15-year-old raped in court: Rapist gets probation, teen gets 12 mo

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So that the girl lied to the cops when filing her charges and, as a minor, received a draconian sentence of twelve months in jail. Hmm. Suggestion: Perhaps she lied because was afraid of her attacker? No excuse! She spoke untruth to a cop! (and I always thought you only have to confess to your priest, and even that only when you're Catholic - well, not in America!)

Never mind, victim, schmictim - that despicable juvenile criminal scum lied to the policy - meaning extra paper work, lost work hours, costing taxpayer dollars (and that in a depression) - much unlike her molester (who didn't get caught, and thus didn't cause any work and costs - the elementary 101 of justice dos and don'ts ... don't cause the police any work, or they will file charges against you, and worse, and don't cost them money or there will be less booze at the Christmas party, and that'll really make them mad). Those twelve months? She deserves it!

That guy that raped her and probably a dozen other teens? He might have just thought to himself: How handy, she's shackled, and since she is about to be sentenced for lying, who will believe her? And he gets ten years probation for rape - perfectly justified for a productive member of society, after all, he did work as a juvenile counsellor, doing something about criminal scum like that fifteen year old. What are you saying? Abuse of his counsellor position? Exploiting of and inflicting harm on a person for whose well being he was responsible? Despicable breach of public trust towards a member of the justice system? Nah, that probably was just some white noise ...

A frigging travesty. That's a story that could have been written by Charles Dickens.

 

He's on probation? As in, he doesnt go to prison, but if he screws up again, he goes to prison?

Someone please, ahem, remove his manhood. He doesnt deserve.

Thats a miscarriage of justice right there - I think its pretty understandable that a young victim would feel the need to lie. A lot of women are reluctant to report rapes - this doesnt help. Report your rape and you might get 1 year in prison if you arent completely, 100% honest.

 

And then, let's presume that she, an impressionable 15 year old, has been pushed to report a crime, when she, as an impressionable 15 year old, was afraid of the rapist because of the threats he made to her and/or felt ashamed and/or didn't want to report. She might just lie when pressed - I mean, for heaven's sake, she said she didn't know her rapist, when in fact she apparently did - but was apparently afraid to tell. Then she has the extra misfortune to encounter some a**hole cop, with the sensitivity of a piece of brick, who has nothing better to do but to file charges against her because she lied.

That filing of charges is something really special about this case as well. The cop didn't have to file these charges. Cops get lied to all the time, that's part of the job. Cops have some leeway whether to file charges or not. Here the cop chose to file, when a 15 year old rape victim lied. That is odd. It suggests to me that that there was about zero comprehension for the situation of the girl, let alone any sympathy, and that the apparently greatest problem for the cop was the being lied at - for which that cop apparently was vengeful.

Which suggests a number of bad motives, the most likely would IMO be that he perhaps felt disrespected, as in: You think me stupid and I won't find out? You called me stupid? I'll teach you!. Or perhaps it was that she made him work (i.e. do his job), which me must have, to find out that she was lying, or that her telling it to him straight would have spared him some legwork (aargh, those sore feet ... nasty) - a punishable offence of there ever was one.

 

I'm so pissed off by this that I'm not even going to attempt to make much of a comment because it'll give the censor a break down!

 

This is an outrage on so many levels:

* First the girl gets assaulted.
* As if that wasn't bad enough, she encounters an an a**hole cop who files charges against her for lying to him when she was afraid of telling who did it.
* Then she has an prosecutor who doesn't toss that garbage case out, but instead brings it to court.
* On the way to trial she gets raped, by, of all persons, a juvenile counsellor.
* In court, the prosecutor secures a guilty verdict, and a very harsh sentence.
* If there was a jury, they apparently didn't intervene.
* The judge apparently didn't intervene.
* And her last rapist gets off lenient for multiple instances of rape, and actually gets a milder verdict for that than his victim for lying.

Speak of adding injury and insult to injury.

It also suggests that there are systemic problems in the justice process that led to this egregious result. So many safety valves, and they all failed?

 

Which just reinforces my view that one should never talk to a cop, unless required to by law. The Sicilians had it right.

 

and

I think there is some information that is being left out that would be useful. For starters, these are two separate cases. She lied to police about an assault on the way to school, and then, on the day she was to be sentenced for that, she was raped on the way to the courtroom. That she was raped on the way to the courtroom has no relevance to the absurd sentence she got for lying to police, and the fact that she lied to police has no relevance to the absurd sentence the counsellor got for raping her.

First of all, she didn't necessarily lie about being raped on the way to school. The report said she was "assaulted" on the way to school. If she had been raped, they would have said "sexually assaulted". Now assault covers a whole list of possibiliities. Getting smacked across the face that leaves a red mark for a few hours counts as assault, and so does getting your arm broken in a few places.

The question here becomes, why did she lie to police about not knowing who assaulted her on the way to school? We can obviously conclude that she did, in fact, know the person. It also suggests that she since she stated otherwise she did so because she did not want the person who assaulted her to face charges for it. That suggests that the person was boyfried, family member, or close friend.

The second question, of which I can only give speculative answers to, is why was she sentenced to 12 months, as a juvenile, for filing a false police report? There almost has to be some extenuating circumstances we are unaware of for this to even be brought to court, and some serious extenuating circumstances for getting 12 months for doing so. (I would speculate that for her to go to prison for this, she had to already have a criminal record.)

So for the first crime, the sentence seems absurdly harsh, but I don't think we've heard all the facts about the case.

