Some of you might remember the Steubenville, Ohio rape case, where an underage girl who was drugged and unconscious was gang raped. A video of the rape went viral, complete with some of the party goers laughing hysterically over her being 'so raped' and 'dead.'
The story is also notable because the perpetrators, or at least the two we know about were members of the popular high school football team and there was an effort at a coverup by the school because of that.
The two football players, Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond,pictured above were only convicted because of the efforts of hacker Deric Losutter, who hacked into the Steubenville High School sports fan website and revealed incriminating evidence against two rapists and three others who may or may not have also participated and kept silent except for swapping obscene Instagram comments among themselves along the lines of ''no pity for whores' and how 'some whores deserve to be p*ssed on.'
Faced with also being prosecuted, the other three were given immunity to testify.
The duo's lawyer, one Walter Madison actually tried to make the case this was consensual because "She didn't affirmatively say no."
"The person who is the accuser here is silent just as she was that night, and that's because there was consent," he said.
Of course, as the judge pointed out, consent wasn't an issue since the girl was a minor and others testified that she was unconscious while all this was going on. But then, most defense lawyers usually aren't burdened much with morals and ethics...let alone concerned with the truth unless it provides a loophole of escape for their clients.
Richmond and Mays were convicted of the rape of a minor, but aside from some harsh words from the judge, nothing really happened to the two rapists. Ma'lik Richmond was back to playing football for Steubenville just a few days after serving only 10 months out of a one-year sentence in a juvenile detention facility. And Trent Mays spent just two years behind bars for the rape, but that didn't stop him from getting admitted to Ohio’s Hocking College and playing varsity college football there.
The real criminal, the one who felt the full force of the law on his back? Deric Losutter, the one the actually unearthed the evidence that convicted the rapists and got the others to plea bargain. The FBI raided Lostutter’s home and, then arrested and indicted him on four counts: three counts of unauthorized access to a computer used for privacy breach and one count of making a false statement to the FBI.
He's facing 16 years in prison. Lostutter’s lawyer, Tor Ekeland, says that the harsh sentence is based on the 1986 the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA. It was originally only supposed to cover actual criminal activity, but it's been extended out of all proportion from its original intent and beefed up quite a bit, perhaps as a lesson to the activities of whistleblowers and the WikiLeaks phenomenon.
Yes, Losutter apparently had some involvement with Anonymous, a group for which I admittedly don't have too much sympathy for reasons I needn't go into. But one of the primary object of criminal justice used to be to determine who had been harmed.
Now, we've it seems we're returning to an earlier time, when justice is doled out unequally as a given, and a primary objective is simply to serve as an example pour encourager les autres, a warning to keep the peasants in line.
Can we blame this on the regime of President Obama? Of course we can. It's under his administration, particularly at the Federal level that the idea of justice being politicized and perverted depending on who it's aimed at has taken off on steroids.
A fish rots from the head.
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