Avicenna reports on the progress of the case against the guys who raped and murdered Jyoti Singh.
Manohar Lal Sharma has been named as the Defence Lawyer for the Delhi Rape/Murder case which he is planning to plead “not guilty” to. And boy is he a real piece of work. Remember how Anil from AVfM said “women have it better than men”? I probably have to apologise to him (And to Astrokid), because Sharma has it figured out.
Well Manohar Lal Sharma is all about women. In his infinite knowledge about the female body has analysed the case meticulously and found that in his experience there are no rapes of “respected ladies”. In addition the male companion was wholly responsible for the incident as the unmarried couple should not have been on the streets, particularly with such a weed since he was incapable of defending her against six armed dudes. It’s his fault for being so bad in a fist fight and it’s her fault for not checking his ability to fist fight.
“Until today I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” Sharma said in an interview at a cafe outside the Supreme Court in India’s capital. “Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl with respect.”
It was Jyoti Singh’s fault, in other words, because she was the kind of dirty slutty woman who isn’t respected.
Of course if a “respected” woman does get attacked, she retroactively loses all previous “respect.”
And of course THAT is her fault too.
What an evil asshole.
Well I never completely agreed with Dick the Butcher (Henry VI); but if we were to go along with Dick surely this scumbag would be a candidate?
Well, you know what this means right? If respectable women don’t get raped, and there are rape laws on the books, the law must specifically be there to protect the sluts, prostitutes and other dis-respectable women out there.
Yahhoo! No matter what her reputation, the law was made to protect her! If anything, the defense barristers in India should now be praising the respectability of every complainant or victim.
Why didn’t we try this tactic in North America?
Oh fuck. I just read on Jeff Shallit’s blog that there are now Sandy Hook Truthers (ie: it never happened), and now this.
Some days I wish I was a cat instead of a human.
Excerpted from: How to Make Complete Crap Arguments and Assertions.
Hey Benson, is ArnieTheSlymeDog really CommanderTuvok under another user name? If so, that kid’s rapidly turning into another Dave Mabus…
There are too many cases in which the maxim, that one should not ascribe to malice that which is due to incompetence, is inapplicable because the two are indistinguishable. This even applies to the subject of the original post.
Allegedly raped and murdered, and the allegations are made by a notoriously corrupt and incompetent police force so- even if they are duilty- the accused need a better lawyer than they seem to have.
Saw Sharma on the TV news last night. Ticking all the misogynist boxes, basically – what was she doing out “so late” at night (at 9:30 ffs), what was she doing out with a man, and it was all her companion’s fault for “taking her” to where they were attacked (i.e. out of the house, in a public place; he was talking specifically about how this didn’t take place in the home but out “on the road”).
.
Part of me would like to think that he’s an extreme believer in the principle that everyone accused of a crime is entitled to representation and that it’s the defense lawyer’s job to do anything they can to defend their client … but most of me realises that the most likely thing is he really believes this shite he’s spouting, he really thinks she and her friend brought it on themselves.
Hey Hornbeck, I don’t know who ArnieTheSlymeDog is.
I find the lawyer’s comments truly vile. So, please don’t misunderstand then following sentences as some form of mitigation.
Isn’t this what lawyers do? Aren’t they required to offer the best defense possible to a client, wether they agree with the client, or not? As I understand it, in Australia – a common law country – lawyers are appointed ‘cab-off-the-rank’ and do not refuse an appointment because they’ve undertaken to give a person, no matter how shitty, the best defense possible. In a misogynistic country, a misogynistic defense would be the best one possible. N’est pas?
Actually, that whole pile of poorly worded shite was a mitigation. Please don’t take this as an excuse, perhaps would have been somewhat less an abomination. Just delete the comment. I know what I mean to say, but I can’t say it with the clarity required. In systems that must cater for all, we’ll get people gaming said systems, and lawyers are employed to game the system, even when their clients are scoundrels like Mother Teresa or the Pope.
