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Struggles of the Exonerated to Rebuild Their Lives

By Jeralyn, Section Innocence Cases
Posted on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 04:50:00 PM EST
Tags: wrongful convictions (all tags)
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The New York Times has a feature article on the struggles of exonerated to rebuild their lives after years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Here's the story of Jeffrey Deskovic.

There are 400 exonerees and the number keeps growing. When you're making your holiday donations this year, I hope you consider Life After Exoneraton and The Innocence Project.

More...

There's more we can do to prevent wrongful convictions.

The reforms that can address and prevent wrongful convictions include:

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    Struggles of the Exonerated to Rebuild Their Lives | 24 comments (24 topical)

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    It's gotta be tough (5.00 / 2) (#2)
    by Packratt on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 06:00:49 PM EST
    Why can't we also add things like:

    • Forcing prosecutors to pay the defender's legal fees for cases they lose or that are later overturned.

    • State compensation for anyone found innocent or having their case overturned being compensated for lost wages based on last employment.

    I would imagine that these would help reduce the number of malicious prosecutions and balance out the Nifongian problems of prosecutorial immunity and politicization of the prosecutor's office.

    Meanwhile, I can only imagine how difficult it is for people who are wrongfully convicted, just being wrongfully accused left me deep in debt, makes me reluctant to ever leave the house, damaged my career, and continues to give me nightmares each night.

    Not only should we support those wrongfully convicted, but also work to help reduce the causes of mistaken convictions.

    Let's Also Not Forget (none / 0) (#1)
    by jazzcattg1 on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 05:27:07 PM EST
    those released upon convicted of minor, non-violent, or victim less crimes to the streets with limited or no support.

    add another group to that list (none / 0) (#3)
    by allwrits on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 08:31:59 PM EST
    I would add witness to innocence to the list of organizations that do work with the exonerated.

    Back to the original subject? (none / 0) (#23)
    by Peter G on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 04:45:56 PM EST
    I just wanted to point out that the article Jeralyn linked is one of several in the Times on the subject of wrongful incarceration and the exonerated.  TL readers would do well to go there and click on all the sidebars, too.  The Times not only profiled this particular individual in his first year out, but actually tried to interview all of the accessible exonerated, hundreds of them, and has a lot of information about them as a group.  One of those profiled, my client Nick Yarris, who served 23 years on death row in Pennsylvania for a rape-murder DNA says he did not commit, is doing better than most, but has received exactly nothing in compensation.  Half his civil rights suit has been dismissed, and the remaining claims are dragging along.

    Parent
    Mark Kleiman and Kevin Drum also discuss this... (none / 0) (#4)
    by jerry on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 08:44:06 PM EST
    The Reality-Based Community: Clearing the innocent We ought to have, at the Federal level and in each state, an agency with subpoena powers and the capacity to compel secret testimony (i.e., the powers a prosecutor wields through a grand jury) whose sole charge is identifying innocent people in prison and demonstrating their innocence, either to the courts or to whoever has the authority to pardon. And yet as far as I no such an authority exists in no jurisdiction; any politician who proposed one would be pilloried as "soft on crime."

    By my horseback guess, something like 35,000 of the 1.75 million people now in prison didn't do it. Even one would be too many, of course, but 35,000 innocents behind bars is a whole bunch of injustice. Yet the public seems entirely indifferent to the problem.

    Kevin Drum: ...why is the public indifferent? I'll toss out two hypotheses for that too. First, the public might well think that a 2% error rate isn't all that bad. Second, I'll bet most of the public figures that 99% of that 2% is guilty of something, and therefore, in some cosmic karmic sense, justice is mostly being served after all.

