It’s unbelievable what we men can get away with. Here’s an account of an ongoing trial in which a naval officer is accused of raping a junior officer.
The junior officer testified that Neuhart forced his way into her home and attacked her, only stopping when her screams alerted a neighbor. Neuhart ran out a back door and was caught by police after he fell and broke a leg.
Forces his way into a home, attacks a woman who screams so loudly a neighbor shows up, and then runs away. This is an open and shut case so far, right?
During the trial both sides acknowledged that the woman was intoxicated after drinking heavily with Neuhart earlier at a hotel bar. Hotel surveillance video showed her hugging and kissing him. They drove back to her home in a limousine.
Jurors heard video from Neuhart’s cellphone in which she screams at him to leave and tells him some 90 times to stop trying to have sex with her.
They’ve got an audio recording of the woman clearly saying “NO!” 90 times? That she was drunk and affectionate earlier shouldn’t matter at all.
In case you’re wondering how they came to have a recording sufficiently detailed that they could count how often she told him to stop, this is the unbelievable part — the rapist gave it to them. He thought it was exonerating evidence.
Neuhart testified that the woman consented to going home and having sex with him. He said he recorded part of their encounter in case the woman later alleged rape.
Our foreign enemies will quail before the brilliance of our naval commanders. He’s like Horatio Hornblower made flesh.
If your jaw is hanging open in disbelief at this guy, just leave it there, maybe grab it with one hand to keep it from falling off: the jury was deadlocked. This was declared a mistrial.
People still insist there is no such thing as rape culture.
Well, the outcome did prove him right.
this is actually the 2nd deadlocked jury and 2nd mistrial! Amazing! At least the Navy relieved him of command following his arrest in 2016. Don’t know what the 2 jurors causing the deadlock see that no one else is seeing https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/04/17/second-mistrial-in-ex-navy-commanders-attempted-rape-trial/
On top of everything else about the case (all of which makes me want to vomit and then punch something) She was under his command which means he had no business trying to have sex with her in the first place and he knew it. Sad to note that not much has changed since I retired 18 years ago. Reason number 127 that I would never advise my daughter to join the military…
The fact that enough people on the jury believed that a person has no right to change their mind about sex and that the fact that a person was drinking or kissed him means she had no right to then say “I’m not into this, please leave my home” shows just how deeply ingrained rape culture is.
And this probably isn’t the first time this attempted rapist has tried this, if he decided that taping their conversation was a preemptive defense against a rape accusation. That just makes me think he has done this to someone else in the past and got away with it then too.
Did he have permission to record? If not could they at least get him for that? (I am desperately searching for a silver lining but am struggling to see anything but shit in this outcome.)
MISTRIAL??? Even ignoring the rest, the court clearly heard her scream out “NO!” to sex 90 times and yet they think she still wanted it??? Why even pretend we have a justice system anymore? Holy crap!!!
It’s just a JUST-US system…i.e. not ‘you’.
The trial was apparently in civilian criminal court, not military. Different laws apply and it may not be clear that he “got away with it” completely.
Gah, two people said, in effect, ‘nope, she asked for it/said yes and her screams were just a cover; RED PILL!’
The POS should be rotting in jail, and the fact the jury deadlocked is crap*
FTFA:
At least his Naval career is wrecked. Being relieved of command is a black mark that will follow him and slow or prevent future promotions. I’m surprised UCMJ 120 didn’t trigger a Court Martial, that we know of.
*No, I wasn’t there, and no, I didn’t hear the evidence or the deliberations. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I suspect the two holdouts were of the ilk that instinctively genuflect every time they see a uniform, assuming that no one who serves in the military should ever have to be called to account for their conduct.
Seems to me that if you’re worried enough about a potential partner falsely accusing you of rape that you’d record your sexual encounter you don’t have sex with them in the first place. More likely he recorded it as a trophy.
