More Proof that USE is better than RAPE

Even judges are starting to realize that the “R” word has ugly connotations and can taint a jury.  “Rape” is not even a legal term”, says Hon. Jeffe Chevront.

The Slate Article in full: A Nebraska judge bans the word rape from his courtroom. 

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007, at 7:27 PM ET

Usually we leave it up to the linguists and philosophers to muse on the crazy relationship between words and their meanings. In the law, words—the important ones, at least—are defined narrowly, and judges, lawyers, and jurors are trusted to understand their meanings. It’s precisely because language is so powerful in a courtroom that we treat it so reverently.Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.Safi’s first trial resulted in a hung jury last November when jurors deadlocked 7-5. Responding to Cheuvront’s initial language ban—which will be in force again when Safi is retried in July—prosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—sex—to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they’ll just have to read the witnesses’ eyebrows to sort out the difference.The fact that judges are not rushing to ban similarly conclusory legal language from trial testimony—presumably one can still say murder or embezzlement on the stand—reflects not just the fraught nature of language but also the fraught nature of rape prosecutions. We as a society still somehow think rape is different—either because we assume the victims are especially fragile or because we assume they are particularly deceitful. Is the word rape truly more inflammatory to a jury than the word robbery? Yes, the question of the victim’s consent surely makes a rape trial more complicated than some other kinds of criminal trials. But the fact that the evidence may be more equivocal hardly makes the underlying word more likely to incite blind juror outrage.

Wendy Murphy teaches at the New England School of Law and has spent years studying the relationship between language and the courts. She describes Judge Cheuvront’s order as part of a growing trend on the part of the defense bar to scrub the language of trial courts, one that has “really blossomed after the Kobe Bryant trial.” The big shifts she’s noticing: Whereas defense attorneys once made motions to limit the use of the word victim in trials, there is an uptick in efforts to get rid of the word rape. Moreover, she points out, these strategies used to be directed toward prosecutors, but they are now being directed toward witnesses as well.

Do a Lexis search on the influence of inflammatory language on juror perceptions. Try to find some social science data on the effect of loaded courtroom words on conviction rates. Not much out there, notes Murphy. That’s one of the things that makes the Nebraska case so maddening. If judges are going to take it upon themselves to issue blanket orders that would have witnesses testifying that black is white, one might hope that they are trying to remedy some well-documented evidentiary problem.

In the long run this is a huge victory for the Pro-Life establishment. But the real winners are the lives that will be spared from the abortion mills.   Praise Jesus! 

Baptists For Brownback 2008 will continue to push for legislation making the term “Rape” illegal and abortions punishable by the death penalty. As Christians we can take comfort in knowing that Pro-Life advocate Sam Brownback will overturn Roe vs. Wade when he is elected President of the United States of God.