    At Kevin's site, I had to toss in my usual 2 cents by noting that here on the left, there is a group that associates with us that insists that there are no false allegations of rape, domestic violence, or child molestation, and even if there are, the rate is so low as to make the problem of imprisoning the falsely accused trival and okay to ignore.  And besides, stopping the rape of one women justifies imprisoning 100s of innocent people and doing away with the presumption of innocence.  Bloggers I love actually blogroll these people.  I can't figure out why they think liberals approve of their views. :(

    jerry, (none / 0) (#5)
    by cpinva on Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 11:48:49 PM EST
    there are extremists and nutjobs at both ends of the spectrum, so far left/right, they meet in the middle. however, they're such an insignificant minority, i wouldn't get too worked up over it. posters like lilith are clearly unstable, do you worry about the inmates taking over the asylum?

    the bad thing is, there will always be convictions of innocent parties, fallability is the nature of the human beast. the good thing is, as forensic science continues to advance, the odds of getting that false conviction overturned are better now then ever before.

    granted, little solace if you're unjustly sitting in a prison cell, but it's far better than it used to be.

    Lilith is a nutjob, but the bloggers that give her (none / 0) (#6)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 12:57:52 AM EST
    cover and encourage her sentiments in society are the problem.  Lilith's sentiments are not unusual at that site, and her sentiments are really just reflections of what the current proprietors of the site believes and has said in one form or another many times, and that person enjoys a relatively good reputation amongst liberal blogs.

    In any discussion of how the exonerated struggle to reclaim their lives, I think it's reasonable to question the bloggers and leaders that claim to be liberal and yet again and again seek to limit free speech, due process, equal protection, and the beliefs that we are innocent until proven guilty as well as the Franklin's ratio: it is better that 100 guilty go free than imprison one innocent.

    During the course of a custody dispute, I have been falsely accused of well, rape, child molesting, child abandonment, and domestic violence.  Intriguingly these charges only come up in the weeks before we go to court, and they have never been verified through any evidence, police reports, school reports, neighbor reports.  In fact, with expensive hearings, the evidence always shows just the reverse.  But the charges keep coming up.  Why?  Because they have been very effective in the creation of temporary restraining orders that have changed already agreed to visitation plans, and because even when the charges are refuted, there is never any punishment or warning or anything about bringing up yet another false charge.

    And I admit, you know how they say a conservative is a liberal that has been mugged?  Until I actually found out personally what happens to people in divorce, I was probably a completely knee-jerk feminist too.  I still consider myself a feminist and a liberal, but I have definitely had the scales fall from my eyes.  Now it's many of these bloggers that I don't consider to be liberal, progressive, or even feminist for that matter.  Mainly just exploitive and as abusive of other people as many on the right wing.

    In the meantime, there are progressives out there that do seek a real justice for all people, but they are continually and incorrectly tarred as right wing because they speak out against the policies that are advocated by many of our modern mainstream top feminist bloggers.

    :(

    Parent

    One thing... (5.00 / 1) (#7)
    by Packratt on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 01:12:54 AM EST
    People using the "it's justifiable to accidentally punish one innocent person in order to punish all the guilty people." often fail to understand that in the process of punishing an innocent person, the system will often allow a guilty person to go free.

    This renders the justifiable loss argument worthless, thus when I bring it up it's often ignored or suplemented with "well, it's ok to let a guilty guy go free and punish an innocent guy just to jail all the guilty guys." which is patently self-contradictory.

    Again, in my case, this is exactly what happened. After dismissing the case against me, the prosecutor and lead police investigator told me directly, when I asked, that even though they now knew who did the crime that I was originally accused of that they were not going to go after him.

    I pondered why for quite a while, but then one lawyer (who was more expensive than I could afford) told me that "the city will do this as a defense mechanism because they can keep the files open and thus out of your hands, which makes it harder for you to sue."

    But for those falsely convicted, this is doubly true, they are being punished in exchange for the complete freedom of a guilty party... and in some cases this results in that guilty party harming others because of the mistake.


