Imagine that a woman accuses you of rape, and you are convicted of rape based on pretty much nothing else except this one woman's testimony. Now, we are NOT here to argue about about whether this should happen. The fact is it does, and happens much more frequently than many people think. Here is the question: Who should be the one to decide whether you permanently lose gun rights for the rest of your life? Should it be the jury? Right now, under the current (US) law, the jury basically only decides whether you go to prison or not, and that decision to send you to prison is automatically connected to allowing you to lose gun rights for the rest of your life. To state it in another way, there is no way the jury can say you should not permanently be denied gun rights, without simultaneously saying that you should not be sentenced to any prison. The two are necessarily connected under the current law. And we should not forget that in many cases, most of them actually, there is NO jury trial. Accused defendants are commonly pushed into plea bargains, with the understanding that they will spend less time in prison if they just plead guilty. This is especially the case when everyone knows the evidence will likely be enough to get them convicted and sent to prison, and holding a trial would just be a waste of everyone's time. Under current (US federal) law, if you are convicted of any law classified as a felony, it is officially the director of the Department of BATF who is the one who decides whether you will ever have gun rights again for the rest of your life. That is the reality. Did you realize that was going on in the US? Do you find this to be acceptable? Oh, it's not just rape, and it's actually not only felonies. If a woman you are living with accuses you of domestic violence, you can be arrested, charged, and convicted. And even though that particular domestic violence charge might not be classified as a felony, you will still automatically permanently lose your gun rights. (That is unless the BATF decides to restore them) That is current US federal law. Now first you have to understand what commonly happens in domestic violence accusations. Police will immediately arrest the man. The woman usually gets the benefit of the doubt. The police just want to separate the two to prevent further conflict. But after being arrested, the man is usually charged. The man can be charged based on only the accusations of the woman, and very little or nothing else. (Again, we could argue about whether that should be, but the fact is that is how the current system works) Many men may not have the money for bail. Or in some cases the judge may even deny bail (for a wide variety of different possible reasons, though that is another story). So they sit in prison. It takes a long time for their lawyers to prepare for defending them, so they could be sitting in there for 14 to 18 months before the trial. This is pretty typical. That is, even if they are eventually found not guilty at trial, they will still have been sitting in prison for nearly 2 years. More commonly what will happen is the prosecutor will offer a plea bargain. He will be sentenced to 6 months or a year, then with probation after that. That's less time than he would spend in prison if it went to trial. So the man trades away the possibility of defending his lifetime civil rights for more immediate physical freedom. This is extremely common in the US justice system; that's pretty much how it works. In case any of you were not aware. There is not always a jury. In fact, there is usually not a jury. There are some persons who have their rights permanently taken away who were never sentenced to any prison. (They agreed to plea guilty and so the prosecutor took it very easy on them) Now I actually think there are situations where it is appropriate to send someone to prison based on the accusations of only one witness. (Although the prison time should not be too long, in those cases) But it is a very different thing to take away someone's civil rights for their entire life, based on the accusations of only one witness. Especially for an alleged crime that might not even be extremely severe (I mean not on the level of robbery and murder, etc). (And yes, there can be forms of domestic violence and even "rape" in certain situations that are not as severe. That could be a long topic for another thread, but just look at the situation of Julian Assange, for instance. "Domestic violence" could be anything as trivial as "He pushed me") I don't mean to be all over the place, and I want to try to get to the point, but it's difficult because this is a kind of complicated discussion and I am trying to tie-up all the possible loose ends in the opening post. This is going to be a series of posts where I give examples of how it is possible for individuals to lose their rights, and the problematic nature of current law which does not adequately guarantee and safeguard individual rights.
Its a complicated issue. While there is no easy answer, this mainly affects men. I raised 3 sons and warned them about how a few minutes with an unstable woman can ruin their life. We have to teach our sons: 1. Never have sex with a woman without a chain of texts showing her consent. 2. Never stay and argue with an angry woman. If you live together, leave the home and communicate from another location. In CA, we have a gun restraining order that allows law enforcement to confiscate firearms without due process based on hearsay.
Ha ha. In many parts of Europe a man can be convicted of rape even if it's proved beyond all shadow of a doubt the woman willingly consented to have sex with him earlier that very same night. (Just look at what happened to Julian Assange) That's getting very off-topic here, however.
Thank you for commenting on this thread. Yes it is a complicated issue. In fact it seems too complicated for most persons to be able to wrap their brain around, or be able to understand the big issue and how all the pieces fit together. And unfortunately, that's why I believe this type of issue has not been resolved in the legal arena. Yet with intelligent and creative thought, I do think there does exist a way to redesign the law to properly deal with this. I just want to make sure the law itself guarantees and protects person's rights in these type of situations, to the maximum extent reasonably possible. In some of these situations, a person convicted of rape might only be sentenced by the judge to 4 years due to extremely weak evidence, or the unique extenuating circumstance of the case, and the judge is not wrong to impose such a low sentence in such circumstances. And yet the law automatically takes away the accused's civil rights for life, and there is no entitlement to a jury trial for that. We need to understand that domestic violence is not always domestic violence (and sometimes even rape is not always rape). There is vast wide ranging spectrum. I detailed in another thread a story about a woman who was arrested for domestic violence because she threw an apple at her husband after they got in an argument. And on top of all that, there is can be wide ranging situations of different levels and different types of evidence. That we as a society decide a person should be punished does not mean that we as a society decided that person committed the crime. That's a concept most people seem unable to wrap their head around and understand. It just means that we have decided that the evidence is enough to warrant punishment. If punishment was only ever meted out when we were absolutely 100% sure of something, punishment would almost never be meted out in the justice system. Should a prison sentence always deprive someone of Constitutional rights for life? I think we can all agree that it should not. However when the law assigns those rights up to the subjective whims of one official, then Constitutional rights are denied. Those become no longer rights guaranteed by Constitution, but privileges granted by government officials. I mean, imagine if every time you got a traffic ticket, the law said that you are no longer entitled to any Constitutional rights for the rest of your life unless somebody else says so. (yes, I know that's kind of an absurd extreme example, but I'm using that to try to illustrate the point here) It seems like everyone is just looking for simple answers. And will stubbornly defend those views with retorts like "That never happens or it's incredibly rare".
Our justice system needs a lot of work. An innocent man going to trial will still end up broke at the end if he is lucky. Having 2 daughters, I want men to know that they face a long prison sentence and permanent loss of rights is they cross the line and law enforcement finds them before I do. Having 3 sons, I worry about them facing the mighty justice system that forces the innocent to take a plea deal because they can't afford a trial.
You know, it's one thing if an individual's rights are taken away based on the testimony of someone else, but in that case the law should more clearly define what the punishment should be for the witness if they are later proved to have been lying. I also think the level of reaction to the witness's claim should take into account the situation of how easy it would be to determine if the witness were lying or not. That is, I don't want us to just automatically assume the witness is telling the truth and severely punish the defendant or permanently take away all his rights when it would be so unlikely for the witness in that sort of situation to ever face punishment for lying, due to it being near impossible for us to determine if they were telling the truth, in that type of specific situation. That's something the court should really be taking into account. The language of the law too, ideally. I think we all recognize this when it comes to punishment imposed and length of prison sentence, but apparently lifelong civil rights are viewed as "less worthy of protection".
True. We also have cases where red flags should have prevented a gun purchase. Where to draw the line is complicated and the common answer seems to be more gun control.
