Rape victim harassed to suicide

This is a horrible story

Quote :

Samantha Kelly endured merciless taunting from classmates after they learned that the high school freshman had accused a senior of rape.

The weeks of harassment eventually became too much. Samantha went home from school Monday and hanged herself in this community southwest of Detroit.

With their key witness dead, prosecutors on Wednesday dropped criminal charges against the older student, saying they had no case without the accuser's testimony.

After the bullying, a defence lawyer said this:

Quote :

"Sexual assaults are not crimes that typically take place in front of witnesses. They're private crimes," Kosmala said. "Unless the complainant can sit in the witness chair and point the finger, there is no case."

But...

Quote :

Huron Township police said Justice brought her daughter to the station on Sept. 27, a day after the encounter with Tarnopolski, to file a sexual assault report. At the time it was considered a statutory rape case, meaning the pair had consensual sex but that she was under the age of consent.

Tarnopolski told WJBK that he had sex with Samantha, but it was a "mutual thing."

I don't see why the prosecutors dropped the charges. There's a clear case of admitted statutory rape here. The perpetrator confessed. Spotts, why would they possibly drop this case when they don't even need the victim there?

Oh yeah. I forgot. Obviously, she's dead, so nobody needs to care any more.

ZoZo wrote:

Quote :

Tarnopolski told WJBK that he had sex with Samantha, but it was a "mutual thing."

I don't see why the prosecutors dropped the charges. There's a clear case of admitted statutory rape here. The perpetrator confessed. Spotts, why would they possibly drop this case when they don't even need the victim there?

A slightly better article on the case.

Quote :

In the Huron Township case, 18-year-old Joseph Tarnopolski first talked with 14-year-old Samantha Kelly on MySpace. The two were in a math class together at Huron High School. Both told police they had consensual sex on Sept. 26 at his home a few doors down from hers in a mobile home park...

On Oct. 18, with her mother at her side, Samantha appeared in a WJBK-TV (Channel 2) report in which she accused Tarnopolski of forcibly raping her -- which contradicted her written statement to police.

And that's probably the major reason why the case was dropped - their chief witness changed her story. And without her available to clear up that contradiction, the prosecutor has a major Fifth Amendment problem (a defendant has the right to confront the witnesses against them, and to have them subject to cross-examination).

Could he still convict? Yeah, there's enough with the confession to get a conviction. But then there's a high risk of reversal on appeal, and prosecutor's don't like being reversed.

Shoddy work by the prosecutor though - putting his entire case on one complaining witness. Are they so strapped for cash they couldn't do even a cursory investigation?

I'm not so sure about that article.

It is riddled with a massive straw man argument about punishing 16 year olds for having sex with 15 year olds, which is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.

There's a massive difference between 14 and 18, and it's quite possible that with this kind of power difference, there was coercion.

I agree that it's shoody, shoddy work by the prosecutor.

The legal quibbles, I suppose, are less important than the real tragedy here: that a rape victim was subject to bullying of such a level that she committed suicide. That is never OK.

ZoZo wrote:

The legal quibbles, I suppose, are less important than the real tragedy here: that a rape victim was subject to bullying of such a level that she committed suicide. That is never OK.

I agree with that, for sure.

And I was more looking at that article to get a better sense of the fact pattern that was going on. The article's opinion and perspective is poor, for sure, but it does raise a point about statutory rape cases: prosecutors are reluctant to move forward with them (or any case at all, for that matter) unless they feel that it's not being pushed by third-parties (re: parents).