Update 4/17/12: After more than three weeks in juvenile detention, the victim has been released with a GPS ankle bracelet. She is scheduled to appear in court on April 23. In Sacramento, a county judge has taken “victim-blaming” to a whole new level, ordering that a rape victim be jailed while awaiting the trial of […]
Tag: Justice System
5 Questions To Ask Defenders of DOMA
Opponents of marriage equality have grown so accustomed to parroting the same arguments over and over again that they don’t seem to notice the ground shifting under their feet. Such is the point of a brief (PDF) filed at the end of last week by the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), a New […]
Am I Troy Davis? A Slut?
1. On September 21, 2011, I joined hundreds of my friends and millions of people around the world to watch, through tears and in abject horror, as Troy Anthony Davis was executed by the State of Georgia. In the 20 years between Davis’ trial for the murder of police officer Mark McPhail and his execution, Davis maintained his innocence […]
Troy Davis Is Gone, But the Struggle Goes On
Like many, I was glued to Democracy Now’s live broadcast on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 21, from 6 p.m. until shortly after 11:08 p.m., the time that Troy Davis was killed by the state of Georgia, where I reside. Suddenly, the students’ essays that I was supposed to be grading or the dinner I […]
42 Years After Stonewall, A Look at Policing of Queer and Trans People
Forty-two years ago, the Stonewall riot was sparked by a police round-up of trans women and drag queens. Now, a new anthology from AK Press, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, shines a bright light on how trans people are still “pathologized, terrorized and confined” by the U.S. justice system. Below, Captive […]
Anti-Trafficking Enforcement in U.S. is an Abysmal Failure
It’s been over a decade since the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) was passed into law, and a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that astonishingly little has been done since. The TVPA defines a human trafficking victim as A person induced to perform labor or a commercial […]
Obama Administration Says Marriage is Between a Woman and a Woman
Karen Golinski has a wife. She and Amy Cunninghis have been legally married in the state of California since August of 2008. And now, even the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has officially recognized the validity of that marriage, emphatically stating that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to deny same-sex couples the […]
A Cheerleader’s Rape in a Small Texas Town
Maybe it’s the cheer that makes this one rape among hundreds of thousands that occur in the U.S. each year so resonant. As Rakheem Bolton came to the free throw line during a February 2009 basketball game, the Silsbee High cheerleading squad had a rhyme at the ready: two, four, six, eight, ten, come on Rakheem, put it in. Four months earlier, cheerleader Hillaire S. had alleged that Bolton had raped her at a house party. And now she was being asked to gleefully urge him to “put it in.”
Accused Rapists Released in Notorious Pakistani Case
It was shocking when Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped by half a dozen men nearly a decade ago, but what surprised the world even more was the courageous decision by this Pakistani woman from the remote village of Meerwala to go public with her rape, breaking a stigma of silence in Pakistan. Mai’s fight for justice […]
What’s That Silver Ribbon You’re Wearing?
When Barack Obama was on the campaign trail, running for Senator of Illinois, he met Dr. Sophia Yen–a pediatrician and women’s health activist–who had one very important question: “Where do you stand on reproductive rights?” To which Obama simply replied, “I trust women. Period.” That one simple phrase ignited a movement to make reproductive rights […]