It may seem odd to begin a blog named after Chelsey Wright, with a story about an apparently unrelated, albeit similar attack, in another part of the country, but this was the one that first alerted me to the depth of our decline as a law abiding nation.
There are many disturbing aspects of this case:
There are many disturbing aspects of this case:
- The reaction of the defendants
- The reaction of the defendant's families
- The religious context
- The media coverage
- The prosecution
It was this last point that really bothered me, and still does, because the case was widely reported as a young girl who went willingly to meet a man she did not know, and then 'accompanied' him to meet a larger group of men she also did not know, in a hotel where she otherwise had no business to be.
The circumstances were set and the 'victim' seemed anything but an innocent party to the events that followed.
But after their conviction, the girl released a statement detailing how she had been corralled by the men and forced into the hotel, in effect, she had been abducted from the street in broad daylight. You can read her full impact statement here, but the more important statement comes from the prosecutor, Henry Blackshaw who reportedly said of her meeting with Jama:
"He then made reference to 'his boys' that were at the Victoria Park hotel, so she accompanied him".
She accompanied him?
Contrast that with the victim's account:
"They kind of boxed me in, one behind me, one in front, and one on the side. I started to get frightened..."
Does that sound like she accompanied him?
Perhaps in the old fashioned "You are under arrest. Please accompany me to the police station." sense, but in any other way voluntary?
But the issue here is that statement came from the prosecuting attorney, so the whole case against this gang of rapists and thieves, was based on their own version of events, therefore the greatest wonder is how they were found guilty at all. We can only conclude that the evidence must have been truly devastating for their conviction to have been secured, because it appears to have little to do with the competence or intensity of their prosecution.
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