Sexual Assault Punished by House Arrest in Canada

The Canadian justice system often shows more compassion towards the criminals than towards their victims. Several years ago, a man in Montreal was given a sentence of less than 3 years for murdering his former wife out of jealousy. Apparently, his jealousy (to which he obviously had no more right) was seen as a mitigating factor. The idea that my former husband can murder me and then serve less than 3 years was quite disconcerting to me while I lived in Montreal.

Now, there is a similarly egregious case in Sydney, Nova Scotia. A man convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault is sentenced to. . . house arrest:

Two women who were sexually assaulted say they would have kept it a secret if they had known their abuser would be sentenced to only house arrest. Kevin Gerard Pettipas, 52, was sentenced Monday in a courtroom in Sydney, N.S. He was also handed 10 months probation. One of the victims says she was about 12 years old when Pettipas began to give her liquor and touched her breasts. "It would have been easier to just not go through this," said the woman, now 19, who cannot be identified under a publication ban. She blames her alcoholism on Pettipas. "It's not fair because I am a child and all my friends think I'm cool because I drink. And he just preyed upon that and took total advantage and my life was destroyed because of that," she said. Pettipas was charged in October 2008 after the woman and three others came forward. He pleaded guilty last fall to two counts of sexual assault involving two of the women. The other sex-related charges were dropped. The defence recommended a sentence of six to nine months of house arrest, arguing that the assaults involved touching only. The Crown sought a sentence of 12 to 18 months. Judge David Ryan said what happened to the victims was terrible and unjustified. "It was not your fault," he told them. But Ryan noted that Pettipas is a first-time offender. He also said no one else has come forward. As part of his sentence, Pettipas is allowed out of his home to work at his local business from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

I don't know what the point of such policies is other than to ensure that victims of sexual assault do not come forward at all. Why would anybody want to put themselves through the trauma of a trial only to see the criminal escape without any meaningful punishment?

Thank you, Patrick, for telling me about this!

Mary Winkler and the Price of Patriarchy

This story happened a while ago but ever since I learned about it I couldn't stop thinking about how detrimental patriarchy is for men and women alike. And how, at the same time, it benefits both men and women in strange ways. 

In 2006, Mary Winkler shot Matthew Winkler, her husband and the father of her children, in the back with a shotgun as he lay sleeping. He could have still been saved but Mary Winkler simply turned around, took her children and left as her husband lay dying. She lied to her daughter and told her that help for Daddy was on its way and just left. It was later revealed that Mary Winkler had invested all her family savings into a Nigerian money scam. To cover for her money losses she started writing bad checks, which got her further into debt. The bank had threatened to contact her husband for clarifications. So the night before the bank was due to contact her husband, Mary Winkler shot him with a shotgun. There was never any question that she was the killer.

So how much time in jail do you think she got for this murder? A murder aimed at concealing her financial machinations, no less? A murder of a sleeping, helpless individual? A week. That's it. Just one week for the murder of her husband, a preacher, a man deeply respected in their community. At trial, Mary Winkler alleged abuse at the hands of her husband and suggested that he had wanted her to engage in "unnatural" sex. There was absolutely no proof of any abuse. Except, that is, for a pair of stripper shoes that Winkler's lawyer brought into the courtroom from God knows where. The stripper shoes that her husband allegedly asked her to wear gave the jury an excuse to let the murderer go free. Well, not completely free. There was that week in jail.

There is hardly any need to point out that if a man shot his wife and the mother of his children in the back while she lay sleeping in bed and then left her to die, he could have brought every pair of freaky shoes under the sun into the courtroom only to get laughed right into a prison cell where he'd spend the rest of his life. 

Patriarchy damages women in a multitude of ways. It strives to push them into marriage and motherhood, which many women neither need nor want. It traps women in lifestyles that do not fulfill them and that leave them angry, miserable, and depressed. It makes it so much more difficult for women to succeed professionally and financially. However, patriarchy doesn't treat men all that much better. Men's lives are always valued a lot less than women's lives. In every developed country in the world, men have shorter lifespans than women. Men are expected to wear themselves out prematurely while keeping not only their children but often also a wife. Who can shoot them in the back and get off with a week-long sentence.

Ain't patriarchy just grand, people?

Killing Children

This is something that happened just last week. A woman named Julie Powers Schenecker shot her two children because they annoyed her:

Julie Powers Schenecker is accused of shooting her daughter, 16, and son, 13. . . Police found Schenecker on her back porch, covered in blood. Inside, they saw no signs of struggle. They said she had shot her son in the head in her car, and then went inside and shot her daughter in the face. When police first interviewed her, she said her teens were mouthy, talked back, etc. . . Schenecker was a stay-at-home mother.

 And then people get all antsy when I mention that women are human too, they need to have a life of their own, or they'll start biting people's heads off. Or shooting them in the head.

Cyberstalking and cyberharassment

Many people seem to be in dire need of a reminder on what constitutes cyberstalking or cyberharassment. Here is some useful information on the subject:

Many states have enacted "cyberstalking" or "cyberharassment" laws or have laws that explicitly include electronic forms of communication within more traditional stalking or harassment laws. Other state laws may still apply to those who harass, threaten or bully others online, although specific language may make the laws easier to enforce. This chart classifies the various state laws addressing these three different types of online behaviors, as described below.

