A Unique Form Of Weaponry

Cathy Young of the usually liberal leaning Boston Globe has written an excellent piece that was inspired by the Duke lacrosse rape case entitled, The Rape Charge As A Weapon. I recommend reading the whole article, but here is an important snippet:

In 1996, Los Angeles police officer Harris Scott Mintz was accused of rape by a woman in the neighborhood he patrolled, and then by his own wife as well. At a pretrial hearing, the judge pronounced that he had no doubt about Mintz's guilt. Then, his wife admitted that she made up the charge because she was angry at her husband for getting in trouble with the law; subsequently, Mintz's attorneys uncovered evidence that the first accuser had told an ex-roommate she had concocted the rape charge in order to sue the county and that she had tried a similar hoax before. By the time the case collapsed, Mintz had spent five months in jail.

No doubt feminists and people that think of all police officers as corrupt and oppressive, jumped on this bandwagon and excoriated this man, long before all of the facts were known. While feminists have certainly been quite vocal in the Duke case, it is further complicated by the racial component. Add to that the Prosecutor is up for re-election and has been trying the case in the media, and you have the makings of a political grandstanding that creates a lot of reasonable doubt, before the case even reaches trial.

Don't get me wrong, I have no access to all of the evidence. Therefore, I cannot say anything for a certainty. Even if I did, I may never be able to say for sure. But the more I hear from the media, the more doubt I have as to the credibility of this accuser. And that is the most important component of this particular case, absent solid DNA evidence.