Fucking navy. I did 6 years in the 70’s and this crap was old stuff then. That artificial class system sets these egos up to believe they are above mere mortals. Think: when they list the complement of a naval vessel, it’s listed as “800 officers and men” as if officers are more than just people. Everyone remember Tailhook? Remember when they just about blew a turret off the Iowa and the first thing the navy went for was a sex triangle scandal instead of the institutionally encouraged procedure violations that were the real cause? This stuff runs deep, as they say..
Apparently, during at least the first trial, the video was not going to even be allowed as evidence, Judge Reverses Decision, Allows Video That Allegedly Captured Former Navy Cmdr Attempting to Rape Colleague, As Evidence (Mar-2017). The reporting in that article is sufficiently confused (poor) it’s not clear why, initially, the video was not to be allowed, nor what the judge’s reasoning was in reversing the decision. (I presume the court records could clarify?) As reported, the defense’s arguments to keep the video not-shown are at serious odds with the claim, being basically alleged due process issues with how the rapist’s passphrase was obtained.
I have a son stationed in Guam, luckily his CO is a woman, and an excellent boss according to son. A brief consult of their official pages shows “April: Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month (SAAPM) Clearly they need more than awareness training if a recording of her refusals is not clear and incontrovertible proof of attempted rape. This sentence could use some more details.
Ummm, broke a leg?! Was arrested immediately after the attempted rape? Clearly he is a white man, because running away out the back door is generally taken as proof of guilt.
@blf:
at a guess, I’d say it was an authentication issue. If one person was drunk and possibly didn’t know that things were being recorded, that person can’t testify that the video was actually taken on the night in question. Usually personal testimony is required to authenticate that video was taken at a time and place that make it relevant to the current trial. If the only one who can authenticate is the defendant and the defendant doesn’t want to authenticate it, then you run into problems.
On the other hand, if the clothing in the video is the same as clothing that responding officers found her in that night + statements were made by the defendant to investigators + whatever else they’ve got added up to sufficient certainty that the video does document that night, then you could have one of the investigators testify about the clothing, that the defendant admitted during questioning to making a video that night, etc., etc. and that might be enough.
===================================
In general, this kind of crap breaks my heart. I’ve done too much anti-violence work to listen to these stories dispassionately. I don’t know what the jurors were thinking. I don’t know what evidence was and wasn’t presented to them, but I hate this shit. It seems a useless thing to say, but it’s hard to come up with anything else.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the shitstains who deadlocked the jury weren’t women.
Mark Jacobson@13–
Quite likely, but not a certainty. A lot of women in Steubenville defended the rapists and tried to shame the victim. That’s the point of the term “rape culture” — it’s so ingrained that it’s enabled even by people you’d expect to be against it.
@13
well maybe a repressed unselfaware fundi christains might think she deserved it any way. they were all sinners
uncle frogy
@Tethys
From past experience both in the Navy and in civilian jobs after I retired, Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month often means telling women what place they should be careful in (Watch you drink! Don’t drink to much! Don’t go out after dark alone!) in order to avoid rape. Basically telling women, some of them young and away from home for the first time that if they just follow all these “rules” they won’t be the one who gets raped. Gee, I was the victim of attempted rape in my own barracks room…which one of the “rules” did I break /snark.
How about the training actually be to tell people things like if someone agrees to sex they can change their mind and say they want to stop and you stop. That even if someone said yes to sex before that doesn’t mean they agree to anything but that particular, time. Even if you are in a relationship…even if you are or were married. I rarely see prevention talks that do anything but tell women all the thing we are NOT supposed to do.
@Mark Jacobson – sadly you may very well be wrong. I have met many women who hold some pretty misogynist ideas (they don’t see themselves as misogynist)
@16 embraceyourinnercrone:
On the last point, you are right.
52% of white women voted for Trump. 63% of white women in Alabama voted for Roy Moore. I’m pretty sure the average Fox News viewer (regardless of gender) holds pretty misogynistic views. It is all pretty depressing.