    Parent

    jerry, if the other party (none / 0) (#8)
    by cpinva on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 03:29:32 AM EST
    constantly raises charges which have no substantive basis, and isn't being penalized by the courts, then i submit you need a better lawyer. there are such things as frivilous suit penalties, designed to limit, or eliminate, just those types of actions. as well, if it continues, the judge certainly has the option of finding the complainent in contempt.

    again, i would assert that pandagon represents a mere fraction of a sliver of a thin slice of liberal thought. so thin, you can see through it. extremists tend to be shunned by normal people.

    on the whole, it's a free forum, just because they allow someone to post inane things, doesn't mean they agree with them. if that were the case, half the posts here would be deleted.

    Pandagon is a highly ranked blog (5.00 / 1) (#10)
    by Avedon on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 07:28:05 AM EST
    According to Technorati, Pandagon is in the top 5K of all blogs - just barely outside the top 3K, in fact.  That's pretty remarkable.  

    For comparison, My own blog is ranked just barely in the top 10K at the moment, although when MyDD did an analysis of the top liberal blogs, I was on that list, and my Blogstreet Influence Quotient (when they still did English-language political blogs) was usually around 63.

    So I wouldn't underplay the influence of Pandagon.

    Nor would I underplay the influence of the "If it saves just one..." meme, on this subject or any other.  Trouble is, there's no evidence that making it easier to accuse or incarcerate innocent people actually prevents any rapes, or child molestations, or terrorist acts.

    Parent

    I am not sure what your family court experiences (none / 0) (#9)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 04:18:21 AM EST
    are, but in my experience, it's not a terribly sophisticated place.  It is however, prohibitively expensive.  Judges come and go.  But worse, though both sides are paying $300 per hour, the various lawyers don't have the time to actually understand much of the case.   So when we get our 15 minutes in front of the judge, although I am saying, make sure to ask for fees, and make sure he understands this sort of charge keeps recurring, well, when the order finally comes out, and fees haven't been assigned, or nothing about the phony charges have come out, well, .... what do you do?

    It seems the lawyers have it pretty well sewn up.  When I have talked to other lawyers about taking over a case, they seem very reticent to do so.  It's a small community and they all know each other.

    And at $300 just to interview a lawyer, it's pretty darn difficult to go out and keep interviewing.

    Regarding Pandagon, Pandagon is usually considered to be in the top three of the feminist blogs.  But what I say about Pandagon goes equally for the other top tier blogs.  The same philosophies drive feministe, feministing, shakesville, and those are philosophies that act to well, demonize men and strip them of due process and equal protection.

    And it's a small blogosphere to.  Pandagon, Feministe, Feministing, are on most of the top blogs blogrolls, and to be a serious blogger you somehow need to blogroll them.  It's a small world in other ways to.  Jessica Valenti also helps out at the Blog Report at Salon.  Ann Friedman is an editor at Tapped.  Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan got jobs with Edwards.

    These bloggers also get to write articles for Salon, for the Guardian, appear on Colbert(!), and are even asked to meet ex-presidents.

    And the bloggers are hyped by other well known feminists like Katha Pollitt, or by Professors like Ann Bartow.  It's a small, very networked community.

    And every single one of them pushes policies to strip men of equal protection, free speech, and equal rights.

    And.... Well, there blogs really aren't free forums.  Each of these blogs that I have mentioned very strictly moderates the messages that are posted.  Try it out.  On most of them, your message disappears into a queue and needs to be approved.  If the moderator allows it, your submission is posted.  If not, it just never appears.  At Pandagon, Feministe, Feministing, they will just ban you at will and may or may not tell others they have done so.  The banning isn't related to the common issues: unacceptable language, threats, privacy, incitement to violence.  The banning is related to the content of what you have to say.

    So when you read the sites, do realize what you are seeing is a very heavily controlled message.  If the jerks there seem extra jerky, oftentimes it's because they allow the worst to get through and ban or delete the effective.

