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Blog and Media Roundup - Sunday, January 3, 2015; News Roundup
Topic Started: Jan 3 2016, 05:03 AM (77 Views)
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http://www.heraldsun.com/news/farewell-to-the-chief-lopez-leaves-bull-city-will-explore/article_22ce4aa0-b00f-11e5-a17e-fff09aa4e64c.html

FAREWELL TO THE CHIEF: Lopez leaves Bull City, will explore new chapter

Katie Nix Updated 13 hrs ago

DURHAM — Even though Jose Lopez is out as Durham’s chief of police, he’s not giving up his law enforcement career just yet.
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/02/variety-tabs-the-hunting-ground-as-one-of-the-crappiest-films-of-2015/

Variety Tabs ‘The Hunting Ground’ As One Of The CRAPPIEST Films Of 2015

Posted By Eric Owens On 10:32 AM 01/02/2016 In | No Comments

The film critics at Variety — “the premier source of entertainment news” — have selected “The Hunting Ground” as one of the most atrocious, vile and brutally low-quality films of 2015.

The campus rape documentary released back in February portrays American college campuses as hotbeds of predatory sexual assault where administrators routinely allow perpetrators to get off scot-free.

Variety’s Ella Taylor trashes “The Hunting Ground” as “shoddy journalism” and “a loaded piece of agitprop that plays fast and loose with statistics and our sympathy with victims of campus sexual assault.”

“With death-defying leaps of logic on the basis of skimpy and distorted evidence, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s film does violence to both the legitimate fight for women’s rights and the honorable cause of advocacy filmmaking,” Taylor writes.

“The Hunting Ground” bears the label “CNN Films.” CNN calls the documentary “groundbreaking.”

The film’s strength is built on an almost overwhelming deluge of personal accounts by women (and a few men) who recount suffering violent rapes and then struggling to obtain justice.

However, as scores and scores of critics have observed, it relies on several questionable facts to make its case, and sometimes misleads the viewer in a way that calls the entire film’s legitimacy and reliability into question. (RELATED: CNN’s New Rape Documentary Relies On Myths, Not Facts)

Crucial to the documentary’s strength is the claim that rape is virtually routine on college campuses, and that its frequency calls for drastic action. Within the first few minutes, the documentary touts the statistic that “16 to 20 percent” of women are raped while at college. (The stat is extremely popular among activists.)

[dcquiz] In a bout of fairly cosmic timing, the U.S. Department of Justice published an analysis of crime data just weeks before the release of “The Hunting Ground” showing that the actual annual rate of college rape is just 0.61 percent. Even multiplied over four years, the Department of Justice figure suggests only about one in 40 collegiate women will suffer any sort of attempted or successful sexual assault.

The federal analysis, compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), relies upon years of data collected in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a national survey of tens of thousands of households that seeks to measure the frequency of American crime, both reported and unreported. (RELATED: DOJ: 0.61 Percent Of Students Are Sexually Assaulted)

In November, a group of 19 Harvard Law School professors published a stinging condemnation of “The Hunting Ground,” calling the documentary deeply flawed “propaganda.” (RELATED: Harvard Profs Denounce CNN’s Flawed Campus Rape Doc, Call It ‘Propaganda’)

In response, Dick and Ziering (the creators of “The Hunting Ground”) along with other “rape-culture” advocates menaced the Harvard professors with the possibility of a Title IX sexual harassment investigation intended to silence their criticisms. (RELATED: Professors Threatened With Investigation For Questioning Rape Documentary)

Amy Herdy — one of the 38 producers of “The Hunting Ground” — has been criticized because she sent emails advertising her intent to “ambush” — Herdy’s word — a student accused of rape during an interview.

After “The Hunting Ground” was released, Washington Examiner reporter Ashe Schow busted “Hunting Ground” crew member Edward Patrick Alva for altering Wikipedia entries for months related to the documentary and its subjects. For example, Alva edited the Wikipedia page for former Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston so it better followed the documentary’s rape-is-everywhere narrative.

Somehow, Alva managed to fail to acquire one of the 38 producer credits for the film.

“It is inexcusable for a network as respected as CNN to pretend that the film is a documentary rather than an advocacy piece,” Florida State president John Thrasher, another critic of the film, said, according to The Palm Beach Post.

Winston, a Heisman trophy winner and currently the starting quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has been cleared of all criminal allegations of rape.

As a Florida State sophomore, he was arrested for shoplifting crab legs. He also once found himself in trouble for using a water cup for soda at a Burger King.

