The Forensic Nurse

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER ANNOUNCES REVISIONS TO THE UNIFORM CRIME REPORT’S DEFINITION OF RAPE

Data Reported on Rape Will Better Reflect State Criminal Codes, Victim Experiences

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder today announced revisions to the Uniform Crime Report’s (UCR) definition of rape, which will lead to a more comprehensive statistical reporting of rape nationwide. The new definition is more inclusive, better reflects state criminal codes and focuses on the various forms of sexual penetration understood to be rape. The new definition of rape is: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” The definition is used by the FBI to collect information from local law enforcement agencies about reported rapes.

“Rape is a devastating crime and we can’t solve it unless we know the full extent of it,” said Vice President Biden, a leader in the effort to end violence against women for over 20 years and author of the landmark Violence Against Women Act. “This long-awaited change to the definition of rape is a victory for women and men across the country whose suffering has gone unaccounted for over 80 years.”

“These long overdue updates to the definition of rape will help ensure justice for those whose lives have been devastated by sexual violence and reflect the Department of Justice’s commitment to standing with rape victims,” Attorney General Holder said. “This new, more inclusive definition will provide us with a more accurate understanding of the scope and volume of these crimes.”

“The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Advisory Policy Board recently recommended the adoption of a revised definition of rape within the Summary Reporting System of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program,” said David Cuthbertson, FBI Assistant Director, CJIS Division. “This definitional change was recently approved by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. This change will give law enforcement the ability to report more complete rape offense data, as the new definition reflects the vast majority of state rape statutes. As we implement this change, the FBI is confident that the number of victims of this heinous crime will be more accurately reflected in national crime statistics.”

The revised definition includes any gender of victim or perpetrator, and includes instances in which the victim is incapable of giving consent because of temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity, including due to the influence of drugs or alcohol or because of age. The ability of the victim to give consent must be determined in accordance with state statute. Physical resistance from the victim is not required to demonstrate lack of consent. The new definition does not change federal or state criminal codes or impact charging and prosecution on the local level.

“The revised definition of rape sends an important message to the broad range of rape victims that they are supported and to perpetrators that they will be held accountable,” said Justice Department Director of the Office on Violence Against Women Susan B. Carbon. “We are grateful for the dedicated work of all those involved in making and implementing the changes that reflect more accurately the devastating crime of rape.”

The longstanding, narrow definition of forcible rape, first established in 1927, is “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” It thus included only forcible male penile penetration of a female vagina and excluded oral and anal penetration; rape of males; penetration of the vagina and anus with an object or body part other than the penis; rape of females by females; and, non-forcible rape.

Police departments submit data on reported crimes and arrests to the UCR. The UCR data are reported nationally and used to measure and understand crime trends. In addition, the UCR program will also collect data based on the historical definition of rape, enabling law enforcement to track consistent trend data until the statistical differences between the old and new definitions are more fully understood.

The revised definition of rape is within FBI’s UCR Summary Reporting System<http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/frequently-asked-questions/faqs> Program. The new definition is supported by leading law enforcement agencies and advocates and reflects the work of the FBI’s CJIS Advisory Policy Board.

Click here to read a blog post<http://www.justice.gov/> from Director Carbon on the importance of the new definition of rape to our nation’s law enforcement, and for survivors of rape and their advocates. Click here to listen to the FBI’s podcast<http://www.fbi.gov/?came_from=http%3a//www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/rape-definition-changed/view>.

The sex scandal rocking the Penn State University this week is a clear illustration that mandatory reporting is a topic that needs greater education and awareness for both those in and outside of the medical profession.

 In case you are not familiar with the Penn State Sex Scandal story, Jerry Sandusky a former defensive football coach at PSU has been indicted on 40 counts ranging from child endangerment, to deviant sexual acts with a minor.

The crimes occured over a 15 year period and came to light to the univerisity over 12 years ago. Up until late last week, Mr. Sandusky was still allowed on the Penn State campus and had been seen on multiple occasions with children.

CNN posts news story about indian traditions of families willfully placing their own children into prostitution as a way to meet family financial obligations. 

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/21/tradition-forces-daughters-into-prostitution/?hpt=hp_c1

Thomas Warda is the defense attorney for Mickey Gotwalt, age 52, who was just convicted of molesting a girl who was 14 years old at the time. Mr. Gotwalt was the high school softball coach at Caro High School, earlier pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct.

