Two critiques regarding the case of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn deserve wide attention. They come from very different perspectives, but both hit the bullseye and have implications well beyond the specifics of what happened in the Sofitel Hotel Penthouse May 14.
First there's Andrew Cohen:
Andrew Cohen
The perpetrator's walk instead is the result of one of the most cynical conspiracies in all of modern-day criminal justice. It is an officially-sanctioned and eternally re-enacted plot between the media and the police, the overt act of which benefits both parties — and prosecutors as well — at the expense of the suspect. It is done so flawlessly and routinely now that hardly anyone in America even realizes anymore how prejudicial and unfair it is to a defendant. We simply take it for granted today that the public image of a presumedly innocent person can lawfully be manipulated by the government and its agents. That's why so many of us were so surprised when the French expressed outrage over the way Strauss-Kahn was treated after his arrest. Sometimes, it takes an outsider to see clearly the truth.
The police naturally have an interest in publicly displaying their fruits of their labor — a suspect who looks guilty, as we all would if marched about in handcuffs after sleepless hours in detention — and the media naturally have an interest in publishing the images they receive from the walks. ... At fault are both the law enforcement officials who arrange to "walk the perp" at a specific time and place — there is a reason the cameras are almost always there, folks — and the reporters and producers who endlessly replay the images and take convenient cover under the First Amendment's free press rights. They use the First Amendment as a putative shield, even as they use the images themselves as a sword that cuts deeply into the Sixth Amendment fair trial rights of the accused.
Even the name sings with unfairness. But calling it the "walk of the alleged perp" would hardly undo the damage it does. Of course, it takes a high-profile case to spotlight this abhorrent practice. Nobody raises an outcry when some poor guy, especially some poor guy of color, gets the same treatment as Strauss-Kahn has. In fact, some of the rationalization downplaying what happened with Strauss-Kahn runs along the lines of they-do-it-to-everybody-why-should-he-be-special? The point, as Cohen rightly says, is that they shouldn't be doing it to anyone.
The most cogent example of the other critique comes from Katha Pollitt:
Katha Pollitt
The French political class is aghast at the treatment being meted out in New York to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and likely Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency, who is charged with attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment of a housekeeper in his $3,000-a-night suite at the Sofitel hotel in midtown Manhattan. On the radio, his friend Robert Badinter, husband of Élisabeth, one of France’s most famous feminists, declared he had been “destroyed before any trial.” Martine Aubry, first secretary of the Socialist Party and also a possible presidential contender, declared herself “stunned, shocked”—not by the allegations, but by photos of DSK in handcuffs. “The heart can only contract before these humiliating and poignant images that they’re giving of him,” wrote Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a senator and former minister. “A horrible global lynching! And what if it were all a monstrous injustice?” ...
Indeed, like everyone charged with a crime, DSK is innocent until proven guilty, but can’t the French political and journalistic elite focus for two minutes on the crime of which he is accused? Say what you like about handcuffs and perp walks, they really don’t compare with a violent sex attack. It’s a little scandalous that all these so-called socialists not only think this powerful man deserves special treatment before the law but also have not one word to say about the woman, a 32-year-old Guinean immigrant and single mother, except to imply that she’s a lying slut.
...
No presumption of innocence for the “chambermaid,” apparently. When all else fails, there’s the old standby, wheeled out whenever a famous or powerful man is accused of rape: why would he rape when women were lining up to have sex with him? ...
Americans shouldn’t be too quick to mock the French, though. Eight years ago, Californians brushed aside multiple women’s accounts of crude and even sadistic sexual harassment by Arnold Schwarzenegger and elected him governor of California. ...
Powerful men molest with impunity, enabled by friends, wives, political cronies, a servile press and a culture deeply hostile to women. Tell me again how feminism’s job is over.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
John Bolton, the recess-appointed affliction that goes under the title of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told Iran today that "their regime can stay in place" if they knock off trying to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
Citing the recent example of compliant Libya and its recent reinstatement into the graces of the United States, Bolton said, according to Reuters:
"This is a sign to the rulers in Tehran that if they give up their long-standing support for terrorism and they give up their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, that their regime can stay in place and that they can have a different relationship with the United States and the rest of the world."
How very ... noblesse oblige of him. The US will permit another country's leadership to "stay in place." And of course, there is no factual basis at all in the view that America is arrogant.
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