Monday

You know things are crazy when...

You find that the person on a panel making the most sense is former Manhattan ADA Linda Fairstein. But so it seems from this posting about a panel on "grey rape" which is, from what I can tell a cute new moniker used to describe something lighter than date rape but slightly shy of disappointing sex.


Fairstein the sensible?

Robert D. Laurino, chief assistant prosecutor for Essex County in New Jersey spoke absurdly of “undetected rapists — the small minority of men who have committed hundreds of rapes on campuses.” Such predators, he claimed often have “sophisticated strategies” for sexual exploitation that involve deceiving women into imbibing strong alcoholic beverages. Whoa! Where lurk these super-predators? In some Austin Powers movie?

The usual alarmists then trotted out the standard nonsense about how no one reports rapes and how they're the hardest cases to prove. Until it was, of all people the former head of the Manhattan DA's sex crimes unit who was left to talk some sense into the gaseous hysterical group. It was Fairstein who explained that "there is a higher rate of false reporting (about 9 to 10 percent) for acquaintance rape than for most other crimes." It was Fairstein who explained that contrary to the claims "The prosecution rate for rapes by strangers is “astoundingly high,” and it was Fairstein who concluded that "“Certainly, in the criminal justice system there’s no such thing as gray rape. Gray rape is not a new term and not a new experience. For journalists, it may be, but for those of us who had worked in advocacy or law enforcement, this description of something being in a gray area has been around all the time. It’s always been my job in law enforcement to separate out the facts.”

It's too bad that there wasn't a defense attorney or level headed person there to debunk the junk, but (and I never thought I'd say this since I almost always disagree with her) thank heavens Linda Fairstein was there to talk something resembling sense.

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