Now onto the second case. Whether she was guilty of lying to police or not, and whether her sentence was overly harsh or not, she still was raped on the way to her sentence by the counsellor. All he received was probabtion for 10 years.

Here again, I must speculate on why this was so, but the reason here seems quite obvious: It looks like the prosecuting attorney and judge were taking care of one of their own. Chances are, the counsellor knew the judges because of his line of work, and knew the prosecuting attorney also because of his line of work. For all we know, he may even have been friends with them, and at the very least, work associates. It comes as little surprise that as a result he received the minimum possible sentence for his guilty plea.

To sum up, while I think both sentences are absurd, I have a lot more problems with the second one. I would like to hear more facts about the case of the first before I assess just how absurd her sentence was.

 

Duly corrected. From the article:

Emphasis mine. If she lied when she said she didn't know who it was, then she in fact did know the attacker, but didn't tell. For that there are a lot of possible reasons, intimidation by the perpetrator in particular. It it is that, then twelve months are ridiculously harsh.

And if that was overly harsh, the verdict for her rapist was disturbingly lenient, especially considering his conduct.

 

What does what she did in jail after her sentence say about what she did before her sentence? That she got those extra two years suggests she has a foul mouth and/or bad temper, granted, but beyond that - so what? Do you mean to suggest that since she got these nearly two years extra, she must be a bad girl, and must have done something to deserve that initial harsh sentence?

Does that mean the initial verdict was not remarkably harsh when contrasted with the offence - lying to the police? After all, that was what she was found she was found to be a juvenile delinquent and sentenced to 12 months for.

 

Doesn't that really depend on how bad the person was that attacked her and what her role was in protecting him/her? If the person who attacked her was big time gang/mafia guy targetted by police and she was protecting him (i.e., also in the gang/family) then I could see why she would get 12 months.

As others have said, we simply don't have enough information to draw an adequate conclusion. There are extinuating circumstances which could send the argument in either direction.

 

I agree with BTA - like I said in my original response, to get 12 months for what she did is highly indicative that she had a prior record before this, as you probably would get something like probation if that was the first time she ran afoul of the law. In fact, given her young age and probably prior criminal record, it was likely that she was on probation during this offense. It's not uncommon that if you violate your probation you serve the time for the current crime and whatever you were previously on probation for.

 

The one thing about that that is really clear is that she was the victim of an assault.

If a victim of assault, who is, despite better knowledge, not telling the cops who did it, is a criminal for protecting the culprit, then the victim of every unfiled rape case would be a criminal - for protecting, through silence, the culprit. Let's drag them all to jail.

Saying 'I don't know who attacked me' out of fear of further violence is not a crime. I cannot see how this could reasonably be a crime even in light of a juvenile criminal record.

 

What if she is withholding the name to protect the accused (like if the accused is a boyfriend of family member) who is wanted for other crimes and not out of fear?

 

It looks like what she was charged with specifically is filing a false police report, which is a bit more compelling than "lying to the police." It's a crime, and can even be a felony if the crime falsely reported was a felony. e.g., if you falsely report that someone trespassed on your property (a misdemeanor), that is in turn a misdemeanor. If you falsely report that someone beat you over the head with a shovel (a felony), that is in turn a felony. The fact that they were charging her at all suggests that she had indeed filed a false police report and not just lied to the police, and if she were in fact lying about being assaulted (a felony), that would be a felony, punishable in my state by up to four years in jail or a $2,000 fine, or both.

The New York Daily News says:

(Emphasis mine.) Ashley herself, according to The Raw Story (Ragusa's link), says:

(Emphasis mine.) I strongly doubt that there would have been any charges filed against her if her claim of being assaulted had been found to have merit.

 

So this is a multiple rape and assualt count conviction, involving under-aged girls? And the guy only receives 10 years probation? But I'm sure that those counts can hardly compare to the crimes of the 15-year-old, Ashley.

 

I believe most of us are agreeing in this thread, but talking about two separate and related things.

Admittedly, it's not easy to separate the two when they've been so intermingled by both Ashley and the press. However, whatever she did before being raped and whatever happened to the man who assaulted her are unrelated. The punishments are unrelated, the only uniting factor is the location the falsified police report placed her in. (I don't believe in following a trail of 'what if's, and therefore, the fact that being put in handcuffs placed her in a position to be raped has no correlation to the initial case. Unless in fact the rape was planned by the police, the judge and the prosecutors... but then we would have a much larger problem than a lenient sentence.)

The two viewpoints here seem to be, one: "The cases are related and both punishments make me sick," and two: "The cases are at a substantial level unrelated and the punishment that the juvenile counselor received makes me sick."

Based on these two ideas we can agree on one point: the rapist should have been punished to a much harsher degree. Therefore, we are simply left with: "Are the cases and sentences related?"

If the answer is "Yes," then we must assess why and how they are related.

If the answer is "No," then we must look simply at the point of disagreement: the punishment of Ashley. We can not at present time assess exactly what happened, though we can hypothesize two main possibilities: she was a frightened victim who did nothing wrong or she was a criminal herself [possibly already on probation] preforming some illegal act. Which possibility is true, none of us can say. This leads to the conclusion that we simply don't know whether or not her punishment was fair.

 

No, we don't know that. Guards at juvenile detention are ****ing pigs, like pretty much any official with so much as an inkling of power over citizens. You need to prove that the additional two years was justified.

 

Do I sense someone has had a bad run in with authority?