Out of the minority of people who voted for Trump, 52% were white women. Lying with statistics is a specialty of fauxnews. If you add the HRC voters and third party voters to the didn’t bother to vote column, approximately 70% of WW did not vote for the orange menace.
embraceyourinnercrone
I am sorry that you are a member of the metoo club. I am unshocked that the training consists of telling women to prevent men from raping them. It so conveniently ignores consent, all the raping of men, and holding the rapists accountable for criminal sexual conduct. :(
Crip Dyke@12, Despite the article I mentioned in @10 being very poorly written, it is reasonably clear the issue was how the passphrase to the rapist’s mobile phone was obtained:
On the other hand, as I previously noted, the incompetent fool of a reporter never explained either the original ruling to ban the video, nor the reason(s?) for reversal to allow the video. That original ruling might have been something to do with “authentication”, but a more competently-written report makes clear that was not the concern, Cell Phone Video Allowed in Navy Commander Rape Case (March-2017 (first trial)):
It’s possible “authentication” might have come up if there was indeed any further litigation about video. But that does not at all seem to have been the issue at the time of the cited reports.
blf@20–
Thanks for providing the backstory on the admissibility. I know you’re weren’t providing the info as a distraction, but I’d just like to restate that the main story here is that the video was declared admissible, 12 jurors watched it, and 2 of them thought it was not sufficient evidence of attempted rape.
The Horatio Hornblower metaphor doesn’t work, I’m afraid. He had a ridiculous name, but he was an excellent officer.
@Tethys # 18:
Not quite. White women accounted for more than 1 in 3 voters on election day (37%), and they cast more votes for Trump (52% WW voted Trump)
This isn’t really statistically or rhetorically defensible: “no white women voted for Trump, except the ones that did.” Well…yes: elections are decided by those who go to the polls, not those who don’t, so counting the non-voters as “not voting for” a candidate is disingenuous. White women cast more votes for Trump than black/latinx men and women cast for Clinton combined, so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say “white women voted for Trump”.
We don’t have enough data to model what would have happened with higher voter turnout, other than some suggestions that liberals are more likely to not vote (why? Is it because visible minorities skew Democratic and are also most likely to be disenfranchised? I don’t know.). But there is no way to look at the available data and decide that white people, including white women, are not the main reason Trump was elected.
(Source throughout: https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls It’s a decent model of the vote split for D/R votes, so I’m assuming the biographical data is as accurate.)
chrislawson@21, Thanks. A tiny correction of no real consequence, the cited articles (@10 and @20) about admissibility were for the first trial, when only one juror “thought it was not sufficient evidence of attempted rape.” A mistrial was declared, leading to the second trial reported in the OP, which is when two jurors mysteriously decided that — which, as you say, is the main story.
@22 eamick
I read this sentence as irony, because you are right, Hornblower was a excellent officer and leader.
He was also written as very progressiv* for his time (late 18th, early 19th century) and would never been in such a position in the first place.
shikko
I made no such claim and my statistical analysis is easily defensible using only basic arithmetic and some logic.
A. trump voters are only 29% of the voters
B. of that 29% of voters 52% were WW, so 15.8%
C. even rounded up to 16%, clearly it is wildly inaccurate to claim that 52% of WW voted for him
D. Abolish the electoral college.
E. Exit polls are a joke.
I believe that 52% stat means
(white women voters for Trump)/(all white women voters) = 0.52
and *not* that
(white women voters for Trump)/(all voters for Trump) = 0.52
and indeed very likely that
(white women voters for Trump)/(all voters for Trump) < 0.52.
Also, running while black (not necessarily either “away” from or towards police, though both can aggravate the underlying blackness) is generally taken as justification for being shot (“guilt” being assumed).
Also, at least in a moral sense, not showing up at the polls is the same as voting for the winning candidate.
embraceyourinnercrone
There’s always one. It may be conceived on the spot, but in my experience most scenarios are covered already by two contradictory rules.
Just like your skirt is always 1″ too short.
Lots of women believe in the Rules™. They believe that if they do everything right, they will be safe. And if they actually make it through life without some serious sexual assault, they believe it is because they are the good ones, not because they are the lucky ones.
I remember realising that and it was a bad day.
I should have been more precise with the wording of “white women voted for Trump” and yes, it means among those who cast a vote, sorry about that.
