…Postmedia sources point to huge problems with the case that made it virtually impossible to take to court, chiefly the shifting accounts from Rehtaeh herself and independent evidence, including retrieved online messages, that supported the suggestion the sex that took place was consensual.

Even the notorious cell phone picture, first sent by one of the alleged assailants and re-circulated thereafter, shows virtually nothing that would stand up in court.

The photo is of a male naked from the waist down, giving a thumbs-up sign, pressing into the bare behind of another person who is leaning out a window.

[...]

The case was handled by a joint Halifax Regional Police/RCMP sex assault team, the lead investigator a woman.

It took almost a year for the police to bring the case to a senior Crown attorney within the province’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS). Also a woman, she is an experienced sex assault prosecutor.

While in a few provinces, Crown attorneys have to approve charges, Nova Scotia isn’t one of them, though police often ask for legal advice.

(These two arms of the province’s justice system have different legal standards to meet. For police, it’s what’s called RPG, or reasonable and probable grounds, to lay a charge. For prosecutors, it’s “a realistic prospect of conviction” in court.)

Essentially, what police ask is, “Do I have a case here?”

The prosecutor “looked at it really thoroughly,” PPS spokesperson Chris Hansen told Postmedia in a telephone interview Thursday. “She concluded there was no realistic prospect of conviction.”

The officer then turned her mind to a possible child-pornography charge, so the prosecutor referred her to a colleague, one of two PPS specialists in cyber crime, particularly as it relates to child pornography.

“He looked at it carefully as well,” Ms. Hansen said, and also concluded the case had no realistic chance of conviction.

Among the general public – and even among some alleged lawyers who should know better – there seems to be a sense that this matter should have been brought to trial, regardless of any misgivings prosecutors may have had about whether Parsons’s alleged attackers would have been convicted.

But think about what a trial would entail.  Rehtaeh Parsons would have been obligated to tell her story in court, in front of the people who allegedly violated her.  (She may have been allowed to testify behind a screen, so she wouldn’t have to look at the accused, but this wasn’t certain – and in any event, she still would have been in the same room.)   Then she would be cross-examined by counsel for the defendants, who would not be timid in their interrogation of the complaint.

And after all that, a verdict of “not guilty” could have been the result.  It’s not enough for the judge or jury to believe the accused likely carried out the offence.  Guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, even for accusations like these.  (Actually, especially for serious accusations like these.)

Imagine that you have to decide whether to prosecute this matter.  You believe there are serious, perhaps fatal, weaknesses to the case.  You know forcing this young girl to tell her story in court could be extremely traumatic.  And you think she could be put through all of this only to have the accused walk away.

Without the benefit of hindsight, what would you do?

When it comes to paying child support, courts won’t sympathize with parents who are the authors of their own financial demise through criminal activity, a family court judge recently ruled this month.

In Rogers v. Rogers, Superior Court Justice Alex Pazaratz found an Ontario father who lost his well-paying job due to criminal convictions couldn’t use his reduced income as an excuse to stop paying child support.

The father, Scott Rogers, “is intentionally under-employed. His intentional behaviour caused him to lose employment and limit his opportunities to find replacement employment,” wrote Pazaratz.

Rogers drove without a licence for 10 years and was convicted of driving while suspended 12 times, according to the ruling. He kept driving after each conviction until “it all caught up with him” in February 2011, wrote Pazaratz. The court sent him to jail for eight months, the judge noted.

Rogers’ employer refused to take him back after he got out of jail, forcing him to take up another job that pays far less than his previous income of $74,500. Rogers also accumulated convictions for uttering threats and harassing his ex-wife.

According to the judge, the father “made conscious decisions to do things — illegal things — with the full knowledge that his reckless and anti-social behaviour would make him unavailable (let alone, unacceptable) for employment. The net result is the same as if he’d handed in his resignation.”

The father of two had gone to court with an application to stop paying child support once his income plummeted to an expected $33,000 in 2013. But Pazaratz said his children and ex-wife shouldn’t have to pay for his bad decisions.

[...]

The Ontario Court of Justice decided similarly in Costello v. Costello. In that case, a father sought reduced support for his two children after losing his job following run-ins with the law.

