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Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
Читать онлайн.Название Unsportsmanlike Conduct
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781617755217
Автор произведения Jessica Luther
Жанр Юриспруденция, право
Издательство Ingram
Additionally, Shaffer and Gross found that rape, compared to other crimes (except robbery), has the lowest rate of people lying and it leading to false convictions. Perjury and false accusations led to 64 percent of homicide exonerations, 74 percent of child sex abuse exonerations, 43 percent for other violent crimes, and 52 percent for exonerations of nonviolent crimes. Looking at all 873 exonerations cases, half were due to perjury or false accusations. When it came to sexual assault cases, that number was only 23 percent. In other words, compared to other types of crime, people who report rape are much less likely to lie.
In the end, this is what the study tells us: it is both a myth that black men rape white women at some extraordinary level and that women lie profusely to falsely convict men. Yet the system, as it is set up, seems to suggest both things are true. Many people in this society believe these things to be true.
This is a particularly damaging intersection of racism and sexism, then, for both women and black men. As Byron Hurt wrote on December 5, 2013, in a piece for NewBlackMan (in Exile) about the Jameis Winston case, “It is true that Black men continue to be cruelly stereotyped as rapists. As a Black man, I carry that label—and all of the other stereotypes associated with Black men—wherever I go in our country. However, it is also a stereotype that women lie about being victims of rape more often than not. According to FBI statistics, less than 3 percent of all rapes are falsely reported.”[65]
Yet the exoneration study shows that false convictions for rape are most likely made when the woman does not know her perpetrator and when there is a mistake in his identification; it is not done with malicious intent. That does not mean the woman is not racist or that because the intent is not malicious that the effects of a racist system do not have terrible real-life consequences for black men.
It’s important to note one potential horrific consequence for men behind bars, whether they committed a crime or not: they can become victims of sexual violence themselves as prison rape is at crisis levels in the United States. According to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that “a prisoner’s likelihood of becoming a victim of sexual assault is roughly thirty times higher than that of any given woman on the outside” and “inmates in state and federal prisons and local jails all reported greater rates of sexual victimization involving staff than other inmates.”[66] Kirsten West Savali has argued that ignoring prison rape further marginalizes the struggle to get people to care about mitigating or ending sexual violence altogether.[67] “Until we create safe spaces for these victims, for all victims, to be truly seen and heard,” West Savali writes, “rape culture will continue to be viewed as a ‘woman’s problem’ or a ‘man-hating, feminist agenda’—something society has always found easy to deny or vilify, and ultimately ignore.” These things are complicated issues: racism in the system and in our daily lives means that more black men are criminalized overall and are often misidentified in criminal prosecutions of sexual assault cases; they then go into a prison system where they very well may become victims of sexual violence themselves; and by us ignoring the issue of prison rape (probably because we believe it is a justified punishment or because we simply do not care about what happens to the population of people behind bars), we continue to perpetuate the very rape culture we say we want to end.
In college football, many (though not all) of the sexual assault cases involving college players fall outside of the “stranger danger” rape scenario that leads to misidentification of the perpetrator and so to false convictions. Most of the time, the woman knows the man she is reporting. Additionally, many of these cases involve gang rapes by multiple players (roughly 40 percent), a scenario that does not lend itself to overarching problems with eyewitnesses misidentifying perpetrators. This does not mean that race and racist beliefs about black men’s criminality have no place in these cases, only that most of these cases are more complicated than our nuance-averse narratives allow.
There is no way to determine with 100 percent certainty that the person reporting the crime is telling the truth. Yet the statistical odds are very high that the person reporting in these cases is not lying. Still, we have to also hold in our minds that race does play a role, clearly, in false rape convictions.
One other area where race most definitely has an impact is our appetite for consuming crime reportage when the person accused, charged, or convicted is a black athlete. We find it easy to talk about crime, especially crime as a problem within our larger society, when we have a black person in the role of perpetrator.
IV.
Willie Meggs, the prosecutor who took Travis Johnson to court, was the same state attorney in charge of Jameis Winston’s case in 2013. In the end, Meggs chose not to press charges against Winston. What he did, though, was take the opportunity to make the announcement of not charging Winston into a spectacle. He laughed multiple times during the press conference. At one point, Meggs was on screen standing behind a podium, and a female reporter off camera asked him, “Because there was more than one DNA evidence in the rape kit, can you conclude that there was perhaps sex with more than one male?” Meggs paused and then replied, “That would be a logical conclusion.” The man standing just behind him on camera, former Florida state senator Alfred Lawson, laughed in response, as did other people in the room. That was toward the beginning of the strangely lighthearted press conference about a high-profile sexual assault case. Meggs repeatedly cracked jokes with the media. When asked if the deadline for Heisman voting influenced how quickly or when Meggs determined that he would not press charges, he jokingly asked when the voting ended and then smirked while saying it did not affect his timeline. Then Meggs and Lawson kidded about whether Lawson had called him a “politician,” leading Meggs to grin widely for the camera, seemingly pleased with his own humor.
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