His SAT scores are high
Won’t somebody please think of the rapist?
Again.
A judge suggested that a teenage boy accused of raping a drunk girl at a party should be treated leniently because he came from “a good family”, and cast doubt on whether such an attack amounted to rape at all.
Judge James Troiano in New Jersey made the remarks while ruling that the boy, who was identified only as “GMC”, should not face trial as an adult for allegedly raping a 16-year-old girl while recording the incident on his mobile phone.
“This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well,” Troiano said. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college. His scores for college entry were very high.” Troiano, 69, also noted that the boy was an Eagle Scout.
Trying minors as adults is one thing, and claiming that coming from a good family is a reason to brush off rape is quite quite another.
We saw the same thing with Brock Turner; we saw it with Steubenville; we see it regularly. Judges, and sometimes juries, worry about the waste of these valuable boys while the raped girl becomes just some annoying accident that happened to a boy.
Investigators said GMC sent a clip of the alleged rape to seven of his friends, and later sent a text adding: “When your first time having sex is rape.” Yet Troiano suggested that, in his view, the alleged incident was a sexual assault rather than a rape.
Sending a clip to friends is so beyond despicable I can’t deal with it. I get so sick of the depth and energy with which too many male people hate female people. “Haiy doodz look at this slag I raped while she was drunk hurr hurr.” Pathetic that one of them is a Supreme Court justice now, isn’t it.
Prosecutors had alleged that GMC’s attack had been “sophisticated and predatory” and that he showed “calculated and cruel” behaviour by filming the incident, sharing the footage and then lying about it.
Damn right.
But Troiano refused, pointing to GMC’s background and saying that, in his view, a “traditional case of rape” involved more than one attacker using a weapon to take advantage of a victim in a remote location.
All those other rapes that are so commonplace are thus just a bit of fun among the boys, while genuine rape hardly ever happens. Convenient for some.
Updating to add an informative comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room that I hadn’t seen:
“And there’s a big problem I can see: initially the victim and her parents weren’t asking for charges, they just wanted the perpetrator and his friends to stop circulating the video of it. (Yes, that’s right, he was dumb enough to video it — and text it to his friends with the message “when your first time having sex was rape.” But hey, Eagle Scout honor student!) So the police actually instructed the kids to delete the video, and now nobody has a copy of it. I don’t know enough about criminal law to say how that’s going to play out — the state actually directed the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence, but on the other hand, the defendant himself had a copy too that he also chose to delete so maybe it’s not Brady material.”
I thought this was a case in which the complicit trial court judge got slapped down by an appellate panel or court? So the defendant WILL be tried as an adult?
There’s some good news buried surprisingly deep in the article, at least:
“Troiano’s remarks, which he delivered at a family court hearing in July 2018, were highlighted this week in a sharply worded overturning of his decision by an appeals court. Prosecutors told NJ1015.com they would now seek an indictment from a grand jury so they may prosecute GMC as an adult.”
Still disgusting… I hope there’s a public outcry about this as there was in Brock Turner’s case. Apart from the disgusting misogyny, it’s stunning how willing these judges are to say “If your background is like mine, I will be lenient. Otherwise, fuck you.”
Yes, the appeals court overturned it. There’s a link to the appellate ruling itself in my comment in the Miscellany Room, as well as in some of the news articles about it.
One other point I haven’t seen discussed is whether, independent of the rape charges, this defendant could be charged with transmission of child pornography. I am not a fan of prosecutors abusing that charge to go after garden-variety consensual sexting by teens, but that’s not what happened here. I don’t know if the defendant even disputes that the victim didn’t know she was being filmed, much less that she consented to filming or its distribution to his idiot friends.
Whenever a judgement like this is aired, I now wonder if the judge speaking has a rape or two in his own past. Literally “If their background is like mine…” How many more Kavanaughs are out there, dishing out slaps on the wrist to fellow “promising” young men like themselves? And to their victims? “Fuck you.” Literally.
I wonder if “hate” might be insufficient and slightly off-target in this case.
Assuming everything alleged is true, the rapist’s text message seems not so much to reveal animus as an utter disregard for the humanity, or even the bare sentience, of his victim. Like the sort of attitude that underlay the savage cruelty of slave owners, Nazis, Hutus, or those who seriously believed that the rape of a black woman was conceptually incoherent.
Is that hate? I mean, in some contexts it’d fall into the category, but I fear the word doesn’t capture the depth of the horror: total dehumanization. The behavior here strikes me as having the same character as incidents of extreme animal cruelty. Like when a group gets together and tortures a cat or dog to death, laughing all the while. That failure of character is nauseating enough. How the fuck does someone come to view animals like that? I cannot even wrap my head around the etiology of that psychological state. What am I supposed to do with *this*?
Hmmmyes. I suppose that’s what I meant by “hate.” That contempt, that indifference, that readiness to harm.
It’s…it’s hard to pin down. It’s not that they think of the victim as insentient, because nobody bothers to torture apples or stones or chairs. But they’re so profoundly inferior that torture becomes amusing?
I don’t know. I can never really fathom it. My aversion to actually seeing or hearing pain or grief (and I think this is just normal, nothing special to me) is so intense that I can’t really fathom enjoying it.
Mind you, texting the rape of a drunk person probably doesn’t require that kind of overcoming, but still…
From the Appeals Court judgement is seems that when the victim heard about him sharing the video she confronted him. He denied three was a video and then continued to share it. The first police investigator who interviewed the boys (sender and receivers of the video) told them, with his supervisors permission, to delete the video. It’s not super clear, but that may have been in the context of the girls family wanting to stop any further spread of the video.
How much more can we take before we break down totally as a society? This is behavior that violates so many norms, so very many norms, and yet just gets shrugged off. Can we still call ourselves a society? Or are we just a group of slightly civilized members of a primate species that are living together in the same place at the same time under the illusion that we are a society? While we live our individual lives, many, if not most, of us oblivious to what is happening to the others?
I am sick to death of people who refuse to follow news like this because they find it depressing, and then wave it off with an assumption that it is an isolated incident because they have avoided news. I find that attitude all too depressingly common.
To be fair, the defendant could have been tried under the original ruling, just in juvenile court. And arguably the system is too eager to try teenagers as adults in general. But that’s the reason for making systematic reforms, not for carving out ad hoc exceptions to teenagers who the judge identifies with — because we know how that’s going to shake out.
Yes.
“…take advantage of a victim in a remote location.”
sounds like something I once read in the Bible
#6 (Ophelia): I think that’s right. It’s important to them that their victims be sentient, as the suffering (both physical and mental) is what gives them pleasure. Somehow that suffering is not sufficient to evoke any sort of moral response. For some reason, that suffering is straight up not included in the violator’s moral calculus. I’d be tempted to call it psychopathy, but it could also easily be a learned or conditioned attitude.
But then we’d have to wonder what made this person monstrous and not others in the same community. I’d imagine that most people in the community are like you (and me, and probably every healthy person) in your aversion to inflicting harm.
I dunno, in the context of the deserving getting tortured it’s easy to see how it happens… Perhaps that’s the thought process at work here?
How ‘good’ can a family be, when it produces a monster like this? Is ‘good’ defined by property/income? Or just by skin color?
Brock Turner’s father showed that the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. I’m willing to bet that this future Supreme Court justice has family members just as loathsome.