Guilty Until Proved Innocent…

Friday morning during my hike with Pip when he was off-leash as he usually is on the forest trails, we met a young woman with two small daughters, perhaps three and five years old. Unlike other parents I’ve met on the trails, she did not immediately snatch up her daughters or request that I put Pip back on his leash. “They’re tough,” she told me when I complimented her on her daughters’ apparent fearlessness. Continuing along the trail, I thought about what this tiny scene means in my writing this post, on the training of girls, and its impact on our judicial system.

Does fearlessness on the part of girls and young women cancel judgement and common sense?

I remember watching my beloved granddaughter, years ago, walk down a dark street late at night in New York, wearing a skirt—current then—that barely cleared her thighs. She walked with great confidence and she is tall and strong and entitled, but as I followed her at a distance, I wondered if these qualities would protect her against three men who were coming toward her.

Apparently, these qualities or good luck did because nothing happened.

Earlier this week, I spent the morning as one in a panel of 40 people, 12 of whom would be selected to serve on the jury in a criminal trial. Unfortunately, I was not chosen, perhaps because I had the bad judgment to wear a shirt that, according to a policewoman, “lets us see your bra.”

I was very sorry I was not chosen for the jury, because as I sat there during the cross-examination of the voir dire (old French for speak the truth) and observed the setup of the courtroom, I began to believe that this defendant would not receive a fair trial.

First of all, he is black. I am supposing the young woman involved is white because it seems to me unlikely that any member of the small African-American community here would expose herself to the danger the defendant posed. He has been charged with two other rapes; one case was dismissed “without prejudice,” which means it can be refiled, the other will be tried next month.

It is unlikely that his lawyer mentioned the nightmare image that has gripped this country’s imagination (and not only in the south) for the past 250 years: the black male predictor assaulting the innocent white female victim. But it seems likely to me that that nightmare vision was in the minds of some of the potential jurors.

Because she is underage at 15, the case seemed cut and dried, and indeed the jury handed in a guilty verdict after five hours of deliberation. After thanking the court, the defendant bowed his head to his knees. He faces possibly sixteen years in prison, which will certainly damage if not destroy the rest of his adult life.

What do I see as the problems here? First of all, the setup on the courtroom worked against the defendant who sat with his lawyer at the back wall, about forty feet from the rows of jurors, while the prosecuting attorney sat five feet from us with his colleague. Second, the defendant’s lawyer, at the back of the room, was a woman; she did not ask any questions of the potential jurors whom the prosecutor had drilled with trick questions. And they were sharing the same group of witnesses.

Next, was this really a jury of the defendant’s peers? His pro-bono lawyer had objected earlier to the absence of African-Americans in this jury pool, and so four had been found and added to our group. As was nearly bound to happen in this small town with its tiny black population, all four were struck from the jury because they had all been connected, tenuously or straight-forwardly, with the defendant. Yet the trial went forward without the presence on the jury of his peers.

Another concern: over the past decades, many people in this country have never learned or have dismissed the concept, basic to our Constitution, of “innocent until proved guilty.” Scandal-mongering journalism and sensational films have made it easy to believe, as one of the potential jurors asserted, “Anybody picked up by the police is guilty.” Another admitted that he would have trouble claiming innocence for an African-American. I presume they were struck, but I felt quite sure that these opinions were fairly widely shared.

Leaving aside the question of the defendant’s guilt which has now been proved to general satisfaction, what does this trial make of his accuser? Having met the defendant and his friend on the Plaza a few days before, they arranged to meet at 10pm several nights later. She crept out of her house to join them and climbed into the defendant’s car. A kidnapping charge was later dismissed since she went into the car willingly.

Riding around town, sharing drinks and allowing the defendant’s friend to blow cocaine smoke into her mouth, the young woman then “panicked” as they drove toward his apartment, saying she was afraid to go home because she would get in trouble with her parents.

After vomiting in the bathroom, the young woman lay down on the bed while the two men shared a pizza. The defendant (who has pleaded innocence) lay down beside her, his friend prepared to sleep on the floor at the foot of the bed, testifying in court that he never heard anything that night or in the morning that could have meant sexual intercourse. At 7am, he woke them so he could drive the girl home before going to work.

Nevertheless, the jury concluded that the defendant raped her while she was “fading in and out” and attempting to protest. She was a virgin.

How hopeless at this point in the testimony was the defendant’s lawyer to turn the tide although she pointed out that the young woman had offered differing accounts of what happened and that there was no physical evidence.

Now, as the defendant goes to jail for sixteen years, his accuser dons the cloak of her innocence and her victimhood; the two are always linked. There will be unspoken doubts that trouble the rest of her life but since she has been declared, officially, innocent, she may be able to shrug those off. She possesses the power of the myth that destroyed the defendant, and as the details of the trial led inevitably to the declaration of his guilt, she faces only the consequences that might be implied by her lack of judgement: late at night, alone, sneaking out of her house to meet two men she didn’t know.

Am I blaming the victim? No. But I am questioning the abject innocence of a young woman who behaves in a reckless way.

If Pip were a mean dog, if he had bitten one of the two little girls I met on the trail this morning, who would be at fault? Their mother for teaching her daughters to be fearless, me for allowing an aggressive dog off the leash—or both of us? We have tried for generations now to teach our daughters and granddaughters to be brave; is this an unintended consequence?

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton spent her life fighting for women’s right to vote—and did not live to witness the success of her struggle—I don’t believe she was fighting for the right of a young woman to sneak out late at night and go to the apartment of two men she doesn’t know and then claim no responsibility for what happened.

The defendant said whatever went on in that bed was by mutual consent. Who is to know?

Does any one of us have the right to claim innocence of the effects of poor judgement—especially when the effects mean the destruction of another human being’s life?

In Women, New Mexico 21 Favorites of 2021 Elizabeth Cady Stanton