    And why do they do this?  Well the claim is they need to make a safe place for women to chat.  In the real world that makes sense.  But when they moved that into the online world, what they are truly doing is just making sure no one can effectively refute them.  If you wander from feminist blog to feminist blog you will see very similar moderation policies.  Policies that are actually much more closely aligned to the policies of Red State, Hot Air, LGF, Free Republic, Patterico, than to the policies of Eschaton, Kos, TalkLeft, Hullaballoo, Crooks and Liars, Fire Dog Lake.  I think it's interesting and very telling that the moderation policies of almost every modern mainstream feminist blog is so closely aligned to right wing blogs.

    If you want to consider something even more odd (except it's not), there are feminist blogs that use what are typically the liberal blogging moderation policies.  Who are they?  Cathy Young.  Ann Althouse.  Dr. Helen Smith.  And others.  These women are routinely labeled as "anti-feminists" by our favorite bloggers.  (I've mentioned it before but TL is sort of in this latter category too.  During the Duke scandal, TL was routinely described as not a really liberal blog or feminist blog because of the position that was taken by Jeralyn.)

    Anyway, that's the long answer.  If I had $10,000 or $30,000 in hand, then yeah, I would be in a position to get a different lawyer.  And what you think is a free and open forum, really isn't.  

    I think it's all really screwed up.

    Parent

    Well to take Ann Althouse for example... (none / 0) (#14)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 11:21:37 AM EST
    I've probably had more comments deleted by Ann Althouse than anyone else....  But she lays her ground rules out, and she warns you many times.  And her notion of banning is to tell you "you're banned - go away" and that's it.  I've been banned there.  I still post very rarely there, about once every three months or so.

    The question is not if people delete comments.  The question is if there is in general an atmosphere of free and open discussion, and I can attest that while Althouse and her groupies will pile on, in fact, pretty much anything can be said.  Althouse is terribly wrong in many ways, but she is far more open to criticism, discussion, and dialog than almost any of her detractors, which actually makes her right in many ways as well.

    Parent

    My mileage does vary... (none / 0) (#18)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 12:43:43 PM EST
    I have had the privilege of being banned by Ann Althouse, Amanda Marcotte, and at Feministing, Shakesville, Creek Running North, as well as at Hot Air, Patterico, Protein Wisdom.

    I haven't been banned at LGM (though they don't like me much), nor at Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Atrios, TL, FDL, Digby, TBogg, Brad DeLong's...

    I say pretty much the same thing at all of these blogs, and I can definitely tell you that Ann's deletion and banning policy is very different from the others.  Professor Althouse's policy is much more similar to Professor DeLong's policy which for the most part permits open discussions of just about anything and attempts to keep threads on track.  Professor Althouse, and again, I know this from experience and long time reading, has probably banned at most, ten people.  At most.

    Amanda seems to ban people on a regular, if not daily, basis, and it's not for obscenity, threats, libel, defamation, etc.,  In my personal experience and judgment it's for making effective and persuasive arguments.

    Parent

    I've addressed ALL of your points! (none / 0) (#20)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 02:07:11 PM EST
    How is what I wrote at DeLong's at variance with anything I've written here?

    demonize men and strip them of due process and equal protection.

    I didn't address this?  Glenn Sacks writes specifically of the abuses of restraining orders and how they are used to strip men of due process and equal protection, Amanda says he just wants to make it okay to beat women, and you think she is somehow defending men's rights to due process and equal protection?

    See also, her views on false allegations of rape and how they are too low to be measured.

    And see her avid defense of equal protection and due process for the Duke students.

    Oh yeah, she still thinks they're guilty!

    DarkAvenger, I am sure in your casual contributions (over 313) to Pandagon, you've seen a few of these examples by now.

    Parent

    pro-abuse men's rights advocates are trying to rec (none / 0) (#24)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 04:48:20 PM EST
    Wait, you have the gall to quote Amanda saying "pro-abuse men's rights advocates" when I explicitly gave you her quotations from Glenn, and Glenn's responses and links showing how she is misrepresenting that, and you haven't addressed any of her mendacity or misrepresentations?

