Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Wednesday Hero - Sgt. Brent Dunkleberger

This weeks hero was submitted by Jimbailoni

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero. We Have Every Right To Dream Heroic Dreams. Those Who Say That We're In A Time When There Are No Heroes, They Just Don't Know Where To Look

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. If you would like to participate in honoring the brave men and women who serve this great country, you can find out how by clicking here.

Mike Nifong's fourth victim?

Susan Estrich tells us that there are four victims of Mike Nifong's botched prosecution. From FOXNews.com: 

There are four victims of District Attorney Mike Nifong’s twisted tactics in the Duke Lacrosse case.

The first three, of course, are the young men who never would have been charged with anything had Nifong adhered to the standard practices in his own office. With luck, they will ultimately be exonerated, and be able to move on with their lives, albeit after having endured a chapter in hell.

The fourth victim is unlikely to be so lucky; she will not be exonerated at trial, and she will not be able to move on with her life. She will be destroyed by this case, and while she is partly to blame for that herself, the other part of the blame rests squarely on Mike Nifong’s shoulders.

The woman is a liar. That is the English translation of the latest round of maneuvers, in which the prosecution dismissed the rape charges because the woman could no longer say, as she once did, that she had intercourse with three men at the party. In other words, she lied when she said she did.

That about sums it up. I don't see her as a victim at all. I see her as a liar looking for quick publicity and a big cash settlement. I see another Tawana Brawley destroying race relations with yet another bogus charge.

In the bad old days, before rape laws were reformed, a number of jurisdictions enforced a special corroboration rule in rape cases that provided that a case could not go to the jury on the uncorroborated testimony of the victim. The idea behind the rule was, as Sir Matthew Hale famously warned, that rape is a crime “easy to charge but hard to prove, and harder still to disprove” even by one who is innocent.

So special rules were needed, or so it was thought, to protect men against acts of spite so easily launched and so difficult to disprove.

Every jurisdiction that had corroboration requirements ultimately got rid of them, as a formal matter, but informally, of course it matters whether there is corroborating evidence.

No study has ever found that women lie about rape any more often than men (and women) do about other crimes, but that doesn’t mean that every complaint belongs in a criminal trial. The job of the prosecutor, especially because of the special stigma that comes simply with the charge of rape, is to screen out those cases that should not, or cannot, be won, and not bring them in the first place.

I have to ask, has any study ever found that women lie about rape any less often than men (and women) do about other crimes? Probably not. When nobody is an eyewitness to the crime, and when there is no physical evidence of the crime, it's often a case of "he said - she said". I've sat on rape juries before. The standard is that the crime must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There's a hell of a lot of reasonable doubt in this case.

Just exactly who did Mike Nifong think he was doing a favor by pushing forward a case with an alleged victim who, the minute she spoke, would inevitably be massacred as a lying slut?

Her? Her family? Her community? So that later there would be pressure to charge her for lying? Did he really think he was doing her any favors?

I can tell you who he likely thought he was doing a favor. He probably thought that by pumping up the rhetoric in the case he could help his re-election chances. He probably thought that by delaying the trial until the spring that he could help his re-election chances. He probably thought that by suppressing evidence in the case so that it looked like he was being tough on a racially motivated rape he could help his re-election chances.

Mike Nifong was re-elected. Now, after the election he drops the rape charges. He should drop the whole case. It's built on a house of cards and the wind is blowing.

Previous:

• Tawana Lite - Mike Nifong's Prosecutorial Misconduct
• Remember Tawana Brawley?

Trackposted to Rightwing Guy, Perri Nelson's Website, Outside the Beltway, Is It Just Me?, Faultline USA, The HILL Chronicles, The Random Yak, Wake Up America, Don Surber, Pirate's Cove, Planck's Constant, The Bullwinkle Blog, Dumb Ox News, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

New Cornerbacks

Good news for the playoffs. The Seahawks signed a couple of new players to deal with their cornerback shortage. Safety John Howell, who was with the hawks last year is back, and Pete Hunter, a former Dallas Cowboy, will be joining the team as well. 

Howell and Hunter figure to contribute immediately on special teams, with Hunter perhaps to be used as an extra defensive back in passing situations. Neither player was on a team this season.

Source: The Seattle Times: Sports: Seahawks sign two to help beleaguered secondary

That beats the heck out of having no cornerbacks.

Cross posted to NWBloggers.com

URL Rewriting code finished

I've finished working with the URL rewriting code for a while.

The permalink format has been changed. If you link to a post using the old style permalink, the user's browser will be redirected to the new permalinks, so references to old posts should not be broken.

The new style permalinks are based on the year, month, and day of the post, as well as the post identifier. For example, this post's permalink would be http://perrinelson.com/2007/1/2/355.aspx (Sorry, without more control over the IIS configuration of my website I can't get rid of the ".aspx" there).

The permalinks are hackable now too. What that means is you can strip off path segments and still have a valid URL. For example, http://perrinelson.com/2007/1/2 will bring up a page with all of the posts for today, and http://perrinelson.com/2007/1 will bring up a page with the dates and titles of all of the posts for January, 2007. The titles of the posts will be links to the actual posts. That should make it a lot easier to find a post in the archives.

You can also strip off the month part of the path. That will bring up a page with a link for every month that posts are found in the year. After each link will be a count of the number of posts for that day.

Let me know how you like the new feature, and if you find any bugs in it, please let me know about them in the comments as well.

Open Trackback Tuesday

The holidays are over, it's time to get back to work...

Here's your open trackbacks post for Tuesday, January 2, 2007. If you have an interesting post you'd like to share, feel free to link to this post and request a trackback. Just remember to follow the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

How Republican Are You?

I saw that Wild Thing took the test on the PC Free Zone, so I had to try it out.

You Are 80% Republican

You have a good deal of elephant running through your blood, and you're proud to be conservative. You don't fit every Republican stereotype, but you definitely belong in the Republican party.

Naturally, I decided to try out the counterpart test too.

You Are 4% Democrat

If you have anything in common with the Democrat party, it's by sheer chance. You're a staunch conservative, and nothing is going to change that!

So somewhere, 16% of me is missing.

Some of my friends have told me I'm not all there. Maybe they were right.