Day: March 6, 2002

Is Virginia’s Proposed Marital Rape Statute a Good Idea?

A lot of folks are up in arms over Virginia’s proposal to criminalize marital rape, but the proposal seems like simple common sense.

Virginia’s legislature is considering altering its laws to make it easier for married women to file rape charges against their husband. Some critics of feminism are up in arms over this proposed change, but, in fact, passing the law would be the right thing to do.

The issue here is pretty straightforward. Under current Virginia law, a woman who wants to accuse her husband of rape must first meet two criteria — she must no longer be living with her husband or she must provide some evidence of a serious bodily injury. If she is still living with her husband or did not sustain a serious bodily injury, she cannot accuse her husband of rape.

The proposed law would eliminate those two requirements, giving married women the same rights under the law that single women have.

This seems like a pretty obvious change that probably should have been done a long time ago, but critics both in the Virginia House and on the Internet have criticized the bill on a number of grounds. Stuart Miller wrote a critique of the law, Martial Rape — What a “Can of Worms”! that presents two arguments against the marital rape statute. Lets look at those.

First Miller opens his critique with the bizarre view that a marital rape statute might discourage men from getting married. Since data show that married women suffer less violence from their partners than do non-married women, the law might actually increase violence against women by lowering marriage rates. It is also true that children living in married households are less likely to be abused by their parents than are children living in unmarried households. Does it follow, then, that we should decriminalize child abuse among married couples? Besides, I thought it was the radical feminists who were obsessed with groups rather than with protecting the rights of individual. Presumably women who are raped by their husbands would prefer to be treated like individuals rather than figuring in some grand collective calculus by Miller and others.

The second argument Miller offers is also an argument that was made in opposition to the law on the floor of the Virginia House — some unscrupulous women might use this law to file false rape charges against their husbands to gain leverage during divorce proceedings.

Certainly, if this law passes, some women will in fact do this. So what? The fact that some women might twist and abuse the law is hardly much of a justification for jettisoning the rights of women who do not abuse the system in that way. The solution to that problem is not saying that married women must jump through all sorts of extra hoops to charge their husbands with rape, but rather demand that more be done about the problem of false allegations.

Virginia’s current law is absurdly antiquated. That a woman in Virginia cannot file a rape charge against her husband if she is currently living with him and did not sustain a serious bodily injury boggles the mind. The Virginia legislature should pass this change to its statute on marital rape, and it should also pass legislation toughening treatment of men or women who file false allegations.

Source:

Marital Rape — What a “Can of Worms”!. Stuart A. Miller, Strike-The-Root.Com, March 3, 2002.

Domestic violence a priority. Pamela Stallsmith, Virginia Times-Dispatch, February 24, 2002.

I Sue You, You Sue Me . . .

Via Boing!Boing! comes word that The Electronic Frontier Foundation is threatening to sue Barney — well, at least they’re threatening to sue Lyons Partnership which owns Barney.

I like Barney, but apparently a lot of people on the Internet do not. There are quite a few sites that have parodies of Barney, ridiculing the cute, cuddly dinosaur.

When Lyons Partnership comes upon these sites, it sends a cease and desist order demanding that the parody site be pulled down claiming that it is “unlawful … to use this property without the permission of Lyons Partnership.”

Lyons is simply wrong there — parody of copyrighted and trademarked works are legally protected as free speech (typically the test is that a reasonable person would realize that the derivative work is a parody and that it uses as little of the original as possible — I think most reasonable people can tell that a Barney photoshopped to resemble the Devil is probably a parody. Though wouldn’t it be cool to turn Frank Miller loose on Barney? Call it Barney: The Purple Dinosaur Returns or something like that).

In fact, according to the Newsbytes article, Lyons Partnership has lost at least one parody case in the past,

Barney’s owners themselves once failed to protect the dinosaur’s image from parodies when a judge in Fort Worth, Texas, threw out a Lyons Partnership case against the owners of the San Diego Chicken. The defendants had taken their mascot and someone wearing a Barney costume to baseball games around the country in the late 1990s, having the chicken pretend to beat the stuffing out of the dinosaur — usually to thunderous applause from ballpark attendees.

Barney’s owners sought a minimum $100,000 fine for each “fight” conducted in public. But the judge in that case said the routines qualified as parody and were protected under the U.S. Copyright Act, U.S. trademark laws and the First Amendment. In September 1999, San Diego’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and dismissed the case.

In a letter to lawyers working for Lyons, EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes that,

As they were when you threatened the EFF directly, your claims are baseless and a misuse of your copyrights. We once again urge you to cease threatening noncommercial hosts of parodical material. Should you continue, or should you carry out your threat to send this baseless threat to Dr. Frankel’s ISP [which hosts a web parody of Barney], we will investigate bringing affirmative claims against you.

Go EFF!

Source:

EFF Blasts Barney The Dinosaur’s Copyright Claims. Kevin Featherly, NewsBytes.Com, March 4, 2002.

Plan to Eradicate the Tsetse Fly

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization of African Unity are working together on an interesting effort to eradicate the tsetse fly from Africa. Like mosquitoes, the tsetse fly feeds on the blood of humans and animals and in the process spread sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis).

Anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 people are afflicted with sleeping sickness every year, and the disease ends up killing 4 out of 5 of those who contract it.

It is not that there is no treatment for sleeping sickness, but rather that it is relatively expensive. A full regimen of drugs for the disease costs about $1,000 — an enormous amount in African countries where the per capita income is often far below that amount.

Moreover, the prevalence of sleeping sickness in Africa has been gradually increasing. The BBC reports that some estimates put the cost of the disease in excess of $4 billion, including an estimated three million cattle killed every year by the disease.

The International Atomic Energy Agency hopes to take advantage of the mating habits of the tsetse fly to eradicate it from Africa. Female tsetse flies normally only mate once in their lifetime. Once they mate with a male, they will not usually attempt to mate again.

So the plan is to sterilize male flies using radiation and then release the sterile males into the wild. When a sterile male mates with a female, that female will produce no offspring throughout her short life. Gradually, the number of tsetse flies should begin to decline, and eventually it might be possible to eradicate the tsetse fly entirely from sub-Saharan Africa.

The validity of this approach has already been demonstrated on the island of Zanzibar. In 1994, in cooperation with the Tanzanian government, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency began a program of releasing sterilized male tsetse flies into the environment. In 1997 an independent monitoring group confirmed that not a single tsetse fly had been found in over a year in the areas where the fly population had been the heaviest only a few years earlier. The FAO and IAEA succeeded in eradicating the fly, and since the island is too far from the mainland of Africa for the insect to fly, it will remain tsetse-fly free unless the fly is accidentally reintroduced on shipments from mainland Africa.

Of course that will be a moot point if researchers succeed in eradicating the fly from all of Africa. The campaign will initially introduce large numbers of sterile male flies in areas where the insect is pervasive, such as Botswana and parts of Ethiopia, and then gradually spread out across all of Africa.

Source:

New drive to root out deadly fly. Ania Lichtarowiz, The BBC, February 18, 2002.

Battling the deadly bite of the tsetse fly. CNN, February 28, 1998.

Tsetse fly eradicated on the Island of Zanzibar. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, May 5, 1998.

Campaign Launched to Eliminate Tsetse Fly, Which Has Turned Much of Africa Into a Green Desert. International Atomic Energy Agency, Press Release. February 2, 2002.

Do Rape Shield Laws Forbid Questions about False Allegations?

In February 2001 the United States District Court for the Eastern District issued a ruling in an odd rape case that boiled down to this: do rape shield laws protect accusers from being questioned about previous false allegations of rape that the accuser may have filed?

The case involved Wisconsin resident Jessie L. Redmond who was convicted in 1993 of raping and providing cocaine to a 15-year-old girl. Redmond worked as a counselor at a group home for alcohol- and drug-abusing youths. In December 1992 he was arrested and later convicted after one of these youths claimed that Redmond had supplied her with cocaine and had sex with her.

Redmond’s case took a very odd turn which involved the eventual suspension of his attorney. His original lawyer, Mike Sandy, showed up at the court and passed himself off as the girl’s attorney in order to illegally obtain the girl’s juvenile court file. Among the things that file contained was detailed information about another allegation of rape that the girl had made in early 1992. Police investigated that allegation and determined that it was a false allegation and the girl was charged with contempt of court.

Sandy would eventually have his law license suspended because of that and other incidents. At Redmond’s trial, however, Sandy wanted to ask the girl about the previous false allegation of rape that she had made. The judge in the case, Dennis Flynn, refused to permit that. Although Wisconsin’s rape shield law includes a specific exemption for false allegations, Flynn ruled that the line of questioning about the previous allegation would be prejudicial while having little value for determining the truth of the case against Redmond.

Redmond’s case was then taken up by Howard Eisenberg, the dean of Marquette University Law School. The case ended up in the U.S. District Court which eventually overturned Redmond’s conviction. It noted that since the only evidence against Redmond was the testimony of the girl, the girl’s previous false allegation indeed had probative value. The opinion of that court reads, in part,

But the fact that the girl had led her mother, a nurse, and the police on a wild goose chase for a rapist merely to get her mother’s attention supplied a powerful reason for disbelieving her testimony eleven months later about having sex with another man, by showing that she had a motive for what would otherwise be an unusual fabrication.

…

And thus the court’s ruling, though ostensibly based on the rape-shield statute, derives no support from that statute. The statute protects complaining witnesses in rape cases (including statutory-rape cases) from being questioned about their sexual conduct, but a false charge of rape is not sexual conduct

Redmond was ordered released by the court. He was somewhat vindicated by the decision, but in the process lost 8 years of his life due to an incredibly bizarre interpretation of a rape shield law — an interpretation that the U.S. District Court dismissed out of hand.

As Attorney Mark Richards, who represented Redmond in his first round of appeals, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “A lot of people will point to this and say it is proof the system works. But it’s not proof that the system works, because this guy has been sitting there (in prison) for 7 1/2 years.”

Sources:

Redmond v. United States. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 99-2333, February 14, 2001.

Court reverses rape case conviction. Tom Kertscher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 21, 2001.