We give judges the title of ‘Honorable.’ We stand up when they enter a courtroom. So we shouldn’t be surprised when this quark of authority worship leads to our blind faith in that they deserve it.
In fact, we don’t question if they deserve it. Hence, the blind faith: they’re judges; they’re honorable. And I stand up when they tell me to; I will sit down when they tell me to. Simon says judges are wise, accomplished, fair, deserving of their authority, deserving of my respect inherent to their authority, expert determiners of what is ultimately right.
I don’t want to sound conspiratorial. Please don’t mistake this post’s dramatic entrance as a critique of authority or our desire to respect it. It’s just meant to illustrate the pain and betrayal we come to feel when who we deify may not deserve such fine marble.
Rape Culture’s Honor Roll
[Trigger Warning: from here on out, this post details judges at their most hideous in a handful of rape cases. If you are a survivor of rape or a survivor of ‘the second rape,’ i.e., blamed for being raped when seeking justice, I would suggest reading no further.]
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 1980s, 1991, and 2016: Clarence Thomas
Since the ’80s, multiple women have recounted being sexually harassed and groped by Thomas. Anita Hill made national news in ’91, but at least one other woman was not given the chance to share a similar sexual harassment testimony in the hearings preceding his appointment.
As well, in 2016, a woman recounted Thomas groping her. Her story unfortunately broke right before the James Comey drama and thereby entered oblivion. Thomas remains in his lifetime appointment on our country’s most powerful judicial bench, where time and time again, his votes aim at limiting women’s rights.
In ’92, the year following Anita Hill, Thomas started in on women’s rights cases, saying Roe v. Wade should be overturned. In 2000, he decided rape survivors had no right to sue their attackers in federal court, invalidating an entire section of the Violence Against Women Act. That case came down to a 5 to 4 decision. Then in 2013, another 5 to 4 decision, Thomas voted in favor of protecting businesses from sexual harassment law suits, weakening an employee’s ability to sue her harassers. And in 2014, Thomas again added a crucial majority vote in a 5 to 4 decision, that an employer’s religious objections superseded the rights of women employees.
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2006: The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland
A woman wanted to stop having sex with a man, but he refused to stop. The case led to a mistrial. But in the second trial, a jury found the man guilty of rape. In that second trial, the jury asked the judge if it could be considered rape if the woman initially consented but then removed that consent. The judge said the question was too ambiguous for him to weigh in on. So the convicted rapist appealed on the grounds that the judge should have answered the jury’s question. The Court of Special Appeals sided with the rapist and threw out his conviction:
“QUESTION POSED BY JURY, ‘IF A FEMALE CONSENTS TO SEX INITIALLY AND, DURING THE COURSE OF THE SEX ACT TO WHICH SHE CONSENTED, FOR WHATEVER REASON, SHE CHANGES HER MIND AND THE . . . MAN CONTINUES UNTIL CLIMAX, DOES THE RESULT CONSTITUTE RAPE?’ WAS NOT AMBIGUOUS AND THUS REQUIRED A SPECIFIC ANSWER AND, NOTWITHSTANDING WEIGHT OF AUTHORITY TO THE CONTRARY, SHOULD HAVE BEEN ANSWERED IN THE NEGATIVE UNDER THE MOST CURRENT MARYLAND LAW.”
At the time, Maryland was one of two states (North Carolina) that specifically stated that a woman could not remove consent at any point after she gave it. Note that the survivor had to watch as the rapist walked free of charge, not because he didn’t rape her, but because of how a judge handled a question about her rape.
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2007: Jeffre Cheuvront
In 2004, a woman had drinks with a man at a bar. The next thing she knew, she found herself in an apartment she didn’t recognize with puke in her hair, undressed and under the weight of a man she didn’t know. When her case began, Cheuvront banned her and her attorney from using the words ‘rape,’ ‘sexual assault kit,’ ‘victim,’ and ‘assailant’ in the courtroom. He also refused to admit into evidence that the man had been accused of similar date-rape sexual assaults over the previous three years.
The survivor said, “[t]he judge took my words away from me.” Cheuvront forced her into saying that what the rapist did to her was ‘sex.’ The case led to a mistrial. Then a second trial started with the same restrictions, and same thing again, it led to mistrial. Finally, the prosecution dropped her case. Looking back, Jeffre Cheuvront said that the case was
“kind of a mistake I made.”