At the sentancing hearing Mr. Warda argued that his client “didn’t kill this girl,” according to a court transcript obtained by the Saginaw News. Warda was pleading for a more lenient sentancing for his client saying that he was not a pedophile, and implied that the victim would not suffer from any lasting psychological trauma.

Warda comment excerpts From court transcript: 

“I mean, this isn’t — I don’t think she’s gonna have psychological injury the rest of her life,” .   

“I mean, he’ll be in prison, but, you know, she’ll have forgotten all about this at some point.”

“I’m not blaming the victim, I’m just saying there are circumstances here, but nobody wanted to hear them.”

 Although conceding that the relationship was inappropriate. He went on to say that the teen fell in love with her coach and sent him hundreds of text messages. Gotwalt who was undergoing cancer treatment and Warda claimed was suffering from depression at the time.

Tuscola County Circuit Judge Patrick Joslyn was not swayed by the arguments and sentanced Gotwalt to seven years and two months to 15 years in prison. 

After sentancing, Warda said he stood by his remarks.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as arrested over the weekend on suspicition of sexual assault in New York.

A housekeeper at the hotel he was staying alledges that he chased her down the hallway and then attempted to sexually assaulted her. She picked Kahn out of a police lineup on Sunday.

The arraignment was delayed after Mr. Kahn agreed to  forensic testing requested by police according to his attorney. Strauss-Kahn, has been charged with attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment relating to the alledged event. A spokesperson for Strauss-Kahn has proclaimed his innocence of the charges.

Strauss-Kahn has been considered by many to be a potential candidate for the french presidancy. The IMF has not made any comments about the situation.

One of the important legal issues regarding the case is about potential diplomatic immunity for Strauss-Kahn.

IMF bylaws state that its officials “shall be immune from legal process with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity except when the fund waives this immunity.”

If it can be proven that he was acting within the scope of his official capacity of the IMF, he could be outside the jurisdiction of law. William Murray, a spokesman for the IMF, said that as far as he knows, Strauss-Kahn was not in New York City for IMF business.

The law named after 17-year-old Chelsea King, increases penalties for those who commit forcible sexual acts against minors in the state of California becomes law today . Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signed the bill after it unanimously passed the Senate and Assembly in a rare display of bipartisanship of the california legistlature. Officially named AB 1844,  The bill has an urgency clause meaning that it will take effect immediately after being signed.  

The bill creates a new penalty of life without the possibility of parole for commiting forcible sex crimes against minors that include certain aggravating factors, such as the age of the victim or whether the victim was restrained or drugged.

The law also sets out to more clearly define criteria that assess the risk for recidivism, or the likelyhood of commiting a similar crime again, and then placing those with greater risk under more careful supervision.

The law was spawned by the parents of the murdered children after a previous registered sex offender John Gardner III admitted to killing her in March of this year. Within days of finding the chelsea’s body, the body of Amber Dubois was found, who had been missing for over a year. Gardner was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders and an attack on a jogger.

Gardner was previously paroled on September 26, 2005 after serving 5 years for two counts of lewd and lascivious acts on a child younger than 14 and a single count of false imprisonment for attacking a 13-year-old neighbor. Under the new Chelsea’s Law the lewd and lascivious acts on a minor will carry a mandatory sentence of life without parole. The “one strike” provision (in reference to California’s 3 strike law) raises the bar on these types of sexual crimes.

 Read Full details of AB 1844 (Chelsea’s Law):

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_1801-1850/ab_1844_bill_20100831_enrolled.pdf �

children’s author K.P. Bath  was sentanced to six years in prison for possession of child pornography. The author has written books such as “The Secret of Castle Cant” and “Escape from Castle Cant”.

Authorities found Bath’s collection included images depicting sadistic conduct, rape, sodomy and bestiality.  Prosecutors were originally seeking more serious charges of distribution and transporting child pornography as well, but were later dropped as part of a plea agreement in exchange for the guilty plea.

Many victims of sexual crimes live the remainder of their lives, or a good portion of it, in fear that they will be victimized again. They often want to see their attacker locked up forever as punishment for the torment they experienced.

 Some states actually do have laws on their books to do just that. Most people dont even know such laws exist. They are called civil commitment laws and basically say that when a person becomes and has repeatly shown to be an emminent threat to the community as a whole, the govenment has the ability to incarcerate that individual indefinately.   

“The primary goal is incapacitation, that is, protecting society from people who are predicted to be dangerous in the future,” said Eric Janus, author of “Failure to Protect” and dean at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. “The second goal is to provide treatment to these individuals.”

