News Cut: August 24, 2011 Archive

Is Dominique Strauss-Kahn owed an apology?

Posted at 12:48 PM on August 24, 2011 by Michael Olson (8 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice

A New York judge yesterday dismissed the rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, He is free to return to France. This comes after he was forced to give up his job leading the International Monetary Fund. The allegations brought against him are likely to complicate his chances to win the French presidency.

Columnists including Janis Turner of The Times were quick to jump on Strauss-Kahn as the allegations emerged.

If an apology is due, Fox News' Lis Wiehl says it shouldn't come from the prosecutors.

Did the prosecutors do the right thing in arresting DSK, and taking the evidence to a grand jury? Absolutely. They had a complaining victim with a compelling story, physical evidence of a sexual encounter, and a possible rapist about to board a plane for France. They had to act fast and ask more questions later. And the grand jury found the evidence convincing enough to meet the lower standard of probable cause, and to issue the charges.

She also writes that they did the correct thing is dropping the case because it wouldn't have risen to the pass the "reasonable doubt" threshold.

James Cohen, a professor of law at Fordham University, tells BBC News, "The system is supposed to get it right and it did get it right. There was a charge made and no reason not to accept it. The defense raised the consensual sexual encounter issue, the [district attorney] investigated the background of the victim and found she had credibility issues. ... So it's not a perfect process, but it worked as it's supposed to."

Tracy Clark-Flory examined the case against dismissal in Slate.

Jaclyn Friedman, author of "Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape," says the major problem here is "the way the adversarial justice system works," she told me by phone. "Prosecutors only like to bring to trial cases they feel they can win, which makes them reluctant to bring difficult cases, which usually works against anyone alleging rape." As a result, that "sends the cultural message that most rape victims are lying, which makes it even harder to convince a jury because we're all jurists."

The system is imperfect writes U.S. News' Susan Milligan.

Sexual assault is the one crime in which the victim is as much on trial as the alleged attacker, and Diallo learned this lesson about U.S. jurisprudence the hard way. Strauss-Kahn got his own unfortunate lesson as well about the criminal justice system here, the perp walk and media frenzy surrounding his arrest were appalling and prejudicial. But while Strauss-Kahn was indeed unfairly treated in that manner, that doesn't mean he didn't attack anyone.

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