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2008: Gene Martin
Inspired by Cheuvront, Martin also banned ‘rape’ and rape-related words from the courtroom. Though, somehow, his restrictions weren’t enough to stop a jury from finding Ray Slaughter guilty of one count of forcible rape and two counts of forcible sodomy against a teenage girl.
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2011: Liam O’Grady
O’Grady dismissed a class action suit brought by 28 service-members against the military for mishandling their rape reports. O’Grady justified the dismissal of the case by stating that rape and sexual assault are “incident of service,” accepting the conclusion that being raped by their fellow servicemen is “an occupational hazard” of serving in the U.S. military.
Side note: As of August 2015, 160 total women had been killed in direct combat in the wars in the Middle East. In 2016 alone, 8,600 women were sexually assaulted. So when we hear that women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by fellow servicemen than killed by enemy soldiers, note the alarming understatement. In the U.S. military, for every woman killed by enemy soldiers, there are 215 women sexually assaulted by their fellow servicemen.
And when women risk reporting their sexual assaults, the military punishes them 58% of the time. Yep. It’s not enough experiencing the trauma of being raped by their fellow servicemen; it’s not enough their country dismisses their rape as simply an occupational hazard. Six out of ten servicewomen who report their rapes are punished by the military for getting raped.
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2012: Derek Guy Johnson
“I’m not a gynaecologist, but I can tell you something, if someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case.”
“That tells me that the victim in this case, although she wasn’t necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight.”
“To treat this case like the rape cases that we all hear about is an insult to victims of rape.”
“I think it’s an insult. I think it trivializes a rape.”
Derek Guy Johnson said this to a woman raped and beaten by her ex-boyfriend. The rapist beat her with a metal baton, threatened to mutilate her face and genitals with a heated screwdriver, and raped her. Johnson refused to see it as “a real, live criminal case” and claimed that the rape was only “technical.” He took ten years off the recommended sentence, making the rapist serve only six years in prison.
Jacqueline Hatch
A drunk cop drove to a concert, flashed his badge at the door to get in for free, saw an acquaintance, walked up behind her, forced his hand up her skirt, and sexually assaulted her. A jury found him guilty of sexual abuse with a two-and-a-half year jail sentence. Despite the jury’s decision, Hatch only gave him probation and did not make him register as a sex offender. She had nice things to say about him, his service to his community, etc. But, to the survivor, her tune turned bizarrely accusatory:
“If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you.”
“I hope you look at what you’ve been through and try to take something positive out of it. You learned a lesson about friendship and you learned a lesson about vulnerability.”
“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.”
The Connecticut Supreme Court
A jury found a man guilty of attempted sexual assault and sentenced him to six years in prison. However, the Connecticut Supreme Court tossed his conviction. The survivor has cerebral palsy; she cannot verbally communicate, and the only part of her body that she could use to communicate with the courtroom was her right index finger.
These facts aside, the defense attorney claimed that she didn’t fight off her attacker enough to prove a lack of consent. They argued she could have resisted by “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning, or gesturing.” The man, caught trying to sexually assault a woman with cerebral palsy, was no longer the one on trial. And the Connecticut Supreme Court agreed with the defense:
“(W)e, like the Appellate Court, are not persuaded that the state produced any credible evidence that the [victim] was either unconscious or so uncommunicative that she was physically incapable of manifesting to the defendant her lack of consent to sexual intercourse at the time of the alleged sexual assault.”
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2013: G. Todd Baugh
A teacher pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old student, and Baugh sentenced him to 30 days in jail. That’s days, as in one month.
After the rape, the student confided in a church leader who then notified authorities. She faced two years of threats and bullying for a rape that she never intended to become public knowledge. She killed herself before the case went to court.
So there’s the mother in the courtroom. Not only having to live with the fact that her young girl was raped, not only having to live with the fact that her young girl spent her last two years constantly tortured for being raped, not only having to live with the fact that her young girl took her own life, there’s the mother in the courtroom to see Baugh give her late daughter’s rapist a month in jail. There’s the mother in the courtroom to hear Baugh say this:
“[Your daughter] seemed older than her chronological age.”