Other films receiving jeers from Variety include “Truth,” an homage to the fake-but-accurate news which finally destroyed Dan Rather’s career, and “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore’s latest movie in which he walks around fat while attacking the country that made him rich. (RELATED: Sony Warps The Truth With ‘Truth’)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/opinion/no-more-statutes-of-limitations-for-rape.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1

No More Statutes of Limitations for Rape
By JILL FILIPOVICDEC. 31, 2015

THIS week, Bill Cosby was charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault. The felony charges stemmed from an incident more than a decade ago, in which Andrea Constand says Mr. Cosby drugged and assaulted her in his home. Mr. Cosby says he intends to fight the charges, and no court has found him liable for sexual misconduct.

The timing of the criminal charges was not arbitrary. The date of the alleged assault was Jan. 15, 2004, and Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations for rape and sexual assault is 12 years: If prosecutors had delayed two and a half weeks, the limit would have tolled.

Mr. Cosby’s public fall in the wake of dozens of accusations has been an education in the reality of sexual assault, especially concerning the long conspiracy of silence, and the weight of shame victims are made to carry, when the suspect is powerful and famous. “I was a teenager from Denver acting in McDonald’s commercials,” wrote Barbara Bowman, another of his accusers, in The Washington Post in 2014. “He was Bill Cosby.”

After decades of unsettling claims and quietly settled lawsuits, Mr. Cosby’s public reputation has gone from America’s dad to America’s creepy uncle. But Mr. Cosby finally faces prosecution only because of a deposition made public in July: If that testimony had been revealed just a few months later, it could have been too late for prosecutors to try this case.

The charging of Mr. Cosby, just under the wire, raises a key question: Why is there a statute of limitations for rape and sexual assault at all? Across the country, 34 states have statutes of limitations on rape, sexual assault or both, ranging from as little as three years up to 30. (A few states also have reporting deadlines tied to statutes of limitations; and a number of states provide for an exemption from statutes of limitations if a DNA match is later made on a reported rape or sexual assault.)

Restrictions on how long charges can be brought after the alleged commission of a crime exist primarily to prevent the deterioration of evidence, but also to promote public order, protect criminal defendants who may have a harder time guarding themselves against long-ago accusations, and encourage plaintiffs to bring cases or report crimes swiftly.

Those are laudable goals that make sense in theory. But in practice, they undermine justice for survivors.

Most sexual assault survivors don’t report the crime right away, especially if the perpetrator is someone they know — which applies in about four-fifths of cases. Data from the Department of Justice indicates that rape and sexual assault are the least reported violent crimes, with only around a third of victims reporting. Even when survivors do go to the police, law enforcement routinely fails to fully investigate their claims. Nationwide, as many as 500,000 rape kits still await testing.

Among the reasons survivors don’t go to the police, one is the well-founded fear they won’t be believed; another is that they may be accused of lying or even be prosecuted themselves. Cases where the accused and the accuser know each other, or where there is little physical evidence, are especially difficult to prove.

Even evidence doesn’t guarantee a prosecution. In the 24 states where there is no DNA exemption to the statute of limitations, if a rape kit finally is tested and there’s a match, the victim is out of luck if it has been too long.

It shouldn’t take multiple accusers to bring about a full investigation, but that’s sometimes the reality. The allegations against Mr. Cosby span decades. Once one woman speaks up, others may find the courage to do so. According to New York City crime figures, the number of women willing to report rapes that occurred in previous years is rising rapidly — a phenomenon that has been called “the Cosby effect.” Those survivors shouldn’t miss their day in court because they were too traumatized or too scared of possible repercussions to speak out sooner.

While good data is lacking on how many suspects are charged a decade or more after the fact, reports of such cases are rare. Some assailants, though, have gotten off because they admitted to their crimes after the statute of limitations expired.

The differing statutes of limitations across state lines create a ZIP code lottery. Where a person is assaulted shouldn’t determine whether she gets justice.

An end to statutes of limitations would also allow prosecutors more time to build thorough cases against alleged assailants, instead of rushing up against a dwindling deadline to file slapdash charges, potentially compromising the rights of the accused in the process. It would also allow the accused to defend themselves in a court of law, with its high bar to conviction, rather than in the court of public opinion.

Perhaps some state legislators fear ending statutes of limitations for sexual assaults would create chaos and a flood of reports of decades-old crimes. They need not worry: The 16 states with no statute of limitations for rape or sexual assault are not overwhelmed with huge numbers of stale claims.

Increasing reporting of rapes and sexual assaults is a complicated challenge, and requires cultural changes as well as improvements in law and policing. For state legislatures to eradicate statutes of limitations for sex crimes is a small enhancement, not a big fix. But for the women and men who find the courage to speak after years of silence and fear, it could be everything.

Jill Filipovic is a lawyer and a former senior political writer for Cosmopolitan.com who is writing a book about female pleasure and politics in America.
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Quasimodo

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OK; but let's have no statute of limitations for people who make false accusations; and penalties equal to what those who were
accused would have received.



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