EXTRA: THE SCALES OF JUSTICE?
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| A Jury of My Peers? |
Casey Anthony Acquitted...
Here's What Nancy Grace Thinks
(With Video, If You So Choose):
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| Not Too Many Things Scare Us Anymore, But.... |
We Know That The Global Game Readers Could Care Less What Nancy Grace Thinks.
Here's What TGG Readers Think:
One reader writes, "If she were Black,
she would have been convicted."
Another writes, "If she were Black,
we never would have heard of her."
A third says, "It's easy to focus on Casey Anthony because it's hard to focus on the eradication of
the American middle class."
The Casey Anthony trial captivated one part of America.
The DSK Affair captivated another.
What to think about the latest shocking developments, which you couldn't have made up if you tried?
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| Why Is This Man Smiling? No, Really....... |
TGG doesn't have many rules, but this is one of them:
we never try to say in our own words what somebody else has already said perfectly well.
So here, hitting the nail on the head, is New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, in his own (complete) words:
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The D.A. Did the Right Thing
By JOE NOCERA
Published: July 4, 2011
A young immigrant woman, lacking privilege and money, alleges that she was raped while on the job. She reports the incident soon after it takes place. There is semen on her clothes and bruises on her body. She tells her story with such conviction that, according to The Times, seasoned investigators cry when they hear it.
Related
Times Topic: Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
The man she says raped her — wealthy, famous and powerful — is on an airplane about to depart for his native land. This is the same countrythat, for decades, helped shield Roman Polanski from being prosecuted for statutory rape in the United States. The man in the current case appears to have left the hotel where the rape allegedly occurred in some haste. He even forgets to take one of his cellphones.
With no time to spare, detectives lure him off the plane and arrest him. When he is questioned, he refuses to talk about the incident, having already “lawyered up.” He is forced to do the “perp walk,” and spends the next five days in jail, at which point he is indicted. (Under New York law, if prosecutors don’t indict him within five days, they have to release him on his own recognizance.) Once out on bail, he is placed under house arrest, in a $200,000-a-monthTriBeCa townhouse. The New York tabloids mock him mercilessly.
Now that the man can’t flee, prosecutors turn their attention to the alleged victim. They begin investigating her background, knowing that the case hinges on her credibility. In just six weeks — an extraordinarily short time, as these things go — they put together a devastating profile of her past, filled with troubling inconsistencies, outright lies and the possibility that she hopes to profit from her alleged ordeal.
The prosecutors waste no time divulging these exculpatory facts to the man’s lawyers. Then, in open court, they tell the judge what they’ve found. He releases the man from house arrest. Though the case is not yet abandoned, it almost surely will be.
You know what I’ve just described, of course: l’affaire D.S.K. In the days since Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s stunning reversal of fortune, many Frenchmen have howled at the injustice of it all: “This vision of Dominique Strauss-Kahn humiliated in chains, dragged lower than the gutter,” as the French writer (and D.S.K. friend) Bernard-Henri Lévy put it in the Daily Beast — all because Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, chose to believe “a hotel chambermaid” over an esteemed member of the French political establishment.
In America, meanwhile, the case’s collapse has brought sniping from former prosecutors and white-collar defense attorneys, who have criticized Vance for indicting Strauss-Kahn before he knew more about the victim’s background.
For the life of me, though, I can’t see what Vance did wrong. Quite the contrary. The woman alleged rape, for crying out loud, which was backed up by physical (and other) evidence. She had no criminal record. Her employer vouched for her. The quick decision to indict made a lot of sense, both for legal and practical reasons. Then, as the victim’s credibility crumbled, Vance didn’t try to pretend that he still had a slam dunk, something far too many prosecutors do. He acknowledged the problems.
Lévy, himself a member of the French elite, seems particularly incensed that Vance wouldn’t automatically give Strauss-Kahn a pass, given his extraordinary social status. Especially since his accuser had no status at all.
But that is exactly why Vance should be applauded: a woman with no power made a credible accusation against a man with enormous power. He acted without fear or favor. To have done otherwise would have been to violate everything we believe in this country about no one being above the law.
As for Strauss-Kahn’s humiliation, clearly something very bad happened in that hotel room. Quite possibly a crime was committed. Strauss-Kahn’s sordid sexual history makes it likely that he was the instigator. If the worst he suffers is a perp walk, a few days in Rikers Island and some nasty headlines, one’s heart ought not bleed. Ah, yes, and he had to resign as the chief of an institution where sexual harassment was allegedly rampant, thanks, in part, to a culture he helped perpetuate. Gee, isn’t that awful?
The point is this: We live in a country that professes to treat everyone equally under the law. So often we fall short. The poor may go unheard; the rich walk. Yet here is a case that actually lives up to our ideal of who we like to think we are. Even the way the case appears to be ending speaks to our more noble impulses. Vance didn’t dissemble or delay or hide the truth about the victim’s past. He did the right thing, painful though it surely must have been.
To judge by his recent writings, Bernard-Henri Lévy prefers to live in a country where the elites are rarely held to account, where crimes against women are routinely excused with a wink and a nod and where people without money or status are treated like the nonentities that the French moneyed class believe they are.
I’d rather live here.
For balance, if you want to get into the mindset of the most take-no-prisoners DSK apologist, here is the aforementioned French intellectual Bernard-Henry Levy's diatrabe against the American justice system and the wounded "honor" of his ami DSK:
All we can say, is, this story is not over. And we are quite sure that it has revealed as much about DSK's true character as anyone else's.
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| And It May Be Just Us, But We're Guessing That One Way or The Other, There's More Nail-Biting Times To Come |
STAY TUNED.
