Charges Are Pressed Against a Defendant
You have lived through the crime and made it through the initial investigation. They’ve caught the man who harmed you, and he’s been charged with armed burglary, robbery, and rape. Now he’ll be tried. Now you expect justice.
You receive a subpoena for a preliminary hearing. No one tells you what it will involve, how long it will take, or
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how you should prepare. You assume that this is the only time you will have to appear. But you are only beginning your initiation in a system that will grind away at you for months, disrupt your life, affect your emotional stability, and certainly cost you money; it may cost you your job, and, for the duration, will prevent you from putting the crime behind you and reconstructing your life.
Before the hearing, a defense investigator comes to talk to you. When he contacts you, he says he’s “investi- gating your case,” and that he “works for the county.” You assume, as he intends you to, that he’s from the police or the prosecutor’s office. Only after you give him a statement do you discover that he works for the man who attacked you.
This same investigator may visit your neighbors and coworkers, asking questions about you. He discusses the case with them, always giving the defendant’s side. Suddenly, some of the people who know you seem to be taking a different view of what happened to you and why.
It’s the day of the hearing. You’ve never been to court before, never spoken in public. You’re very nervous. You rush to arrive at 8 A.M. to talk to a prosecutor you’ve never met. You wait in a hallway with a number of other witnesses. It’s now 8:45. Court starts at 9:00. No one has spoken to you. Finally, a man sticks his head out a door, calls out your name, and asks, “Are you the one who was raped?” You’re aware of the stares as you stand and suddenly realize that this is the prosecutor, the person you expect will represent your interests.
You speak to the prosecutor for only a few minutes. You ask to read the statement you gave to the police, but he says there isn’t time. He asks you some questions that make you wonder if he’s read it himself. He asks you other questions that make you wonder if he believes it.
The prosecutor tells you to sit on the bench outside the courtroom. Suddenly you see the man who raped you coming down the hall. No one has told you he would be here. He’s with three friends. He points you out. They all laugh and jostle you a little as they pass. The defendant and two friends enter the courtroom; one friend sits on the bench across from you and stares. Suddenly, you feel aban- doned, alone, afraid. Is this what it’s like to come to court and seek justice?
You sit on the bench for an hour, then two. You don’t see the prosecutor; he has disappeared into the courtroom. Finally, at noon he comes out and says, “Oh, you’re still here? We continued that case to next month.” You repeat this process many times before you actually testify at the
preliminary hearing. Each time you go to court, you take leave from work, pay for parking, wait for hours, and finally are told to go home. No one ever asks if the new dates are convenient to you. You miss vacations and medical appoint- ments. You use up sick leave and vacation days to make your court appearances. Your employer is losing his patience. Every time you are gone his business is disrupted. But you are fortunate. If you were new at your job, or worked part-time, or didn’t have an understanding boss, you could lose your job. Many victims do.
The preliminary hearing was an event for which you were completely unprepared. You learn later that the defense is often harder on a victim at the preliminary hearing than during the trial. In a trial, the defense attorney cannot risk alienating the jury. At this hearing there is only the judge— and he certainly doesn’t seem concerned about you. One of the first questions you are asked is where you live. You finally moved after your attack; you’ve seen the defendant and his friends, and you’re terrified of having them know where you now live. When you explain that you’d be happy to give your old address the judge says he’ll dismiss the case or hold you in contempt of court if you don’t answer the ques- tion. The prosecutor says nothing. During your testimony, you are also compelled to say where you work, how you get there, and what your schedule is.
Hours later you are released from the stand after reliv- ing your attack in public, in intimate detail. You have been made to feel completely powerless. As you sat facing a smirking defendant and as you described his threats, you were accused of lying and inviting the “encounter.” You have cried in front of these uncaring strangers. As you leave no one thanks you. When you get back to work they ask what took you so long.
You are stunned when you later learn that the defen- dant also raped five others; one victim was an eight-year-old girl. During her testimony, she was asked to describe her attacker’s anatomy. Spectators laughed when she said she did not understand the words being used. When she was asked to draw a picture of her attacker’s genitalia, the girl fled from the courtroom and ran sobbing to her mother, who had been subpoenaed by the defense and had to wait outside. The youngster was forced to sit alone and recount, as you did, each minute of the attack. You know how difficult it was for you to speak of these things; you cannot imagine how it was for a child.
