Objection! (26 page)

I am firmly convinced that a life sentence is not a severe enough penalty for a man who bragged that murder was his talent and pled guilty to the brutal sex-torture murders of so many women. Authorities are convinced Ridgway is responsible for even more vicious killings.

That night on
Larry King Live,
I argued that if forty-eight murders of young girls and women don’t equal one death penalty, what does? The comment was made that the victims (some were as young as fifteen years old) were found in areas known to be frequented by prostitutes. In describing some of the victims, my opponent said, “Anybody that says O B J E C T I O N !

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a fifteen-year-old can’t be a hooker just doesn’t know much about hookers these days.” When I fired back, “[Are you] suggesting that because

[someone] was a hooker, she’s less of a victim?” he denied it. I was so angry my chest actually began to hurt right there on the
King
set. Several of the victims were murdered and thrown away like trash along the side of Washington State’s Green River. They weren’t disposable. All were victims.

Families of the victims felt frustrated and deceived. They were led to believe Ridgway would receive the death penalty, but capital punishment was plea-bargained away. Ridgway had actually forgotten many of his victims and had a “hard time keeping them straight.” He never learned their names and wrote them off as thrill kills. His contempt for women seeped out of a statement he made at plea bargain.

Among his chilling words: “I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

Ridgway is a serial killer and a psychopath. I will never understand why his lawyers would attack the victims on national television.

Why would they use a victim’s alleged lifestyle as some sort of justification for murder or rape? Because they can. I learned that answer in court many years ago. Attacks by the defense, as vicious and unreasonable as they may be, are usually aimed straight at the victim. When there is nowhere else to turn, no one else to blame, the tried-and-true defense tactic is to blame the victim.

When the defense has no alibi, when prosecutors present eyewitnesses or DNA, when the defense is trapped and there’s nowhere to go, what can they do? Point the finger in the other direction—at the victim.

It’s an old strategy that has become standard operating procedure in courtrooms across the country. There’s a reason this chapter is the 1 7 6

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longest one in the book—the list of cases where this deplorable strategy is employed by the defense just keeps growing.

T H E K O B E B R Y A N T C A S E : T H E N E X T G E N E R A T I O N

B L A M E - T H E - V I C T I M D E F E N S E

The Kobe Bryant case
has brought back into the forefront a legal issue that has existed for decades: the treatment of a rape victim in the courtroom. Think about it for a moment. Say there’s a bank robbery in your town. When the teller who was robbed at gunpoint takes the stand, can you imagine the defense attorney asking, “Isn’t it true you had several one-night stands in college?” Or how about, “Isn’t it true you’ve been on birth control pills for some time now?” The state’s attorney would scream bloody murder, and the defense attorney would be—

rightly—thrown out on his ear. Not so with sexual-assault cases. And therein lies the problem.

Statistically, sexual assault and domestic violence are the two most underreported crimes on the books. All too often, the tables are turned and the victim is put on trial. It’s not unusual for a rape victim to be questioned about everything—from whether she drinks alcohol, goes to bars, or has frequented “bad areas.” Even her appearance comes into question. What possible difference does it make if a woman wears short skirts? I find this type of behavior exhibited by defense attorneys appalling. Rape-shield laws were created to protect against these uncon-scionable actions and to encourage victims to come forward, while protecting them from having their reputations ruined. These laws disallow from evidence a victim’s unrelated sexual past or anything touching on it.

That includes evidence showing that a victim has lived with boyfriends, uses birth control, had abortions. Rape-shield laws also aim at preventing direct questions posed to the victim about her unrelated sexual history.

The important thing to remember is that the victim isn’t the one on trial.

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One of the things I believe that this country has learned from the Kobe Bryant case is that these laws don’t always work. Inevitably, there are always ways around laws protecting victims. Whether Bryant was guilty or not guilty, the alleged victim in this case was repeatedly attacked by his defense team and others out to exploit the sensational tabloid aspects of this case—and that is wrong.

The alleged victim in this case went through hell. She received thousands of angry, menacing, or obscene e-mails and messages. An Iowa man pled guilty to leaving death threats on her answering machine. Another man broke into her home. Yet another man, a Swiss national, faced charges of offering to kill the woman for $3 million to

“help out” the Bryant defense team. It’s ironic to me that it’s so much easier for some people to blame her for flirting with a married man or being in the wrong place—basically reinforcing the theory that rape victims “ask for it” and that somehow they deserve the treatment they get. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s more comfortable for many people to believe that the alleged victim in this case is a “gold digger” than to believe that a then-nineteen-year-old girl was raped by an NBA superstar.

How can we expect victims to speak out if we cannot protect them from another, more insidious form of attack?

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Stories about the alleged
victim were planted like bombs and exploded almost daily during the Kobe Bryant case. Some accounts claimed that the young woman was bragging about her encounter with Bryant, while others focused on stories of multiple sex partners in the days surrounding the alleged incident. Most of the allegations were based on the loaded questions put on the record by Bryant’s defense attorney, Pamela Mackey. She asked highly objectionable questions in front of the full press pool, knowing they would repeat them as fact in their stories. Her strategy worked.

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The Kobe Bryant case was over before a jury was even struck. Perceptions of the alleged victim were publicized there in Colorado and all over the country. Thanks to satellite dishes tacked on to towers, homes, and huts, the “news” was spread around the world.