    And you want me to give you a direct quote from her on something that I never claimed was a direct quote?

    I can't find everything via google, because her site has lost many of its old records, and she admits that, and also because well, not every search has exactly the right words in it.

    But here are two posts for you in which she takes explicit care to downplay the significance of false allegations and then having done that, never once says anything like: of course, even these are serious and need to be treated seriously.

    Read these posts, and then tell me: are the posts there to demonstrate she takes false accusations seriously, or to show that she thinks they can be ignored.

    But Dark Avenger, if you have any intellectual honesty, you owe me an answer to my posts where I point out how she defames Sacks and his positions and he rebuts them.

    including the FBI's statistics that set the false reports rate at 8%. As Ampersand points out in that post I linked, false reports are not false accusations. The majority of cases I've ever read about are Tawana Brawley-type situations where the alleged victim is using a rape claim to weasel out of some other problem, and doesn't finger anyone in particular. From what I understand, her case only turned up actual suspects because of the amount of politically motivated doggedness behind it, which is probably why rape and murder cases also have a problem with false accusations. Anyway, I don't know what the statistics are on it, but it seems to me that false reports are correlated with the most terrifying and stereotypical kinds of rape. But the myth is that false reports are correlated to the more common acquaintance rapes, and that the motivation is strictly an unwillingness to admit that one's self is a dirty slut. My feeling is that men who make this blase statement about false reports are showing more their feelings about the dirtiness of women who have casual sex and projecting that onto women.

    and

    Culture of fear (Regarding this post, it's not clear who wrote it, Amanda or BlitzGal, I think BlitzGal wrote it, but many people, probably mistakenly say Amanda did because Amanda's name appears right under it, but no one corrects these folks, so, maybe not.  BlitzGal's blog has disappeared so it's hard to say.  Regardless, this sort of post appears at Pandagon all of the time.)

    Now, since you feel that Amanda is in favor of protecting men's rights wrt domestic violence and false allegations, maybe you can show me all of those posts of here where she has discussed that, and how important it is to do that, and not just used her claims as a way to actually reduce men's rights.

    And yes, I do think you owe me a response to the posts I put up showing that Marcotte has defamed Sacks time and again.

    Parent

    Amanda: The FBI says this, but it's this, and this (5.00 / 1) (#26)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 06:29:39 PM EST
    No doubt most of you are familiar with the ubiquitous nature of these myths, which persist in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, including the FBI's statistics that set the false reports rate at 8%. As Ampersand points out in that post I linked, false reports are not false accusations. The majority of cases I've ever read about are Tawana Brawley-type situations where the alleged victim is using a rape claim to weasel out of some other problem, and doesn't finger anyone in particular. From what I understand, her case only turned up actual suspects because of the amount of politically motivated doggedness behind it, which is probably why rape and murder cases also have a problem with false accusations. Anyway, I don't know what the statistics are on it, but it seems to me that false reports are correlated with the most terrifying and stereotypical kinds of rape.

    She won't take the FBI's account.  She first drops it with Amp's info, and then she goes off on her wild speculation specifically of how it occurs only when the victim is trying to get out of something else and it just doesn't happen at other times.

    She has no evidence for that last, and it doesn't fit what we see in other studies.

    And then at the end, her point is, specifically, we don't have to worry about these cases.  When men say this, she says, it's more about the men's misogyny.  She says, it doesn't occur.

    And the posts about Sacks are below (or above) where she specifically says that Sacks is trying to defend abusers.

    You keep telling me to read Pandagon -- and clearly I do.  Now it's time for you to read Sacks and to quit evading the question for you about Amanda that I've asked three times.  Did Amanda grossly misrepresent Sacks' opinions and views?

    Parent

    DA: Read this post, and address it (1.00 / 0) (#27)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 06:30:38 PM EST
    Post 16, currently right below this one

    Parent
    Dark Avenger: I accept your concession then... (1.00 / 0) (#30)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 07:36:59 PM EST
    Dark Avenger,

    For most of the day you've failed to address comment 16, while demanding all sorts of responses from me.