“[Your daughter] was probably in as much control of the situation as the [the man who raped her].”
James Woodroof, Jr.
A man raped his 14-year-old neighbor at least two times, threatening her life and the lives of her family if she ever said anything. A jury found him guilty with a 40 year prison sentence. But Woodroof altered the sentence so the rapist never had to go to jail. Instead, Woodroof put him on probation and in a two year program for nonviolent criminals.
His lenient sentencing took for its logic the argument of the defense attorney (his childhood friend):
“The original allegation was that both of these crimes were forcible. But then you have to believe that although she was forcibly raped twice, she continued to come back and have a social relationship with Austin Clem and his family.”
When ordered by an appeals court to issue a new sentence, Woodroof retaliated by making the sentence even lighter. The rapist never spent one night in jail for raping a 14-year-old.
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2014: Christopher McFadden
When the jury, based on DNA and medical and physical evidence, found a man guilty of two counts of rape and one count of sodomy against a woman with Downs Syndrome, they convicted him with a minimum of 25 years in prison. McFadden, however, overturned their decision and demanded a retrial. He said,
“[T]he evidence is sufficient to sustain the conviction,” but, “[a]t no time prior to her outcry [she waited one day before telling anyone], did [she] behave like a victim. Nor did Mr. Dumas behave like someone who had recently perpetrated a series of violent crimes against her.”
Jeanine Howard
When a man admitted to raping a 14-year-old girl at her high school, Howard sentenced him to 45 days in jail and, based on good behavior for that month-and-a-half, no permanent criminal record. She decided on the lenient sentence when she found out that the rape survivor was not a virgin, and therefore, according to Howard,
“[she] wasn’t the victim she claimed to be.”
Howard also, in a “spur of the moment” decision, ordered the rapist to volunteer for 250 hours at a local rape crisis center. To which idea, the rape crisis center said absolutely not!
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2016: Patrick Butler
When a woman got drunk with some of her friends, one man reassured them that he would take care of her. Once he had her alone and incapacitated, he sexually assaulted her. When a jury found him guilty, Butler only made him serve probation and one year of work release.
“I’ve struggled, to be quite frank, with the idea of, ‘Do I put him in prison?’”
Judith LaBuda
Two friends went to a party. The woman got drunk, and the man she came to the party with took her into the bathroom and raped her. With DNA evidence and forensic examinations that showed injuries consistent with rape, the jury found him guilty. LaBuda gave him 6 months in county jail and probation.
“I lack the mitigating circumstances of remorse on your part in this case.”
“Despite all that, I find that you have many redeemable qualities [. . .]”
Thomas Estes
Two women, after a party with drinking involved, found a bedroom in the house for the night. Once they were asleep, a man sexually assaulted them. This guy preyed on women so often that he was known by the epithet, “David the Rapist.” And he even sent texts the next day apologizing to one of the survivor for what he did.
Estes ordered the case Continued Without a Finding, which means while enough evidence could find him guilty, Estes instead opted to put him on probation, and if David the Rapist shows good behavior, then the case would get dismissed. Estes even worked the probation so David the Rapist could go to college out of state and did not make him register as a sex offender, accepting for his reasoning the defense attorney’s remarks:
“The goal of this sentence was not to impede this individual from graduating high school and to go onto the next step of his life, which is a college experience.”
“He can now look forward to a productive life without being burdened with the stigma of having to register as a sex offender.”
“We all made mistakes when we were 17, 18, 19 years old, and we shouldn’t be branded for life with a felony offense and branded a sex offender.”
“[O]ne mistake at one moment on one night which was clouded with alcohol.”
“Putting this kid in jail for two years would have destroyed this kid’s life.”
While doing research for this post, I found Estes’s decision in this particular case puzzling. With an admission of guilt from a man who has rapist as a nickname, Estes’s extreme leniency stands out even among these other cases. But as we learn more about Estes, it makes a painful amount of sense. He is currently being sued in federal court by a former colleague for forcing her to perform sex acts in his court chambers.
Jerri Collins
While not a rape case, Collins’s treatment of a survivor of domestic violence deserves a spot on our country’s Rape Culture honor roll. A woman, when subpoenaed to testify against her abuser, told the police and lawyers and the court that she just couldn’t bring herself to be in the same room again with that man. She reported anxiety, depression, and the need to look after her baby. So she missed the court date.