Toronto family lawyer Bill Rogers calls the decision a “really good reminder” for both family lawyers and litigants of how the courts treat parents who lose their jobs through their own actions. “It’s basically like quitting your job,” he says.

According to Pazaratz, the definition of intentional doesn’t require establishing that the father lost his job just so he could stop paying child support. “There is no requirement of bad faith or need to find a specific intent to evade child support. Rather, as the objectives of the child support guidelines state, parents have a joint and ongoing obligation to support their children. Imputing income is one method which courts can use to give effect to this obligation.”

He added: “The expectations placed on the applicant were not terribly onerous: Obey the law. Support your children. It would be counter to public policy to allow the applicant to deliberately breach the first obligation and then use his own misconduct to avoid the second.”

That said, what kind of jackals would do something like this?

Rehtaeh Parsons’ mother is calling a rash of posters, some placed on the street outside her home, a form of harassment.

“It just felt like someone kicked me in the stomach. How dare they do that?” Leah Parsons told Global News.

“My daughter is gone because of them and they have the nerve to show up on my street and my community where my children live and keep harassing us. That’s harassment.”

Rehtaeh was taken off life support just over a week ago, after she hanged herself in her Cole Harbour home. Rehtaeh was allegedly sexually assaulted by four boys in 2011, and a picture of the assault was distributed throughout her school. An initial police investigation did not yield any charges.

Parsons says it was the assault and subsequent bullying that pushed her daughter to commit suicide.

The posters, printed in bright neon colours, were put up in Cole Harbour, Eastern Passage and Halifax. Entitled “Speak the Truth,” the posters encourage people to “listen before you judge” and to “stay strong” and “support the boys.”

[...]

This isn’t the only backlash. After Sunday’s rally outside the Halifax Regional Police headquarters on Gottingen St, a counter-protest took place with the same message of “support the boys.” There was also a Facebook page created to support the young men, although it has since been taken down reportedly at the behest of the RCMP.

“Just keep your heads up guys,” wrote one poster. “This will go away in time and just keep in mind everybody that knows you, knows you didn’t do anything.”

Global News has tried repeatedly to reach out to the boys and their families, but they have not offered a comment. [emphasis added]

I never saw the defunct pro-accused Facebook page.  But the feminist blog Dance of Red has been monitoring the alleged rapists’ supporters online, and as you might expect, they’re overwhelmingly focused on attacking the character of a girl who can no longer fight back.

And they think this makes them look innocent.

A terrorist detonated a bomb at Atlanta’s Olympic Park, during the 1996 Olympic games. That terrorist was Eric Robert Rudolph, who pled guilty to the crime along with a number of abortion clinic bombings. Mr. Rudolph ispresently a guest at the ADMAX hotel in Florence Colorado.

For nine years, Richard Jewell labored under suspicion that he’d been the bomber. In fact, Richard Jewell was a jewel of a man, a private security guard who spotted the bomb, informed the police of its existence, and escorted park visitors off the site until the bomb exploded. Jewell was a hero.

Such an unlikely hero, it occurred to the FBI, and CNN, and NBC, and the New York Post, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, that he must have planted the bomb. After all, private security guards are losers. Mall cops. And Jewell, for all his common sense and bravery in a crisis, was an odd man. A little weird, a law-enforcement wannabe who’d just happened to be in the right place at the right time, then went on tv talking as though he was an actual cop. And he was fat.

Obviously that weirdo Jewell had planted the bomb so he could take credit for discovering it.

Or so it seemed, for some reason, to the FBI, which leaked Jewell as the primary suspect, and CNN, and NBC, and the New York Post, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which took the leak, a perfect story after all, and used it to make Jewell’s life Hell on Earth.

[...]

If the FBI, and CNN, and NBC, and the New York Post, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and All Of Us, could get the Atlanta bombing sotragically wrong in 1996, they, and we, can do it today. In the days to come, it would behoove All Of Us to take what the FBI, and CNN, and NBC, and the New York Post, and their ilk, have to say about suspects and motives with a grain of salt.

Lest we find outselves owing someone a Richard Jewell-sized apology.

Perhaps the best apology we, All Of Us, can give to Richard Jewell is to be a little more skeptical of what we’re told by the FBI, and CNN, and NBC, and the New York Post, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and their ilk.

It will do Richard Jewell no good whatsoever, but it will make All Of Us better citizens.

