It happened one night
God, he’s still doing it. The stubborn dishonesty of it and the absolute determination to remove the young woman who was assaulted from the picture is mind-boggling. Is this what Republicans are? Guys who struggle hard to draw a veil over attempted rape so that they can take women’s reproductive rights away at last?
As would mine. But I would not want to be the father who says: "Your life will now be defined by this one moment at a party, so just accept that it will be used at will at any point in your life."
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018
It was more than a moment – they shoved her into the room, they locked the door, they turned the music up. It wasn’t “at a party”; it was upstairs from the party, where she had gone because she needed to pee.
But I'm still completely worried about stuff you did as a minor ending your career at 50. There's something in that I cannot get used to, and I have *always* felt this way. But @MalcolmNance made me think about this differently in a way a million other stupid insults didn't. /3x
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018
It’s not “ending his career.” Potentially it will end his bid to be on the Supreme Court. That’s all.
Pretty sure I was around some felonies in the 1970s as a boy. Lots of drugs and bad stuff where I grew up. For a while, I was a kid who could just as easily have gone to jail as college. Maybe that's why I'm in a defensive crouch about this.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018
But drugs are (mostly) a harm to the self. Assault is harm to the person assaulted. The issue isn’t a generalizes soup labeled “bad stuff”; the issue is sexual assault of a girl in a locked room.
I don't know, David. On the one hand, I'm rethinking this, because the argument that a national judge should be morally spotless, even to teen years, sways me. On the other, I'm not sure what happened between two teenagers and I'm creeped out by this emerging as the killer app.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018
It didn’t HAPPEN. Assault is not a thing that happens; it’s a thing that an agent does.
That, for me, is the adult behavior that is even more disqualifying than anything that happened one night when he was 17.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018
It’s not “anything that happened” – that is shifty, evasive, victim-erasing, agent-concealing language.
Some men can’t see that they’re erasing women even when you point it out to them directly. It’s astonishing.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it actually seems like Jeff Flake might (gasp!) DO SOMETHING other than talk for once — he just told the WaPo that he thinks the vote should be delayed until the committee hears from the accuser.
I don’t know how the American legal system deals with ‘spent’ convictions, but under English* law, if one is convicted of a crime then that crime will remain on record, and therefore potentially affect the offender’s suitability for employment in certain areas, until that conviction is considered ‘spent’; i.e. there has been no further simliar offence by that person since conviction and so is wiped from their police record.
Completion of a sentence imposed is not the same as a spent conviction, and the length of time taken to have a conviction removed from record varies by severity of the crime.
As far as I am aware, most sexual crimes are never spent, so remain on record for life, so even if a 17 year-old had been tried and convicted of sexual assault 40 years ago, in England that conviction would still be relevant in considering his worthiness for any position he applied for (and it would be an offence if he didn’t declare it).
What I’m getting at is that yes, some things that a 17 year-old can, should, and indeed does follow that person throughout their life, because at 17 one is well above the age of criminal responsibility (12, under English law) and knows full well the difference between right and wrong. If one chooses to act against the law, there can be no calling ‘no fair’ when it comes back to kick one in the arse forty years later.
*I’m specifying English law as other parts of the UK have their own systems and I don’t know how they differ from English law in respect of spent convictions..
Call me crazy, but I’d just as soon somebody who sexually assaulted someone not be on the Supreme Court. Even if they were a child when they did it.
AoS, I don’t know how long it lasts, but sexual offenders in the US have to go on a sex offenders registry, and certain activities are prohibited. They can’t live within a certain distance of a school, for instance (though that may only be for those who molest children, I don’t know for sure). They are prevented from certain types of positions. I don’t know if judge is one of those positions, but if not, it should be.
On the other hand, an offender who is a minor may very well have his/her record sealed, and the offense not show up on their record as an adult. This is common for minor offenses, such as joy riding and shop lifting, but I’m not sure if that holds for rape. And 17 year olds can be tried as adults if the court decides that their maturity or their crime calls for it, so it’s usually on a case-by-case basis.
IMNAL,so don’t quote me on any of this. I’m just going by years of reading newspapers and magazines, and you all know what they say about fake gnus.
Of course, one of the many, many ironies of all this is that the GOP is the number-one proponent of charging teenagers (even as low as pre-teens) as adults, for an ever-expanding list of crimes. Of course, that generally only happens to poor teens with dark skin, which also serves the purpose of keeping them off the voter rolls. As soon as the person in question is a rich white male, well, then he was ‘just a child’.
Fucking hypocrites.
Freemage, they seem willing to expand that “just a child” to a rather mature age, too, as witness Dubya’s wild youth that extended at least into his thirties. But then, Dubya is a rich white male, so…
I’ve seen people try to excuse Donald Trump, Jr.’s collusion with the Russians on the grounds that he’s just a young man.
His father wanted to execute the Central Park 5, who were between 14 and 16 at the time they were accused. (And — oh yeah — innocent.)
40 is hardly the first flush of youth, is it?
Speaking of Jr., I’ve just been reading about his disgusting response to the accusation against Kavanaugh. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/406989-joe-walsh-trump-jr-is-an-uncaring-narrow-minded-idiot
On the other hand, if a teenage girl is raped and impregnated, according to Republicans like Kavanaugh, she is expected to accept the lifelong consequences of the man’s actions.