"Raped" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Raped

Two rape stories made headlines last week. The first was from Denver and described the arrest of a convicted rapist suspected in new sexual assaults on five women and girls over the previous week. The 35-year-old was being held on $25 million bail. He had been questioned in November after confessing to attacking a boy. The police had let him go as they pursued their investigation. They should have held him, since he had been convicted of prior sexual assault.

There may have been other attacks since he was let go, but so far he is being charged with raping two 11-year-old sisters, their 67-year-old grandmother, as well as two other women. The rapist had been sent to a state hospital for three years then prison for 14 for raping a young boy and a girl. He’d pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to one of the rapes so he could get treatment. Said the police chief who let him go in November, "Our goal, again, is to achieve a successful prosecution here, not to make a quick and hasty arrest."

The second story was of a Lodi, California man who’d done ten years for a rape he didn’t commit. He was released from prison after a group of San Francisco law students with the Innocence Project presented irrefutable DNA evidence to a judge who ruled that the man was not the rapist. The rape victim also recanted her identification of the man as her assailant.

Under California law, the man is entitled to $100 for each day he was in prison for the ten years. It was not known if he would sue the victim. Or the state. The prosecutor did not oppose the finding of innocence but refused to apologize for the error, insisting "there's a certain percentage of people" -- both in his office and the Lodi Police Department -- "who believe it's very possible that he did commit this crime."

The Police Department said it had investigated their investigation of a decade ago and concluded that "sufficient probable cause existed to warrant the arrest." They also acknowledged, however, that their tactics in questioning the victim "may be viewed as overly aggressive." The head of the Innocence Project said she would ask the Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice to investigate the arrest and prosecution.

There is no connection between these cases except the crime and the grotesque failures of the authorities.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.