Cyberstalking. Cyberstalking is the use of the Internet, email or other electronic communications to stalk, and generally refers to a pattern of threatening or malicious behaviors. Cyberstalking may be considered the most dangerous of the three types of Internet harassment, based on a posing credible threat of harm. Sanctions range from misdemeanors to felonies.

Cyberharassment. Cyberharassment differs from cyberstalking in that it is generally defined as not involving a credible threat. Cyberharassment usually pertains to threatening or harassing email messages, instant messages, or to blog entries or websites dedicated solely to tormenting an individual. Some states approach cyberharrassment by including language addressing electronic communications in general harassment statutes, while others have created stand-alone cyberharassment statutes.

 Here you can find specific cyberharassment statutes of each state.

Somebody Is Finally Trying to Bring Goldman Sachs to Justice

This is truly welcome news:

The government has accused Goldman Sachs & Co. of defrauding investors by failing to disclose conflicts of interest in subprime investments it sold as the housing market was collapsing. The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a civil complaint Friday that Goldman failed to disclose that one of its clients helped create — and then bet against — subprime mortgage securities that Goldman sold to other investors. Two European banks that bought the mortgage securities lost nearly $1 billion, the SEC said. The agency is seeking to recoup profits reaped on the deal. . . The civil lawsuit filed by the SEC in federal court in Manhattan was the government's most significant legal action related to the mortgage meltdown that ignited the financial crisis and helped plunge the country into recession. The SEC's enforcement chief said the agency is investigating a broad range of practices related to the crisis.

Personally, I will not feel content until all these disgusting creatures are in jail. Right now, some nasty brainless jerk called Fabrice Tourre of Goldman is under the investigation. Following in the footsteps of his boss Blankfein (who believes he is God), this is how Tourre described himself:  "The fabulous Fab standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!" The only real monstrosity, of course, is that because of these losers' stupidity the entire world is now in deep shit economically.

Horrible News from Yale

The brutal murder of Annie Le, a graduate student at my alma stepmother, has been a horrible shock. The way the story is being covered has been very one-sided. I have a strong feeling that many reporters are going out of their way to transmit the message the university administration wants to be spread around: Yale is generally safe, this is an isolated and unfortunate occurrence.

Don't believe that, people. As somebody who went to Yale I can tell you that there is nothing isolated about what happened to Annie Le.

So here are some of the myths the media and the administration are spreading about how secure Yale is:

Myth 1. "Random acts of violence on campus are “pretty rare”. Not true. Maybe it is at other universities, but at Yale it is extremely common for the students to be mugged, assaulted, robbed, beaten up, menaced with all kinds of weapons and harrassed. I hardly know any one who has not been a victim of a crime on campus. 

Myth 2. New Haven is a safe place. "After a stretch of crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, New Haven doesn’t feel dangerous today, said Jean Recapet, the general manager of Atticus Bookstore and Cafe, who has been working in the campus vicinity since 1982. “We feel like we are in a safe environment,” said Recapet." Of course, a business owner in a dangerous area of town has to say that. But anybody who has lived in New Haven (I lived around the corner from Atticus Bookstore and was one of the most regular patrons) knows that it is a very dangerous town and crime rate is extremely high. As a woman, I felt scared every time I had to go outside after dark. I'm surprised I was only assaulted once while living there. I think I have been lucky. If I start listing all of the cases where people I know personally were victims of crime on campus, this will turn into my longest post.

Myth 3. Yale buildings are secure thanks to swipe cards. This is such a joke. I regularly entered buildings without a swipe card. You just stand there for a minute waiting for somebody to use their card and just follow them in.

The reality is that there is a huge racial and class divide between the super rich Yale and the extremely poor town where it is located. There is poverty, anger, resentment, constant conflicts between the administration and the students or the administration and employees. There is this constant atmosphere of strife, of the administration treating the students (especially the graduate students) and the employees like total crap. It is so annoying that even after a terrible tragedy liike the murder of Annie Le Yale administration can't find the courage to recognize that our campus is VERY dangerous and something needs to be done right now to change things.

Why Put the Crook in Jail?

God knows, I wasn't going to write about Madoff and the fact that he has been sentenced to 150 years in jail. In fact, I was going to return to the pile of absolutely amazing books I plan to be reading and blogging about until the end of summer.

And then I read one more blog post claiming that Madoff's sentence is somehow unfair. This is what Alec Baldwin says at Huffington post: "Madoff got 150 years? Why?
Does that serve the greater good? Does that really contribute to solving the problems that stemmed from Madoff's misdeeds? I want to suggest, as I am confident others have, that Madoff be given a reduced sentence in exchange for answering every question that investigators ask regarding how he did what he did and what are his recommendations for how this might be detected and/or prevented in the future." If it were only Baldwin, I wouldn't care. But I have read over a dozen blogs and articles recently that were saying the exact same thing.

The whole discussion about why we need to put a criminal in jail is baffling in the extreme. Let's try and imagine that the same rhetoric is being disseminated about a serial killer who managed to kidnap and murder 30 people. Would any one suggest that the killer be given a reduced sentence "in exchange for answering every question that investigators ask regarding how he did what he did and what are his recommendations for how this might be detected and/or prevented in the future"? Or is it ok to do this with some crimes and not with others?

I just don't understand why people suddenly feel so much compassion towards this vile crook? He committed a crime, he has been sentenced to jail, let's lock him up and throw away the key instead of feeling sorry for him.