Another weakness in Ron Hart’s argument on the death penalty (blogged about below) is that he’d also favor applying it to rape.

Brutal though rape is, I personally don’t believe in execution for anything but murder. However, my real objection to Hart’s idea is that it’s a guaranteed get out of jail free card for rapists.

Rape isn’t an easy crime to convict someone of. A decade or so ago, a woman was taken out of a Florida bar at knifepoint, raped and stabbed multiple times (she survived). The jury found the defendant not guilty, and the jurors said later that based on the woman’s sexy outfit, she’d obviously gone to the bar looking for sex — presumably meaning that therefore, she had no grounds for complaint if someone decided to sleep with her, even if he had to stab her to do it.

I could rattle off other examples, but the point is, juries are often reluctant to convict under the laws we have now: They may wonder about the woman’s clothing, her lifestyle, did she know the defendant, was it actually consensual, was the victim maybe a little slutty or kinky (some rapists have acknowledged the act, but claimed it was consensual rough sex)? What if the defendant is a respected member of the community, a sports hero or “too handsome to have to rape anyone?” All these things have been known to sway juries. How much worse would rape trials become if juries knew that finding the defendant guilty would send them to the chair (or the gas chamber, or the needle)?

A lot worse, I suspect: Barring the kind of evidence required under Islamic sharia law (where it takes four corroborating eyewitnesses to the act), juries would bend over backwards to avoid a conviction. Instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the effective standard would become “beyond any doubt whatsoever”: The victim’s sexual history, the idea she didn’t fight back “enough,” the rapist’s claim it was all a big misunderstanding (”I swear she gave consent right before she passed out from the gin—I suppose I should have realized how drunk she was, but …”), the belief some people have that guys just can’t help it if a woman turns them on, all those could be factors into the case.

Heck, how many prosecutors would even want to take a rape case faced with those odds?

Hart means well, but the death penalty for rape is a very bad idea.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 8:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.