Lacrosse ugliness at U.Va.

It's true. We should just do nothing. The parents of future Yeardley Loves will just have to seek comfort in the knowledge that the Socratic Method proved that all potential solutions were foolhardy and reactionary.

 

Waylon, you may have missed my earlier post, but I can take a last name/first name and look up any court case matching that name in my state on this thing called "the internet" in a matter of seconds. Free. It will tell me what kind of case it is, where the case stands, any pleadings or scheduled hearings, the arresting officer, and more.

I don't mean this disrespectfully, but if you're going to be a lawyer, you might find that useful. Everything's moving online these days. The lawyers in my family used to subscribe to services like Westlaw, but they tell me they really don't use it as much as they use the good old internet.

The other day, I was checking to see if someone had a lien on his property. I found the information online in a matter of seconds.

And if alerting the university disciplinary committee of student arrests and convictions saves just one life or one beating... might it be worth the so-called "time and expense"?

 

Bingo

 

Probably a lot. At the hands of other men, mostly.

I don't want to get too off track here, but I posted the other day about a book I'm reading for a class... 'Microtrends' by Mark Penn. If you don't know who he is... he's basically a glorified Harvard statistician who got into politics.

He was the guy who came up with the term 'soccer moms.'

Anyway.... He writes about what scientists call "The Testosterone Storm." It a stat that something like men ages 15-24 are 5 times more likely to die than women of that age. The reason is aggressive behavior.

 

I posted further up on this thread that I help fundraise for a non-profit that helps survivors of domestic violence. According them, 32% of college students report dating violence by a previous partner, and 21% report violence by a current partner. That's just incidents of dating violence, not violent crime.

 

That kicked in door makes his lawyer's 'accident' defense much, much more difficult to make believable to a jury.

 

So he's not entitled to the best defense possible?

 

Sure he is. But nobody is obligated to say that his defender is being entirely honest, in this situation.

 

If the defender wasn't there, how can it be said he's being dishonest?

 

He clearly intended to physically harm her. That was going to happen before the door got kicked in.

And then it's a really thin line between beating someone up and beating them to death.

 

If you have one guy that abuses 10 different women, does this stat mean that he does the work so to speak of 50 men?

I just don't think 20% of all men, on college for crying out loud, are abusive.

God, I hope not.

 

I'm sure on some level the lawyer is probably a little uncomfortable, morally, with the position he's arguing, but that's not his job. He knows it is his client's only chance of seeing the outside of a penitentiary in the next 25 years. (As a quick aside, check out this Wash Post article from earlier this year. Virginia got rid of almost all parole 15 years ago, so he's not going to do six years and be on a beach in Florida with the old man. He's doing 25 hard years either way.) As sickening and insulting as the defense's argument may be "He meant to beat her up, but not KILL her for pete's sake; he's no animal!" it's a valid legal argument and he's entitled to make that case. The lawyer essentially knows with this defense Huguley isn't going to walk. He's just trying to make it more difficult to get a first-degree murder conviction. (Which is why we might see some additional charges added in later, just in case.) The kid is almost certainly going to jail one way or another. Waylon is correct in pointing out that the nuances are important here. The defense attorney is splitting hairs -- because that's what defense attorney's do, especially when the facts are not in their favor. His job isn't to make moral judgments, it's to make sure the law is properly followed and this his client gets the best defense possible.

And Junkie, yes, in what I suspect we will eventually learn was a coke-induced rage, I do believe he decided to kill her at some point. Whether that happened before he kicked in the door, or right in the moment when he slammed her head against the wall for what was probably the fifth time, I can't say.