Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachsetts attorney general and head of Common Cause, has been appointed by ACORN to investigate lapses in the organization that led to its recent scandals. Harshbarger was responsible for one of the most outrageous "Satanic ritual abuse" prosecutions when he was AG, sending three innocent members of the Amirault family to jail. He has never repudiated the prosecution. It's sickening that someone who so abused his power would be appointed to investigate or reform anything. (I also see that Harshbarger was a big John Edwards supporter, so his ability as a judge of character remains atrocious.)

Tags: ACORN, satanic ritual abuse

On Instapundit, the indomitable Glenn Reynolds says that by not publishing the name of the 18-year-old Hofstra student who falsely cried gang rape, I'm "protecting a perpetrator." The student hasn't been charged with a crime—the prosecutors on the case have talked about that possibility, but they haven't done it. Still, why shield the identity of a woman who sent four men to jail based on a story she then recanted? As I said in my piece, there's an argument against anonymity here.

I'm not naming the student out of some mix of pity and sisterhood. She has been suspended from Hofstra. She's being ripped apart on the Internet. She is having her 15 minutes as the poster girl for untrustworthy slut. And Glenn is right, I am still making excuses for her, even though false allegations are a criminal justice nightmare, because while what happened to her in the bathroom wasn't rape, she must deeply regret it, and she probably was drunk or otherwise not thinking straight when it happened. Plus, she's only 18. So not naming her seems like a small—if fairly meaningless—shred of compassion to offer. It's true that the names of the men she accused became public once they were arrested. That's a really tough one: whether to publish based merely on an arrest. It always gives me pause, but if a case goes on for a long time before trial, hard to avoid. In this case, for whatever it's worth, I didn't publish the guys' names, either.

Glenn also links to a post describing studies that, if correct, show a shockingly high rate for false accusations of rape. The comments from men who say this has happened to them are heartbreaking. I'd love to know more about this.

Tags: date rape, false rape accusations, glenn reynolds, gray rape, hofstra gang rape, instapundit

It’s official. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is running for governor of California. She faces a daunting task if elected: California has a crushing budget deficit and the Democrat-dominated state legislature is not going to be happy about her pledge to cut 40,000 government jobs or her planned $15 billion budget cuts.

I want to be excited. Republicans need more women in leadership positions. But I also remember that I was a little too excited the day that John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate, and eventually I came down with a case of buyer’s remorse (though the fact that Palin drives liberals so absolutely bonkers tells me she’s doing something right). As the election got closer and the economic meltdown picked up speed, I really, really wished that perhaps Mitt Romney, with his sound business mind, had been tapped to be McCain’s wingman. So I’m going to temper my enthusiasm for now, lest I regret it later. (A little. I’m already pondering what it would be like to have GOP women in charge of two of the three biggest states in the nation. Go Kay Bailey Hutchison!)

I don’t want to be someone who supports a woman just because she’s a woman, but Whitman has a pretty solid résumé regardless of gender. She no doubt made some enemies during her time at eBay, but she also turned the company into one of the big stars of the Internet. If she could pull California out of its financial morass—something that Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger have all failed to do—it would a victory for the state, for the GOP, and, partisan politics aside, women everywhere.

Tags: California governor's race, Meg Whitman

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A few weeks back, when Emily pointed out this disturbing David Grann New Yorker article on a wrongful execution Texas, it occurred to me that I didn’t see it as a piece about the death penalty. I read it instead as a piece about the terrifying commonality with which prosecutors rely on soi-disant “experts” who prefer self-aggrandizing mysticism to verifiable science. While he amasses bogus “evidence” of a man’s arson, a fire investigator in Grann’s piece sets himself up as a mysterious medium through which the fire speaks. And now the man he helped convict is dead.

None of this will seem surprising to anyone familiar with the work of my colleague Radley Balko, whose crime reporting has exposed a Mississippi “bite mark expert” and taken down corrupt medical examiner Steven Hayne. (Both of these guys are responsible for putting men on death row.) Today Balko has a column on the dogma of “shaken-baby syndrome,” and the pattern looks somewhat similar. The three symptoms once taken to be irrefutable proof that a baby was shaken to death turn out to mean nothing of the kind. Nor can doctors say whether it is possible to shake an infant to death.

Where there is consensus, however, is that the triad of symptoms traditionally associated with SBS are not exclusive to it. A number of other things can produce these symptoms, including falls, head impacts, infections, birth defects, reaction to vaccinations, and surgical procedures. That's a significant departure from what prosecutors have been telling juries for the past 20 years. In other words, there are almost certainly a significant number of innocent people in prison today who were wrongly convicted of shaking a baby to death.