There is video footage of Collins berating the sobbing survivor of abuse as she orders the survivor to three days in jail in contempt of court.
“You think you have anxiety now? You haven’t seen anxiety.”
Aaron Persky
Now for the infamous Stanford case where a man was caught raping an incapacitated woman outside a frat house. When caught, he tried to run away, but two men chased him down and pinned him to the ground until the police showed up. With plenty of evidence and two unbiased witnesses, the jury convicted him of rape. Persky, however, only sentenced him to six months in jail, of which, he only ended up serving three months.
To justify his leniency, Persky offered a weirdly long and, at times, rambling statement. Below are snippets from the actual statement. What I don’t include is what I consider one of the most painful for the survivor. She wrote a letter of testimony, and Persky took her words out of context to justify his weak sentence. She said that the damage he had done to her could not be undone, and Persky quoted her as reasoning not to punish him any further, because, like she said, the damage is already done and can’t be undone.
“[T]here is less moral culpability attached to the defendant who is legally intoxicated.”
“[A] prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.”
“[W]ith respect to the media attention that’s been given to the case, it has not only impacted the victim in this case, but also Mr. Turner.”
“Because Mr. Turner came before us today and said he was genuinely sorry for all the pain that he has caused to [the survivor] and her family. And I think that is a genuine feeling of remorse.”
“And so you have Mr. Turner expressing remorse, which I think, subjectively, is genuine, and [the survivor] not seeing that as a genuine expression of remorse because he never says, “I did this. I knew how drunk you were. I knew how out of it you were, and I did it anyway.” And that – I don’t think that bridge will, probably, ever be crossed.
“I mean, I take him at his word that, subjectively, that’s his version of events.”
“The jury, obviously, found it to be not the sequence of events.”
“But I’m not convinced that his lack of complete acquiescence to the verdict should count against him with respect to an expression of remorse because I do find that his remorse is genuine.”
“I think that he will not be a danger to others.”
This now makes for yet another time in this honor roll that judges have sided with rapists because of alcohol. Compare that to Hatch’s above blaming of a survivor for being in a building where drinking was going on. When men drink and rape, it’s the alcohol’s fault; when women drink and get raped, it’s the woman’s fault. Let me do the math for that equation real fast.
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2017: William H. Follett
A 16-year-old girl kept refusing her older brother’s sexual advances. So he kept giving her “dabs,” or highly potent hash oil, until she was too incapacitated to resist his sexual prodding or even recognize him as her brother. “Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t say ‘no’ anymore, like, I didn’t know how to.”
Her 20-year-old brother wrote a confession, video-recorded an admission of guilt, and pleaded guilty in court to drugging and raping his younger sister. Follett sentenced him to four months in jail and probation because he doubted there was enough evidence for a jury to convict the brother. Follett also blamed the survivor for taking off her clothes while she was drugged and for not being technically unconscious during the rape.
Teresa Hawthorne
This next member of the Rape Culture honor roll shamed the jurors for finding a man guilty of rape.
“Quite frankly, I am disturbed.”
“I am disturbed by the way you came back with such a harsh verdict and sentence for this man’s life in such a short period of time. Did you even discuss the details of this case at all?”
“[I] did not believe the victim was raped at all.”
Turns out, her hostility toward the verdict may have had to do with the fact that her nephew was at that same time being tried as a rapist. Before her nephew’s trial she tried to get his case thrown out, sending multiple emails to her fellow judge asking him to remove the warrant in the pending case. And when that failed, she then testified in behalf of her nephew, without being subpoenaed, referencing her judicial position several times.
She received a reprimand for both shaming jurors and trying to interfere in her nephew’s case.
Hawthorne was also going to be running for re-election this year, but she became ineligible when in the paperwork she wrote the date in the place where she was supposed to write her party affiliation.
Thomas Low
After a Utah jury found a former Mormon bishop guilty of ten counts of forcible sexual abuse and one count of object rape, Low let him free on bail to return to his wife and eight children until his sentencing. At the time of the conviction, in front of survivors of Vallejo’s abuse, Low got choked up and said,
“The court has no doubt that Mr. Vallejo is an extraordinarily good man.”