In 1990, Washington state became the first state to pass a civil commitment law specifically for violent sex offenders. Twenty states now have civil commitment laws.

Indefinate confinement of individuals to mental hospitals or treatment centers for those with severe mental illness has been acceptable in the United States since its close to its birth as a nation. Around turn of the 20th century many laws dealing with sexual psychopaths were passed as women gained more and more rights. But as the century progressed the laws were either repealed or rarely applied.

This week the United States Supreme Court is re-evaluating its position on civil commitment based on an appeal. They have upheld the use of such laws in the past when the goal has been rehabilitation and not further punishment. These laws can mandate indefinate treatment even after their criminal time behind bars has ended. Some argue that these treatments could happen while the person is incarcerated rather than after their sentancing.

The case being heard by the Supreme Court this week centers around a lay that has been used in as many as 77 cases where inmates were held in a federal prison in North Carolina under indefinate commitment.  “The justices will decide whether the program enacted under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 is constitutional by infringing on a traditional state function”.

Alan DuBois, attorney for the federal prisoners, said it was wrong for the United States to claim a public safety argument when justifying continued incarceration.

“This statute is not written constitutionally,” he added. “It effectively does require no connection between the underlying criminal charge and the subsequent commitment. You can be in custody for any crime whatsoever. ”

Lawyer David Hargett convinced the Virginia Supreme Court that his client had a constitutional right to contest his civil commitment.

“I have found talking with people they are shocked to hear somebody can be sentenced by a judge, serve out that entire sentence and then say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not going to let you go,’ ” Hargett said, calling it a legal “black hole.”

The full story can be viewed on cnn.com

For well over two hours outside a school gymnasium in Richmond, a 15 year old california girl was allegedly beaten and gang raped while a a crowd of approximately 20 people stood by and watched. The crowd managed to stand by and watch, snicker, and even “tweet” about the incident on twitter, the popular social networking site. Not one of them intervened or called the authorities to report the crime.

The reasoning behind why no one got involved gets a little more complex. Some say there was fear of repercussions from the gang conducting the rape and beating. Others say the crowd was overcome with what is known as the bystander effect. The bystander effect is when individuals in a crowd see that everyone else in the crowd is doing or not doing something, and that behavior becomes the accepted social norm. In essense, because no one else was doing anything, it must be ok for me to do nothing.

Some of you may remember the story of Kitty Genovese who was brutally raped, beaten, robbed, and eventually stabbed to death in Queens New York back in 1964. The story gained national attention when it was later revealed that several witnesses heard her scream during the attack during the night, and no one notified the police. One man shouted from his window to leave the girl alone, and the attacker fled, only to return a few minutes later when the police never arrived, and dragged her into a stairwell and stabbed her again leaving her to bleed out in a stairwell.

California has a law that makes it illegal to witness a crime against a child and not report it to police. But in this case technically the crowd did not violate the law which specifies that age of the minor child is 14 or less. The victim in the California gang-rape case was 15 years old.

  “This just gets worse and worse the more you dig into it,” Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department. “It was like a horror movie. I can’t believe not one person felt compelled to help her.”

To date the AP is reporting that five people have been arrested so far in connection with the crime. Three juveniles and two adults.  Richmond police spokesman, Lt. Mark Gagan said that  the three juveniles will be charged as adults. While the complete list of charges is not final yet, the suspects will be facing felony charges like “rape in concert” which can carry a life sentance.

The police were eventually notified when a person called in who had overheard others who were at the scene of the assault talking about the incident. The girl was found unconscious and “brutally assaulted” under a bench shortly before midnight Saturday 

Police have posted a $20,000 reward for anyone who comes to them with information that helps arrest and convict those involved in the attack.

Ben Roethlisberger, the two time NFL superbowl winner with the Pittsburgh Steelers was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by a woman in Nevada.

According to court records, the woman, Andrea McNulty, has filed a civil suit against Roethlisberger. An attorney for Roethlisberger ,  David Cornwell denied Roethlisberger sexually assaulted McNulty. He issued the following statement:

“This weekend Andrea McNulty served Ben Roethlisberger with a civil complaint accusing him of sexually assaulting her in July 2008. Ben has never sexually assaulted anyone; especially Andrea McNulty. The timing of the lawsuit and the absence of a criminal complaint and a criminal investigation are the most compelling evidence of the absence of any criminal conduct. If an investigation is commenced, Ben will cooperate fully and Ben will be fully exonerated,” Cornwell said.