Reply #174: aargh [View All]

[iverglas]

I had confused this situation with another one. In this case, the document had not been filed with the court. Legally, that doesn't matter, because there is no gag order in place ...

And whether it matters "legally" has never been in issue!

The issue I'm seeing has to do with the wisdom of forming opinions about the credibility of the complainant in this case based on dribs and drabs of prosecution evidence selectively released by the defence.

Where "legally" comes into it is, I gather, that the prosecution is under some greater obligation not to release evidence to the media/public, and thus presumably is not in a position to attempt to refute statements made by the defence, based on what may be very selectively cited information, by citing other information.

I'm still not clear on whether the defence has any obligation not to do release information in the discovery file, and -- my original question -- why it would be prohibited from releasing all of the discovery file (or at least the parts not otherwise protected, like medical records), as I understood to have been asserted here, and yet not be prohibited from releasing dribs and drabs of it.

As for the specific point on which you cite news reports, the police officer's explanation seems not unreasonable to me. I would certainly want to see video of the event, for instance, before assessing it -- to see what, exactly, the investigator appeared to have been responding to specifically. Taking someone's words out of context and assigning a meaning to them that was not intended -- in an attempt to persuade someone of something -- is really quite reprehensible, and if that were indeed what the defence has done in this instance, I would be most unimpressed.

If that is what the defence was doing, then for it to say:

Since you are the District Attorney's Investigator, the press could have assumed -- falsely, as it turns out -- that you had actually read your file.

-- an allegation that a statement was false based solely on its own misrepresentation of the statement -- would be doubly reprehensible and unimpressive.

I am curious what the "technical" word for the woman in this case is in that jurisdiction. Here, such an individual is normally referred to as "the complainant", in the context of the justice system. The Crown (the state) is the "accuser": the maker of the allegations, to a justice in the form of an information, that found the charge. Obviously, "victim" is inappropriate unless and until the charge is proved, and I find "accuser" -- as used by the defence here, "false accuser" -- to be misleading.

Just as an aside, I'll tell you something else without being asked. In addition to having been a victim of a serious sexual assault that was intended to end in my death, I have been the victim of a false allegation of a crime. I was charged, and, I really don't have any doubt, my life was adversely affected to a far more serious extent, until the charge was withdrawn much later, and permanently, than these young men's lives will ever be. (My account of the abduction and assault illustrates only one factor in the complex PTSD I suffer from, other instances of confinement and helplessness having contributed to it before and after that; now imagine being placed in a jail cell for several hours ... and again several weeks later, when the police knock on your door and you learn that your lawyer failed to appear for you in court several weeks before as arranged ... . Suicidal? Just a tad.)

So I am perfectly aware that prosecutors sometimes do pursue cases for inappropriate reasons and without properly assessing evidence, and of what the consequences may be. I am also aware of what it takes for a woman to pursue a sexual assault complaint. And I'm not generally impressed by what any third party (whether defence or prosecution counsel, for instance) might have to say about the facts of any case.