@Giliell
Pretty much Yes to everything you said. What I find so depressing is that I am 56 and I talk to women half my age, on an almost daily basis who believe some version of the Rules™. I guess most people just don’t want to believe that you can do everything “right” and still have bad things happen to you.
And I understand it’s been documented that women on juries are often even more swayed by attacks on the victim, because they want to continue believing that ‘the Rules™’ will keep them safe. (And if they have the personal experience to know that the Rules™ won’t keep them safe, then the defence would obviously consider them too emotionally involved to be allowed on the jury.)
@33 embraceyourinnercrone
I am a lot older than you, and a white male: I am still horrified. I did not think we had this in 1970, let alone 2018.
How the hell was this a mistrial? It doesn’t get more open and shut than this. One ‘no’ is enough that any ethical person should immediately stop, it doesn’t matter a damn if the other person agreed to sex earlier or was ‘affectionate’.
But of course, this is a high status man being protected by an institution that still sees unfettered sexual access to women, whatever those women might feel about the situation, as one of the perks of the job. The rules, such as they are, immediately cease to apply.
On the subject of rules.
embraceyourinnercrone @ 16;
In the military or in civilian life, the emphasis is still always on telling women what they should do to ‘mitigate the risk’ of rape, as if rape is some kind of roving natural disaster that must simply be accepted as unavoidable in some cases, though one’s losses can be minimised if prudent steps are taken. Like the risk of storm or other extreme weather damage and the need to get proper insurance cover. The whole mentality is backwards and dysfunctional.
As a man, it seems blindingly obvious to me that the emphasis should be on hammering the point home into the minds of everyone (though obviously especially men and boys), from as soon as they are old enough to grasp the concept and throughout the remainder of their lives, that you must never rape. That there are no excuses. That you are responsible for how you use your body, and that if you use it as a weapon then the blame resides with you and no one else. That it is quite simply impossible for anyone to ‘ask to be raped’ no matter what they say or how they behave or dress. That there is no such thing as a rape survivor ‘provoking’ their attacker.
In a world full of complex moral questions and grey areas, rape is one of the few legitimately, and refreshingly, straightforward ethical questions – it is always wrong. No ifs, not buts, no exceptions, no excuses. That really shouldn’t be hard for anyone to remember.
As for false rape claims; they are rare, and shouldn’t be used to create cover for predators. The fact that some unethical people lie about being raped in no way excuses the crimes of actual rapists. Again, not exactly complex.
Some months ago PZ posted an article arguing against someone who was questioning the guilt of a certain individual who had been found guilty of pedophilia. The main point was: the guy has been found guilty in a court of law, therefore he IS guilty, that is what being found guilty means.
I assume, then, that if this guy is eventually found not guilty, as seems likely, he will be seen as not guilty because he was found not guilty in a court of law, and that is what being not guilty means.
If you now want to argue that being found not guilty does not necessarily mean that he is innocent, wouldn’t the same apply to that other case: being found guilty does not necessarily mean he was not innocent?
billyjoe #37
[citation needed]
If you look at PZ’s argument, it wasn’t that we should blindly believe the outcomes of court proceedings as definitive statements on questions other than what the court was deciding.
The court doesn’t decide whether or not you’re morally responsible for something. In a criminal case, the court decides whether the government of a particular jurisdiction is justified in imposing particular sanctions – usually a combination of fines, supervised non-confinement under conditions that limit the exercise of rights and freedoms otherwise guaranteed to citizens, forced labor, forced acts of restitution, confinement, corporal punishment, and/or execution. (Note that in many jurisdictions corporal punishment is now illegal, but not enough yet to cover even 50% of the world’s population.)
When the court finds that evidence is not available for the prosecution because it was found in an illegal search, that can make it likely that a person who would obviously be found guilty considering that evidence is instead found not guilty. This is a point of law. It’s not a decision on the “fact” that someone committed X bad act. It’s a decision that the government cannot break the law in pursuit of enforcing it. This is a trade-off because of a societal conviction that letting a certain number of bad actors go free without legal liability is an important trade off necessary to incentive government to refrain from tyrannical actions.
