The IWF–and especially This Charlotte–fully support the prosecutor’s decision to drop rape charges against Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant over an incident last year in which Bryant had what looked an awful lot like consensual sex with a 19-year-old woman who had gone voluntarily to his hotel room. (See my Justice for Kobe Bryant, Sept. 8.) The medical evidence was consistent with consensual sex, and DNA evidence had emerged that the alleged victim had had sex with yet another guy after she was with Bryant but before she went to the police. The radical feminists, who have turned rape into a political crime and tried to make it difficult for those accused of rape to assert legal defenses, aren’t happy.
Our readers share their thoughts about the Bryant case. Here’s an e-mail from W.W.:
“The Bryant case demonstrates the need for gradations of rape. To assert that a date gone sour, as with Kobe or even with [Mike] Tyson should warrant the same punishment as dragging a stranger into the bushes, raping her and beating her bloody is a recipe for not-guilty verdicts.”
I don’t know enough about the Tyson case (in which the former heavyweight champ was actually convicted of rape) to compare it to the Bryant case. But W.W. makes a good general point.
And H.M. writes:
“In most jurisdictions, the police don’t evaluate the credibility of evidence in a complaint of sexual assault anymore. They don’t exercise their discretion in the matter of laying such charges. Radical feminism has imposed that discipline on the police. The police can’t afford to be caught up in a controversy of this kind. It’s just not good public relations….
“Defense counsels have always held that sexual relations between men and women are extremely complex involving the strongest of emotions that are central to our identity as human beings. No one should be convicted of a sexual assault on the uncorroborated evidence of one witness only. There is simply too much opportunity for a tragic miscarriage of justice to occur.
“While juries, for the most part, agree with this position and acquit the accused in these circumstances, this is by no means an assured result.”
True enough–although, given all the evidence in the Bryant case, I don’t think a jury would have had much trouble acquitting him.
The Other Charlotte has been following the strange case of Jerry “I Carved My Own Selectric Ball” Killian and his supposed memo aired by “60 Minutes” that said G.W. Bush ditched his National Guard service back in ’72. (See TOC’s Isn’t It Strange?, Sept. 9, and Just the Facts, Ma’am–Byron York Reads Bush’s National Guard Records, today below.)
As old-typewriter aficionados scramble to figure out how Killian could have keyboarded that tiny superscript “th” into the memo (the font balls for IBM Selectrics didn’t contain superscript characters, although they are quite common on today’s computer word-processing programs–programs that hadn’t been invented 32 years ago)–Charlotte has been drawing on the Selectricgate coverage of Matt Drachenberg’s wonderful blog, Overtaken by Events. So Matt writes in gratitude:
“I just wanted to thank you for the link to Overtaken by Events. I’ve always enjoyed the InkWell and am glad you found me.”
We’re glad we found you, too–and, Inky readers, we recommend this OBE post on “Mother” Teresa Kerry’s declaration that the people who oppose her Dem candidate-husband’s health-care proposal are “idiots.”
Meanwhile, CBS’s news-cheese Dan Rather is said to have promised to apologize personally on the air if the Killian memo proves to be, um, a forgery.
Memo from a former Selectric owner to future creators of Bush-bashing “typewritten” memos: Always use the Courier, not the Times New Roman font if you’re aiming for a retro ’70s look to your document. Courier was the old Times New Roman. The font balls for Selectrics were expensive, so most people owned just one ball. It wasn’t the way it is today, when you can switch fonts on a keystroke. And please: although “proportional-type” Selectrics (with letters of different widths enabling a professionally typeset look as on today’s computers) existed back then, they were cumbersome to use, so hardly anyone ever used them. And don’t, don’t, don’t forget to eyeball all the letters and characters on your Selectric font ball, so you don’t make the mistake of “typing” a character that didn’t exist on the typewriter at the time you say your memo was written.
Update: According to blogster Powerline, Rather is taking the postion that the Killian documents are authentic, and CBS has decided to conduct no investigation. Says Powerline: “CBS News is walking the plank for the Kerry campaign.” Buh-bye, Dan!