidentify their attacker are not AT ALL complicit? That they do not choose AT ALL when balancing their desire to see someone?
Agreed — no statute of limitations where the issue involves stranger rape. Where the only issue is consent, of course there needs to be a statute of limitations.
And there should also be no statute of limitations on false reporting of rape if a lie sends an innocent man away for 20 years — only because the lie had its intended effect — the woman should not be exempt from proseuction if her lie is only outed long after she made it. Otherwise we are rewarding women who are good liars.
Has to work both ways.
Sailorman wrote: “Are you saying that you think that people who misidentify their attacker are not AT ALL complicit?”
If it is a misidentification then, no, the victim is not at all complicit. Once you open this door then all jurors who wrongly assume that a rapist is or might be innocent because of testimony which paints the defendant as a model citizen have chosen to be complicit to letting a rapist go free.
That would mean if a rapist who was wrongfully acquitted goes on to commit murder that all the jurors on the rape case are at least partially complicit in that murder.
Cranium, your so-called equality of consequences is no equality at all. You reveal this and your disregard for the seriousness of non-stranger rape when you positioned a woman filing a false police report as committing a more serious crime than a man raping someone he knows.
My position is no statute of limitations on rape. Period.
Your logic would mean that the statute of limitations for murders committed by non-strangers must be lowered.
If you were being consistant then any perjury or false report or statement related to any crime would have the same statute of limitations as the crime itself. To be consistant this would need to include men who commit perjury when they claim sex was consensual. The consequences of that would mean that a man wrongfully acquitted of rape could be convicted of perjury and sentenced as if he were found guilty of the rape charge without it being double jeopardy.
Yet you only focus on women who report being raped. You seem unaware that men have given false police reports, either implicating an innocent man for a crime he committed or reporting a crime which never happened.
Also, given that many of the women who file *demonstrably* false police reports for rape — as in, she knows the guy who she says did it but there is no DNA match to him — are probably mentally ill, it would be cruel to criminizalize false reports.
I strongly believe that 98% of the time, when a woman says she was raped, she was raped. This is consistent with the rate of false report for other crimes. However, in the 20% of rape cases that are stranger rapes, the woman could be certain of her identification of the perp and still be wrong a *huge* percentage of the time. And in the 80% of the rape cases that are acquaintance rape, until society recognizes that women have vastly less motivation to lie about having been raped than rapists have to lie about having raped someone, you are *always* going to have the asshats on the jury who think that because she had sex with him once he has a permanent lease on her pussy, or because she had sex with *anybody* once she was required to put out for him, or because she got drunk she deserved it, or she’s just a dirty liar because she’s a woman. So until misogyny is a thing of the past, men will always be acquitted of acquaintance rape because they’re just seen as more credible than women. And if men are acquitted of rapes they committed at higher rates than any other crime, criminalizing the women who attempt to get justice because they weren’t able to get justice would be a terrible blow to justice and a license for men to rape with impunity.
(BTW — this is ridiculous. Men commit EVERY CRIME THERE IS at higher rates than women, except child abuse, which they commit at higher rates in proportion to the amount of time they spend with kids but they spend so much less time that the actual rate for women is higher. (Well, and prostitution, but only because we don’t criminalize being a john, which is absurd. If johns were criminals too, then men would have much, much higher rates of prostitution-related criminality than women, although any given woman with prostitution offenses would have many more offenses on her record). If a man is a rapist, he is a criminal, and criminals lie; a rapist has much higher motivation to lie about not raping than a woman has to lie about being raped. Why don’t we as a society ever notice that 90% of the murderers are men, and most of the thieves, burglars and con artists are men, and take from that a lesson about the relatively credibility of a man and a woman when she says “he raped me” and he says “she totally wanted it?”)
Yes, there are some women who file false reports of rape, but this is such a trivial problem next to the huge, huge problem of men who rape and then lie and smear the women they raped in order to escape justice, it’s like you’re trying to swat a fly while the house is on fire. Unless we had a justice system where the women is presumptively believed unless a preponderance of the evidence suggests otherwise — and that would violate the tenet of “innocent until proven guilty” — then you can never assume that acquittal actually means innocence. So you could never prove that a woman filed a false report.
Comments on this entry are closed.