Montana, Massachusetts Rape Cases: When Judges Can’t Get Even the Easy Cases Right, We’re in Trouble.
It’s been a spectacularly awful week in rape. And that’s not just because of a gang rape of a photojournalist in India. No, it’s also been a really shockingly bad week for American judges dealing with child rape victims, including a Massachusetts woman who has sued to avoid a judicially mandated relationship with her rapist for the next 16 years, and a Montana judge who sent a teacher to jail for only 30 days for the statutory rape of a student who later killed herself.
It is a time-honored legal cliché that hard cases make bad law. That’s a simple way of saying that when courts get bogged down in all the subtleties and complexities of ambiguous human behavior, the legal result isn’t always satisfying. Ariel Levy’s recent exploration of the Steubenville rape case—with its booze-and-football-fueled victimizers and Internet vigilantes—is a pretty good example of all the shades of gray that play out when teen sex crimes are litigated in the courts. But this hasn’t been a bad week in date rape, or in acquaintance rape, or in “he said, she said” rape claims. It’s just been a bad week in rape. In violent, abuse-of-power, unambiguous rape. And what that suggests about where we are heading in the law of sexual assault is worrisome, to say the least.
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The first story comes from Massachusetts, where a plaintiff known only as H.T. has sued the commonwealth in federal court for forcing her into a long-term relationship with her rapist. In 2009 H.T. became pregnant as the result of a rape that occurred when she was 14—in middle school. Her rapist, Jamie Melendez, was 20. Melendez pleaded guilty to the rape in 2011 and was sentenced to 16 years of probation. But the conditions of his probation also included an order that he “initiate proceedings in family court and comply with that court’s orders until the child reaches adulthood.” In short, according to the new complaint filed by H.T., the man who raped her was ordered to “initiate proceedings in family court, declare paternity as to the child born of his crime (paternity had already been determined in the criminal case, via DNA testing), and comply with the family court’s orders throughout the probationary period.”