Argggg
please don’t take this as an excuse but an explanation, perhaps if I’d said that it would have been somewhat ..
recorded accusation of raping.
I’ll stop now.
Interesting how the “best defense” is misogyny and lying. Interesting how frequently this method of “defense” is used in rape cases. Interesting how apparently it’s a defense attorneys job to knowingly and deliberately put and/or keep dangerous people from facing accountability for their crimes. Intersting how we call this justice.
Brian – yes, probably. So the issue is the society more than the particular lawyer.
On the other hand it’s not the defense lawyer’s job to slander the victim by blathering about her outside the courtroom.
Yeah, and one of them is a professor at FAU.
Behold, the crazy.
Hey,
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Illuminata:
Only interesting in the academic sense, otherwise just pitifully plain and emetic. But were you (impersonal you) interested in your own defense, would you not hire a defense lawyer who would regurgitate this emetic shite? (Is that a tautology? regurgititate an emetic? or just cause and effect?)
Ophelia:
Obviously, if it were one misogynistic tool, we’d have nothing to worry about in a country with more than a billion population.
Sadly, women are open to slander unless they are Elizabeth Regina. Young Kate (or Catherine), duchess of Cornwall or whatever precedes the principality of Wales also seems to be in within the bounds of the Madonna/Whore accepted dichotomy, but generally speaking it appears all woman are slandered until they prove their Madonna/Whore bona-fides. Guilty until dead or proven powerful it seems.
Sorry, I read this shit and I despair. There’s nothing I can do apart from yell at the world, treat my wife as best I can and try to stop others when I see injustice. It’s bad.
I should further clarify (not defend) my point. A Lawyer who lives in a misogynistic society, such as mine (Australia), will, in defense of his/her client point out the attire, attitude, vagina-beariness of the rape-victim. There’s a dictum I remember from my psych degree. ‘First behaviour, then belief’. If ‘eve-tauting?’ or raping is normal, or at least not circumscribed behaviour, then a lawyer, living in that environment, who might find it distasteful, might still not see it as slander to put out the defense that the immodest skank wanted to be raped with an iron bar and also by 6 men. After all, good women don’t appear in that circumstance, ergo femina mala. It’s the no true good woman fallacy….
He saiud, ““Until today I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,”
That’s a two-edged argument, because he is also saying that Indian men don’t respect women … and therefore they rape them.
Brian, I do see what you are saying in your first post. If it is the duty of a lawyer to do whatever it takes to defend his client, including trampling all over everything that would be considered moral or ethical in all other circumstances, then the offense lies partly with the definition of the duty. Just as, while the duty of a corporation is simply and solely to maximize the wealth of its stockholders, demonizing the greedy scoundrels that run them is missing part of the point, n’est-ce pas?
(Apologies to people with no French. “N’est-ce pas?” means, more or less, “Is it not so?” Omitting the “ce”, as Brian accidentally did, is equivalent to omitting the “it”. )
Sounds similar to the test for witches in the middle ages.
Throw them in a pond, it they sink they’re innocent but dead, if they float fish them out and burn them.
It isn’t, Zekehoskin.
In a criminal court, as here, it is a defence lawyer’s duty to put forward the case that their client is not guilty to the best of their ability. Unless their client says they are lying- in which case the lawyer must withdraw from the case- they are obliged to take their client’s word that they are telling the truth and put forward their case.
I think that is the case in British law, and Indian criminal law derives from British law.
There are two factors here.One is whether Jyoti Singh was raped, and Manohar Lal Sharma seems to claim it is only rape if the victim is ‘respected’. Whether the victim is respected or not is irrelevant to accusations of rape. The only relevant question is that of consent, and consent is absolutely irrelevant to the charge of murder and there seems to be little doubt that Jyoti Singh was murdered.
The other question is whether the accused actually committed the crime. Given the record of the police in India and the pressure to find the criminals in this case, then, no matter what the pasts and personalities of the accused, the assumption of innocence is more than a formality here.