Now the case is scheduled for trial. Again there are delays. When you call and ask to speak with the prosecutor, you are told the case has been reassigned. You tell your story in detail to five different prosecutors before the case is tried.
(Continued)
V I C T IMS OF R AP E S AN D OT H E R S E XUAL AS S AULT S 343
Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203
attack, less than half were told about opportunities for counseling, and only half were informed about the availability of a vaccine to reduce the risks of contracting HIV/AIDS (Boyle, 2007). The report included a real-life experience that bore a disturb- ing resemblance to the worst-case scenario com- piled by the President’s Task Force decades ago:
An intruder creeps into a 40-year-old librarian’s bedroom and rapes her. She runs to a neighbor’s home, wearing nothing but an overcoat. When the police arrive, they do not immediately race next door to investigate the crime scene. Eventually, she is transported to a hospital, but is left alone in a room
because no victim’s advocate is on duty. Two male detectives ask her to recount the series of events in great detail three times. After being tested for traces of DNA, she is totally naked because her coat was taken as evidence. When she finally is allowed to leave she has to track down a male orderly to get something to wear, and has to plead with the hospi- tal’s staff to arrange for a taxicab to take her home. (Boyle, 2007)
The dramatization in Box 10.2 of everything that can go wrong in the aftermath of a rape and during the case’s processing by the criminal justice system can be useful to antirape activists today.
B O X 10.2 Continued
Months go by and no one tells you what’s happening. Periodically you are subpoenaed to appear. You leave your work, wait, and are finally told to go home. Continuances are granted because the courts are filled, one of the lawyers is on another case, and the judge has a meeting to attend or an early tennis match. You can’t understand why they couldn’t have discovered these problems before you came to court. When you ask if the next date could be set a week later so you can attend a family gathering out of state, you are told that the defendant has the right to a speedy trial. You stay home from the reunion and the case is continued. The defense attorney continues to call. Will you change your story? Don’t you want to drop the charges?
Time passes and you hear nothing. Your property is not returned. You learn that there are dozens of defense motions that can be filed before the trial. If denied, many of them can be appealed. Each motion, each court date means a new possibility for delay. If the defendant is out of custody and fails to come to court, nothing can happen until he is reap- prehended. If he is successful in avoiding recapture, the case may be so compromised by months or years of delay that a successful prosecution is impossible.
For as long as the case drags on, your life is on hold. You don’t want to start a new assignment at work or move to a new city because you know that at any time the round of court appearances may begin again. The wounds of your attack will never heal as long as you know that you will be asked to relive those horrible moments.
No one tells you anything about the progress of the case. You want to be involved, consulted, and informed, but prosecutors often plea bargain without consulting victims.
You’re afraid someone will let the defendant plead guilty to a lesser charge and be sentenced to probation. You meet another victim at court who tells you that she and her family were kidnapped and her children molested. Even though the prosecutor assured her that he would not accept a plea bar- gain, after talking with the attorneys in his chambers, the judge allowed the defendant to plead guilty as charged with the promise of a much-reduced sentence. You hope that this won’t happen in your case.
The Trial
Finally the day of trial arrives. It has been 18 months since you were attacked. You’ve been trying for a week to prepare your- self. It is painful to dredge up the terror again, but you know that the outcome depends on you; the prosecutor has told you that the way you behave will make or break the case. You can’t get too angry on the stand because then the jury might not like you. You can’t break down and sob because then you will appear too emotional, possibly unstable. In addition to the tremendous pressure of having to relive the horrible details of the crime, you’re expected to be an actress as well.
You go to court. The continuances are over; the jury has been selected. You sit in a waiting room with the defendant’s family and friends. Again you feel threatened, vulnerable, and alone.
You expect the trial to be a search for the truth; you find that it is a performance orchestrated by lawyers and the judge, with the jury hearing only half the facts. The defen- dant was found with your watch in his pocket. The judge has suppressed this evidence because the officer who arrested him didn’t have a warrant.
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Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203
Box 10.2 provides a set of benchmarks or even a checklist that can be used to evaluate how much progress has been made in any given jurisdiction, and how much more work remains to be accom- plished in the quest for justice.