Unlike the examples above, SBS is an instance in which the prosecutors were actually pushing the (now-discredited) assumptions of the medical community. Science, inconveniently, evolves. As Balko points out, jurors are apt to confuse consensus with certainty, and courts can be unwilling to revisit past cases when the science advances.

Photography of a baby by Barbara Penovar/Photodisc

Tags: Radley Balko, shaken baby syndrome, wrongful conviction

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On television last night President Obama appeared as the only guest on the David Letterman Show as part of his media push to sell health care reform. Also last night, the disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay made his debut as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. If you ever think that life is dull and predictable, consider the convergence of these two events and cast your mind back five years ago. Just five years ago Barack Obama was an obscure state legislator from Illinois. You can construct some Letterman monologue joke from that time about the idea of this person becoming the next president of the United States. Tom DeLay was one of the most powerful men in Washington, a feared figure whose plan was to remove all Democratic influence from government. Try to imagine the reaction if anyone had said his next career move would be playing air guitar on a cheesy dance show. Real life can be so amazing.

Photograph of Tom Delay and Cheryl Burke courtesy of ABC.com.

Tags: dancing with the stars, letterman, Obama, tom delay

Emily, I agree with you that the feminist reaction to the Hofstra case was interestingly subdued, even from the beginning, despite the long and storied history of cops looking for any reason to dump even the most legitimate rape cases, which is the sort of thing that tends to rile feminists up. It's hard to say why. For me, it was a gut thing. The cops seemed interested in taking the young woman's claims seriously, and that's all we really want. And the evidence demonstrated the girl was lying, so score one for the gut.

That said, I have to quarrel with your characterization of Laura Sessions Stepp as a traditional feminist who is making space to talk about consent-impaired situations that don't necessarily cross the line into legal rape. Much of the "gray rape" Sessions Stepp talks about is plain old rape, but the victims don't want to label it as such. And for good reason! Experience demonstrates that coming out as a rape victim and pursuing justice means that your basic goodness as a person will be questioned and you might as well kiss most of your friends goodbye. People think it's catching. The story you linked from Moe at Jezebel is a good example. Moe initially characterized what happened to her as "gray rape," but she's come around to agreeing that it's actually rape-rape.

But Sessions Stepp is far from a feminist. Believe me, I listen to her weekly podcast, Sex, Really, for the comedy gold that lies therein. Sessions Stepp promotes the idea that men and women's sexual desires are fundamentally different, and that dating is about creating a tense swap where women provide sex to men, and men commit to and pretend to like women in exchange. She's on a rampage against what she deems the "hookup culture," and wants young women to start embracing the idea that it's shameful to just have sex because you want to. In other words, she's agitating for the return of slut-shaming.

There's plenty of irony here, because attitudes like Sessions Stepp's are the reason that you have false rape accusations in the first place. Amanda Hess wrote about this at length, but basically, women who aren't ashamed of having sexual adventures like group sex—even ones that go bad—don't use rape accusations to cover up their choices. It's the women who are afraid they'll be called sluts if it gets out that make up these rape stories. And so Sessions Stepp, and every yuckster who painted the accuser as a dirty slut if she did in fact consent, are contributing to the problem of false rape accusations.

Tags: false accusations, gray rape, hofstra, Rape

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Lloyd Grove interviews conservative rabblerouser Michelle Malkin for the Daily Beast and is surprised to find that she is "vulnerable" and gets upset when she gets death threats from readers. I would imagine that Malkin herself would object to the framing of this article, titled "Michelle Malkin Has Feelings, Too." She's an intentional provocateur who can dish it out as well as she can take it. So why does Grove need to paint her as a delicate widdle girl?

This is a woman who defended the WWII Japanese internment camps. She has a long-running campaign on her blog against Michelle Obama, whom she refers to as the "First Crony." And yet, I would say about 50 percent of this interview is devoted to outlining the hardships that Malkin has overcome—racism, sexism from "liberal bloggers" and "so-called progressives." Certainly these things are deplorable. But in no universe is Michelle Malkin a shrinking violet. Would anyone write an article claiming that Rahm Emanuel was really a "vulnerable" guy who went home and cried when people vehemently opposed him after his expletive-laden rants? No, they would not.

Photograph of Michelle Malkin by Peter Kramer/Staff/Getty Images.

Tags: department of feminist outrage, Lloyd Grove, Michelle Malkin, sexism, The Daily Beast