Juking the stats.

In Brooklyn.

Reference here. Sorry, best reference I could find.

Six seconds too late?

The Maryland Court of Appeals heard a case yesterday concerning when consensual sex becomes rape.

Representing the state, Assistant Attorney General Sarah Page Pritzlaff urged the Court of Appeals to reverse a lower court's decision issued last year. She argued that when force is applied, the act qualifies as rape even if there was initial consent.

"It's rape when the woman says, 'I've changed my mind,' and the man continues to use force or threat of force," she told the judges.

"You clearly have the element of force, you have the resistance by the victim," she said, noting that the victim was bleeding. "The victim was quite clear that it was hurting, that she wanted him to stop."

But Assistant Public Defender Michael R. Malloy argued that, under existing common law and according to a 1980 opinion from the high court, if a woman says yes to intercourse initially and then says no, it's not rape.

Funny how actually reading the story as opposed to listening to it on TV alters your thinking. All day yesterday I heard TV reporters and and TV news promos say the women in question agreed to have sex, but told the man to stop after penetration occurred. The TV reports then said that the man continued for "another 5 or 6 seconds," which seemed ludicrous. I pictured an alleged case of date rape by one drunken college student against another and thought "What? She had a timer on the guy?"

The actual case is really pretty grisly:

The case stems from a Dec. 13, 2003, incident in which the victim, an 18-year-old community college student, drove Baby, then 16, and his friend, Michael Wilson, then 15, both high school students, to an isolated elementary school parking lot, according to court documents.

Wilson and Baby groped the victim and made sexual advances on her, according to the state's account of the incident in court filings. At one point, Wilson attempted to force the victim to engage in sex, while Baby held her down. Then Baby left the car and Wilson had intercourse with the woman. Wilson pleaded guilty to second-degree rape and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Baby, according to the court record, then said it was his turn and asked the victim, "[So] are you going to let me hit it?" adding,"I don't want to rape you."

The victim testified that she agreed to sex "as long as he stops when I tell him to." As he began, she told him to stop because he was hurting her, but he kept going for five or 10 seconds, she said.

Clearly, Baby's intent was to rape her. And any nonsense about not wanting to rape her is ridiculous. He already participated in a rape by holding her down for his companion.

Murder, he wrote

And perhaps committed.

An author leafing through a newspaper comes across tantalising details of a murder so grisly that he becomes obsessed, and imagines the events into a novel. Or a murderer, so self-satisfied with the brilliance of his perfect crime, pens an account to pass off as fiction and enshrine it in literary history.

Where reality ends and fiction begins in the stomach-turning novel Amok is the central task before the jury in Poland’s trial of the decade. Four years after he published his bloody bestseller, Krystian Bala has found himself on trial for the same torture and murder that he detailed in his novel.

Via Sarah Weinman.

Stephen King territory

That's what a neighbor of this woman said upon finding out that police found the bodies of four infants in her apartment.

Police said that they were contacted by social service workers early Thursday at Peninsula Regional Medical Center. Police said that doctors determined that Freeman, 37, had been pregnant but the baby was missing.

Police said they searched her home in the 200 block of Sunset Drive on Thursday night and found the deceased infant. Police said Freeman lives in the upstairs apartment of the house with her boyfriend and four other children.

Later Thursday, the remains of two more infants were found inside garbage bags inside a trunk in Freeman's bedroom, a police spokesman said. A third garbage bag concealed with the other two contained what appeared to be a placenta, police said.

On Friday, the remains of the fourth infant were found inside a motor home parked in the driveway, said Barry Neeb, the spokesman.

WTF???

Did this woman just have sex, get pregnant, drop the kid where it landed and continue on? Four times? And how did the other four children manage to survive?

They knew it was wrong, but it felt so right

Two teenage girls in Australia killed friend to see whether they would feel remorse.

The pair, who cannot be named because of their age, killed 15-year-old Davis while the three were staying at the same house in the coal-mining town of Collie, south of Perth, on 18 June 2006.

They had been discussing how neither would feel bad about committing murder when they decided to kill Davis, who was sleeping in another room, a court heard in April.

They dressed in old clothes then strangled Davis with speaker wire and buried her body under the house, the court heard.

Creepy.

The video game defense

Youth kills homeless man and says violent video games made him do it. His stepmother tells a different story.

As I write this, my teeth are clenched, my hands are shaking, and my whole body is seething with the hatred I feel for this kid and what he has done. Seeing the article brings back all the horrible memories from when he lived with us.

Via PooterGeek.

In the UK, counselling replaces catching criminals

Alexander Chancellor suffered two burglaries recently.

So what do the police actually do in these situations? The main thing they do is to take a statement from the victim of the crime, which is obviously a good idea insofar as this records what actually happened, but less so in some of its other aspects. Why, for example, do the police need to know how tall I am? Or how old I am? Or how I earn my living? Or whether I am retired? Or where I was born? These are among the questions they are required to ask of all crime victims, though it is of the criminals that one yearns to know the answers.

One will probably never know, however, for the rigid bureaucratic rituals imposed on the police seem to stifle all initiative for catching burglars. High on their list of priorities is to offer "counselling" to victims of crime, whereas in most circumstances there could be nothing as comforting to them as bringing their persecutors to justice.

Of course, if he went after the intruders with a shotgun, he'd be arrested.

Via Clive Davis.

How to get away with murder in the UK

Wear a veil and flee the country.

Police reportedly believe that Mustaf Jamma, a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of Pc Sharon Beshenivsky, used his sister's passport and wore a full niqab to evade checks at Heathrow airport.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis insisted there should be an urgent inquiry.

At the time of the 26-year-old's apparent escape between Christmas Day last year and New Year's Day, he was one of the UK's most wanted men and the airport was on high alert in the wake of the July 7 bombing attacks.

But it is thought that staff rarely ask those departing Britain to remove veils in order to make sure their identification is valid.

A BAA Heathrow spokesman told The Times: "Immigration control staff always do a visual check on people coming into the country but only random checks are made with outgoing passengers."

Via Tim Blair.