Rape Culture Honor Roll, Class of 2014 – 2017 Valedictorian: Roy Moore
Here’s the sexual offender based on the accounts of nine women, as young as 14-years-old while he was in his thirties, and two time chief justice for Alabama’s Supreme Court. It was common knowledge in Gadsden that he preyed on teenage girls and even reportedly was banned from the mall and YMCA (though they no longer have records going back to the ’70s and ’80s).
So, unsurprisingly, out of 16 sexual criminal cases brought before the Alabama Supreme Court during his second stretch on the bench, Moore sided with the sex offenders 13 times. Of those 13 cases, he dissented from the court majority in 10. And in two of those cases, he even went so far to argue against Alabama’s rape shield law, protecting survivors from having their sexual history used against them.
In one case, even though David Pittman pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old girl, Moore argued that the pedophile should be able to mention that the child had an STI.
“I believe this evidence could be relevant to the complaining witness’s alleged motive in accusing Pittman.”
The other case involved a school mentor who coerced two 15-year-old girls into touching him sexually. Moore argued that the man should have been able to mention that he thinks they are bisexual and in a relationship with each other.
“[It] could be relevant to the victims’ alleged bias against Tate or their collusion.”
In 2014, Moore sided with the majority in convicting a man of robbery and burglary, but he dissented from convicting the man of rape. The man had bound a sleeping woman, blindfolded her, and raped her. But Moore argued that every technician in the laboratory that connected the rapist’s DNA to the survivor’s rape should have been questioned, instead of having their supervisor represent the team.
In 2015, Moore dissented to convicting a man found guilty of first-degree sodomy and first-degree sexual abuse of a six-year-old girl.
And again in 2015, when a daycare intern raped a 4-year-old boy and was accused of assaulting several other children, Moore dissented from upholding the lower court’s conviction. Moore argued that the evidence didn’t support “forcible compulsion.” That was the chief justice on a state’s Supreme Court saying that a 4-year-old boy didn’t feel forced into being anally penetrated by a grown man.
Rape Culture in the Courtroom Worse Than I Thought
I’ve been studying the U.S. Rape Culture for a few months, so when I decided to take on a post like this, I figured very little about our courtroom Rape Culture would surprise me. I was wrong on two accounts.
Gender
I assumed the culprits that I’d find would basically be a men only club.
I’d even researched and planned to include various analyses on the state and federal level illustrating the “gavel gap” problem in our legal system. And while men’s over-representation in the courts is a serious problem worthy of its own post, to assume women are impervious to the toxic influence of Rape Culture would be simplistic and sexist. And worse, to make such an assumption would be to underestimate just how horrible the situation is for rape survivors. Their court experience, their “second rape,” will be excruciating regardless of a judge’s gender.
Law
Most of these cases stirred public outrage and petitions to remove the judges from the bench. And in most of these cases, other judges came to their colleagues’ quick defense and criticized the public for demanding their removal. A sampling of this pattern can be found here and here.
Judges defending judges makes sense from a bias and self-interest standpoint. Of course a judge doesn’t like the idea of one court case potentially ending a career.
Putting bias aside, though, their reasoning for defending such hideous purveyors of Rape Culture hints at a much more terrifying reality. They defend their fellow judges by claiming that their sentences are well within the norm, the expected. “It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.” So, what makes these cases here exceptional is the public awareness of their existence. How many unknown like-cases preceded these ones in order to establish such a status quo necessary to have fellow judges yawning and shrugging?
And scarier still, many judges defend each other by making the point that they acted in accordance with the law. Quite frankly, that’s hard to refute. So, if you are disgusted with these inductees into the Rape Culture honor roll, then keep in mind that most of them acted in accordance with the law.
That’s the scariest surprise that I found in the research. These judges are the messengers, and their message to all of us is that the laws need to change if we want Rape Culture to change.
The laws of our country’s constitution and the laws of each state’s constitution were written by men for men to ultimately protect men.
So the next time you hear someone ignorantly shaming a rape survivor for not reporting the rape, please share this post with them.
To blame a rape survivor for not reporting illustrates a deeper, lazy assumption that our legal system and its judges are inherently wise, accomplished, fair, deserving of our respect, and determiners of what is ultimately right.
With regards to rape survivors, this assumption is clearly wrong.
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