Mackey started out by calling the victim by name in an open courtroom packed with reporters—six times during the preliminary hearing alone. The judge repeatedly admonished the lawyer, to no avail. She knew who the real judge was: the jury pool reading all the news accounts of what went on in the courtroom that day. Judge Frederick Gannett’s admonitions were like water off a duck’s back. At the same hearing, in direct violation of the state’s rape-shield law, Mackey then alluded to the alleged victim’s sexual history. It was too late. The horse was out of the gate.

While the defense blurted out the alleged victim’s name over and over in court within earshot of reporters, Bryant’s defense team insisted they were concerned about bad publicity. Sure they were, but only as it applied to their client. As for the press, the judge issued warnings in a three-page “decorum” order to lawyers and the media, promising reporters they wouldn’t get a seat in court if they publicized the name or photographs of the accuser.

There is no law disallowing the media from publishing a rape victim’s name. Up until this point, there has simply been an unwritten agreement among outlets not to do so, since rape is so underreported largely because of the vicious treatment victims get in the courtroom.

In the Bryant case, we saw the long-standing traditions of self-governing thrown out the window.

Practically all U.S. news organizations, including the Associated Press, have policies against releasing identities of rape victims and did not release the name in the Bryant case. While Judge Gannett ordered lawyers and investigators to keep her identity secret, the press is a different matter. Similar rulings have been ruled unconstitutional, in that the name of the chief witness in a case is by its nature public, not secret.

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There’s no way to enact a law requiring the media to withhold the name of a rape victim because it would infringe on the First Amendment to the Constitution. However, the alleged victim in the Bryant trial does have the right to seek civil action in that she is not a public figure, and during the case certain media divulged facts that put her in a bad light. A lawsuit on her part against outlets that printed her photo with damaging stories about her would not surprise me.

A R U T H L E S S P L A N

O F A T T A C K

The blame-the-victim defense
in rape cases has grown bolder with every passing year. In the past, the first line of defense was the traditional claim that there has been no sex whatsoever between the accused and the victim. Very often, the perp claims he’s never even met the rape victim. Once a rape is medically or scientifically proven, the defense then moves to the next stage, which is “Yes, we had sex, but it was consensual.” Along with the consent defense, often thrown into the defense pot for good measure is something like “She’s a tramp, she’s a hooker, she sleeps around, or she came on to me.” Yet another version of blame-the-victim is “She wanted money,” or “She wanted powder cocaine”

and now, “She wanted crack.”

In the Kobe Bryant rape case, we saw a tangle of traditional blame-the-victim defenses used. It started with “She’s a star seeker,” went to

“She wanted her fifteen minutes of fame,” then on to the usual fall-back—“She’s promiscuous.” This is one of the first times I’ve seen the inference that “she’s too ambitious” used as the subtext for the defense, although there was a hint of that in the infamous Central Park jogger case in 1989. Long story short, the Bryant case launched an attack on the alleged victim’s lifestyle and sexual history, real or imagined, like no other in recent memory.

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More than one woman was targeted for vicious attacks during the Bryant case. Katie Lovell was misidentified as the accuser early in the case. Lovell and the alleged victim went to the same high school and had a number of physical similarities. A photo of Lovell, who’d been a member of the school’s dance squad, was posted on the Internet nam-ing her as Bryant’s accuser along with her name, phone number, and other personal information. More than a dozen Web sites followed suit.

Her home was swamped with reporters, Bryant supporters, photographers, and hangers-on. Lovell had to hire an attorney to get her name and photograph removed from the sites. After a brief taste of what the actual complainant lived though, Lovell summed up the experience during an appearance on ABC’s
Good Morning America
by saying, “It has hurt me as a person.”

Because of the nightmare she had to live through, Lovell demanded that Colorado lawmakers tighten the rules on identifying sexual-assault victims. In a room crowded with politicians, Lovell said Bryant’s real accuser, who by that time had already been identified on a radio broadcast and in a supermarket tabloid, had received death threats. “I can only imagine what she is actually going through. It will make people think twice about coming forward . . . ,” Lovell said to a legislative committee.

This new generation of attacking the victim in rape cases flies in the face of rape-shield laws, which are designed to protect against such tactics. Why? Because rape cases are supposed to be tried on the facts at hand, not the victim’s alleged sexual history. You’d be astounded at the tactics I’ve seen used. I’ve heard defense attorneys ask everything from, “What were you wearing that night?” to “How many drinks did you have?” to “Isn’t it true you take the birth-control pill?”

Besides being offensive and ridiculous, these questions are legally irrelevant.

In the Bryant case, information would have been permissible during trial only if it was “offered for the purpose of showing that the act or acts charged were or were not committed by the defendant.” Preliminary O B J E C T I O N !

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hearings, though, are not specifically mentioned in Colorado’s rape-shield law, as opposed to the actual trial. That is how Mackey’s actions at the preliminary hearing snuck through a legal loophole. In theory, there was no jury seated to be “tainted” against the alleged victim by the illegal evidence. The reality is, however, that the whole world, including the jury pool, heard not only the alleged victim’s full name, but numerous defense allegations that would likely never be allowed at trial—just as Mackey intended.

R I C H M A N ’ S J U S T I C E

On September 1, 2004,
there was a shocking turn of events in the case of
State v. Kobe Bryant
. The alleged victim in the case refused to go forward. Reports surfaced that there was a civil settlement in the works, rumored to be in the millions. Prosecutor Mark Hurlbert seemed to have tears in his eyes when he announced that the state of Colorado was dropping charges against the NBA star. People all over the country booed and hissed and said, “I told you so.” For once, I had nothing to say.