So the courts are making a decision about whether or not particular consequences are legally justifiable within that government’s own limits (for the most part ultimate limits are set by national constitutions and the interpretation thereof).
In order to justify those consequences, the courts in the US must be satisfied not only that a particular defendant truly did commit specific acts that satisfy the elements of specific legally-defined crimes beyond a reasonable doubt, but ALSO that the process conformed to the limits set by the constitution and laws of the United States.
This is a high standard. It is not foolproof, but yes: a guilty verdict is information that you can use to help you in your own determinations of someone’s guilt or lack thereof for your own private purposes. Since you’re not in a position to lock someone up, you’ll be using a lesser standard of proof to determine things like, oh, “should I call this person a sack of shit in a blog post?” A guilty verdict can help you determine that.
A NOT GUILTY verdict might be because the trial happened before more evidence came to light, it might be because procedural violations prevented the prosecution from bringing its best case, or it might be because there really was and still is not enough evidence to justify locking someone up for 5-7 years (or executing them, or whatever).
So if there’s a not guilty verdict, you definitely shouldn’t refer to that person as convicted, but you still might call someone a sack of shit in a blog post because you might look over the evidence yourself and see that there’s reasonable doubt … but not that much. In that case, maybe the standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence, maybe?) is met for a blogger calling someone a sack of shit even though the government didn’t want to call it good enough to imprison someone for years.
Shorter me: You have to know the courts involved, whether they are known to be honest and procedures reasonably designed to avoid illegitimate guilty verdicts (I wouldn’t trust an Iranian court with anything), and then you give the guilty and non-guilty verdicts each their appropriate weight.
But that doesn’t mean that not guilty verdicts require us to treat someone as innocent of taking bad actions. That is badly misunderstanding the nature of the both a court’s questions and its answers.
@chigau, #38:
I’m sure that billyjoe is referring to this post (in large part) about Skeptic Magazine defending Sandusky.
Naturally, billyjoe gets it wrong. Although PZ mentions the conviction, he certainly doesn’t simply cite the conviction as final, authoritative and unquestionable. No, PZ makes it about the evidence, with the verdict as one piece to consider:
So PZ actually looked at their arguments, actually considered the evidence presented at the trial, the context in which the trial took place, the conclusion of the court, and his own background information about how sexual assault allegations are handled and how participation in a football program affected how the community can see an accused (does anyone remember Steubenville?) and then PZ came to a conclusion.
PZ’s conclusion was that Skeptic Magazine was doing skepticism so badly it was looking a lot more like conspiracy theorizing. But his conclusions were not at all based on a verdict alone as billyjoe suggests.
CD #40
Billie Joe never had a lick of sense anyhow.
Crip Dyke,
Thanks for your detailed response.
I only remembered PZ saying “look…he’s a convicted pedophile”. I didn’t remember the name of the article or of the convicted person, so I couldn’t look up PZ’s article. As you say, he does go on – actually, at length – to explain why he feels the conviction is reliable. On the other hand, he did say “Look….he’s a convicted pedophile” which, on its own, doesn’t mean he IS guilty, as I illustrated in the commentary to that article.
In the comments I mentioned the Azaria Chamberlain case. This involved the death of Azaria for which her mother was charged with murder. As the case unfolded, practically the whole nation and the media believed she was quilty and her mother was duly convicted of her murder and imprisoned. Some years later evidence came to light that exonerated her.
(PS, I was never convinced she was guilty – she was a victim of her minority religious belief, which was often described in the media as her belonging to a cult; and she had an unusual and idiosyncratic reaction to her daughter’s death. She was actually convicted on forensic evidence which, sometime after she was exonerated, was further examined and shown to be totally unreliable)
agreed.
also agreed, though if it were his only writing on Sandusky, I’d actually think more length would be truly required. However, as it happens, it wasn’t his only writing Sandusky, and I think the length was probably reasonable for a case whose background had been discussed on the blog in several other posts concurrent with the initial public release of information and with the riots and with the trial.
I think we’re in overall agreement here.