    Since you have not addressed comment 16, and since you explicitly scored my last request of you a 1, I can only conclude you have no response for it, and you find it irrefutable.

    I accept your concession then, though I think you've wasted all of our time with your demonstration.

    Next time, you should probably just concede up front, and learn to be a bit more gracious about it.  Everyone will appreciate that.

    Thank you.

    Parent

    She's not calling the FBI evidence strong (none / 0) (#31)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 07:45:10 PM EST
    in and of itself, she's saying the cop lied to the students and said the false rate of 70%, which no one has ever claimed.

    Then she says "no doubt you are familiar with these myths which persist in light of strong evidence of the contrary including...

    She's not saying the FBI evidence is strong, she's saying she's a slew of studies that says the rate is not 70%.  Which it's not and no one claims it is.

    In fact the common sense reading is that she thinks the myths out there present the false rape allegation rate at 70%.  But the studies Sacks presents show a range from 8% to 40%.

    Her response to that is more like the other post which was or was not written by her.  And that is that those rates are too high as well, by doing exactly what she is doing here, picking at studies with speculation.

    And frankly, let's accept the 8%.  That's pretty bad.  The false allegation rate for most crimes I believe is estimated at 2%.  Show me a single post, a single post, in which Amanda suggests that something needs to be done to lower that rate from 8%, or make amends to the people tossed in jail with ruined lives.

    A single post.  You won't be able to do that.

    Your single word response to me concerning Sacks is non responsive.

    Please address comment 16.

    Parent

    AKA: pinata syndrome (5.00 / 0) (#28)
    by squeaky on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 06:37:37 PM EST
    It would seem that you have a martyr complex and like most martyrs, have found places to help you with it.


    Parent
    To hit your important points... (none / 0) (#16)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 12:22:21 PM EST
    Amanda isn't for treating men as guilty until proven innocent -- please see my post below with the link to her Duke airport post.  Not only is she for treating men as guilty until proven innocent, she isn't even for treating men as innocent when charges are dropped, or in fact, when they are DECLARED innocent.  There's worse, and it occurred around 4/15/07 but since Pandagon's archive are broken, I can't find it at the moment, but she has said that just because the state AG said they were actually innocent doesn't mean anything.  I noted that at the time. (I didn't provide links because I actually prefer not to hijack TL's threads, and I try to be respectful of what I believe is TL's friendship with many of these bloggers and don't want to start a round of blog wars.)

    Regarding Glenn Sacks, I suggest you read Glenn Sacks, and on a regular basis.  You would find out that Amanda is outrageously, and knowingly, misrepresenting his views.

    To your specific quote, her idea of a minority of cases is something very very low.  Glenn sites many studies that show the minority is something more like 30 - 50 - 70%.  Also note how in your quote she pushes a lot of it onto male-male dv.

    Finally, regarding your quote, Glenn has never once said he wants to ban restraining orders, or give abusers full access to victims, or criminalize self-defense.  That's her intentional misrepresentations.

    Glenn, is a very reasonable individual, and very scrupulous to be fair.

    Here are his posts in reply to Amanda, these are posts that she never acknowledged, or updated her posts to discuss.

    Glenn...makes it clear in this interview, he's on your side if you're angry that your stupid, broken wife resists your abuse. He condemns restraining orders, because they make it harder to get to your wife in order to beat her.

    Marcotte implies that I believe "it's her fault he hit her."
    I never said that or anything close to it. My argument is that many of these men are innocent, but Marcotte keeps trying to twist that into "he beat her and that's OK...
    Amanda says that I "advocate banning restraining orders, giving abusers full access to victims, and criminalizing self-defense." I certainly don't advocate giving abusers full access--or any access--to victims, and I don't advocate banning restraining orders. I'm publicly on the record with this view numerous times in my columns, all of which can be seen here.

    Amanda Marcotte has written numerous terrible things about me in a recent blog post, pretty much saying outright that I think it's fine to beat women, that women should not be allowed to defend themselves, that if a man beats a woman, it's the woman's fault, that men should have free rein to terrorize their families, etc. Her blog post is The country started going to hell when they told women they don't have to just buckle immediately--if I'm misunderstanding her words, feel free to let me know.
    ...
    One frequent reader of Marcotte's readers blog wrote me and said, "Reading her post made me feel truly ill. I think Amanda went over the line, especially considering how gracious you have been toward her." Yup--pretty damn gracious. I congratulated her privately and publicly when she got the job as John Edwards' campaign's blogmaster, and I expressed my regrets to her both privately and publicly when she was forced out. I've written about her many times, and not once would you ever find any trace of the vitriol and vilification that Amanda has employed against me this week. I had Amanda on my radio show, and treated her quite respectfully (to listen for yourself, click here).


    I'm sure Amanda and her radical feminist friends will see this post as whiny or self-pitying or something--over there it's the Night of the Long Knives 24/7 on those who disagree--but it's the larger issue that's bothers me. Someday men and women are going to have to come together on these issues. Sadly, this week's events show how far away we are from that.

    I truly wish that I was wrong and not supported by the facts in this, but google assures me otherwise.  Also, DarkAvenger, let's note I did not demonize feminist blogs.  I pointed out what is happening at a particular strain of feminist blogs, and I suggested a group of other feminist blogs where this does not occur.

    Parent

    Occasional Contributor? (none / 0) (#17)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 12:30:01 PM EST
    Google shows 313 hits for "the dark avenger" site:pandagon.blogsome.com

    Almost all of those are comments you wrote, a few are people referring to you.  

    For what that's worth, google makes it seem as though you are more than an occasional contributor.

    Parent

    in jeralyn's defense (none / 0) (#11)
    by cpinva on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 09:36:35 AM EST
    (though she certainly has no need of me to defend her), her position, with respect to the duke case, was that of a criminal defense attorney, which is what she does for a living. it's also the actual basic premise for this blog, politics and criminal law just happen to intersect a lot.

    to accuse her of being anti-feminist, because she insists on actual evidence, before convicting someone, is beyond unfair, it's completely ludicrous. anyone seriously suggesting that shouldn't be taken seriously, and i won't waste valuable time doing so.

    my experience with family court is exactly zero. i've been fortunate, my dysfunctional thermo-nuclear family unit is apparently far less dysfunctional than most, much to my surprise. however, i can empathize with your problem; small town, everyone knows everyone else, attorneys are hesitant to piss off the local judge. besides, they're all members of the same country club.

    perhaps a call to the state bar association might be in order, they might be able to suggest an alternative tact. good luck with that.

    Jeralyn needs no defense (none / 0) (#13)
    by jerry on Sun Nov 25, 2007 at 11:15:58 AM EST
    Jeralyn needs no defense at all. First her position was completely principled. Second her position conformed to the facts and not the facts to her position. And third, she nicely had the benefit of being right.  Of course, the third often derives from the first and the second.

    The people who should be embarrassed and defending themselves are professors like Ann Bartow who long after charges were dropped and known facts were demonstrating innocence were publishing accounts on their blog that just because the charges were dropped doesn't imply innocence and they probably were guilty, and who then went on to stop any discussion of that and label dissenters as mere astroturfers.

    And who else should be embarrassed but doesn't have the sense to be?  The blogger that wrote the famous sexist and racist Duke Airport Rape blog post and who still takes the position that the students were guilty. I believe that if the sexes and races in that post had been different, that blogger would have immediately been dropped from many liberal blogrolls.

    Anyway, Jeralyn opened an entire forum to discuss Duke, and there is also Durham Wonderland and KC Johnson's book, so I don't want to make this a threadjack....

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    Struggles of the Exonerated to Rebuild Their Lives | 24 comments (24 topical)

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