 

This doesn’t mean we should go full Alex Jones (you never go full Alex Jones), but we already know that much of what was reported yesterday – the “bomb” at the JFK Library, for example – was incorrect.  It will be a long time before we know the full story, even though CNN/Fox News/MSNBC have to fill 24 hours of air time per day right now.

*Can we please stop using the word “tragedy” to describe what happened?  Hurricanes and tsunamis are tragedies.  What happened in Boston yesterday was a crime.

Between all the fun characters, the magical nature of the toys, and burning questions like “What is the sex like between Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head?” it’s easy to forget that there are human characters in this movie. Namely, the toys’ owner, Andy; his little sister, Molly; their mom; and … wait a minute, where’s the dad? This theory by Jess Nevins explains his absence by claiming that, while Buzz Lightyear and Woody are having wacky adventures, Andy’s parents are getting a divorce.

Each Toy Story movie covers a milestone in the life of Andy: his 10th birthday, the first time he goes to summer camp, and the day he leaves for college. And for all of these important events, Andy’s father is always absent, with no explanation. Also, look at Andy’s house: There are photos of Andy, his mom, and his sister, but no dad in sight.

Then there’s the fact that in the first movie, we see the hand of Andy’s mom as she’s bringing over his present. Guess what: There’s no wedding ring.

If Andy’s dad just happened to be on a business trip or was, like, standing in the other room the whole time, you’d still probably see some evidence of his existence. Obviously there could be many, many explanations for this, but it seems likely that either Andy’s parents broke up in a bitter divorce or his dad up and left the family at some point after Molly was conceived (which wasn’t that long before the first movie, since she’s a baby). If the father left recently, this would also explain why the family is moving to a smaller house in the first movie: It’s all they can afford on one salary.

It’s amazing (and kind of depressing) how many animated movies have no fathers in them.  (And even in those that do, it rarely ends well for him.)

As if contemplating a tormented child taking her own life isn’t horrible enough, we must now live with online blame-mobs grabbing hold of a narrative and demanding justice — and not necessarily in a courtroom. We are seeing it again this week in the sad case of Rehtaeh Parsons, a Nova Scotia 17-year-old who killed herself last week, her mother Leah Parson claims, after being raped and bullied relentlessly by peers over photographs of the assault.

On Facebook, in comment sections and on blogs, people are calling for Rehtaeh’s alleged rapists and bullies to be outed, named and shamed (only without using the word “alleged”). Some want Anonymous — which fingered the wrong alleged culprits after British Columbia teenager Amanda Todd committed suicide in October — to get in on the act. What could go wrong, right?

Plenty. Being accused of rape is a hell of a stigma nowadays, and rightly so. That’s why we leave such accusations to the professionals.

The police say they investigated Rehtaeh’s allegations, but found insufficient evidence to lay charges. Ms. Parsons accuses the police of neglecting to interview the accused until “much, much later.” And the police should answer for that, if it’s true. But when cops screw up, cases fall apart. Neither vigilantism nor compromising the usual standards by which justice is done is an appropriate remedy.

[...]

In her tremendous new book about bullying, Sticks and Stones, Emily Bazelon relates the story of Phoebe Prince, a Massachusetts 15-year-old who committed suicide in 2010 after an intense bout of high-school drama. It was nothing you wouldn’t expect a healthy child to pull through, and indeed Phoebe suffered from clinical depression (the “reddest red flag for suicide,” as Ms. Bazelon puts it). But the media reduced the narrative to simple “bullycide” — “the paradigmatic parable of teenage evil.”

Elected prosecutors charged six students with a dizzying range of offences: Assault with a deadly weapon for one who threw a pop can at Phoebe; statutory rape for two older teenagers who had consensual sex with her; a civil rights violation for one who called Phoebe an “Irish slut”; and causing bodily injury, i.e., Phoebe’s death. There was nothing to support this. It was madness, and a sane prosecutor eventually all but abandoned the cases. But in the meantime, worse than nothing was accomplished.

Update: Parsons’s mother is speaking out against vigilantism:

The mother of a Halifax teenager who killed herself after allegedly being raped and photographed by four boys is making a public plea for people to leave the boys linked to the allegations alone.

Rehtaeh Parsons, 17, died on the weekend after trying to take her life last Thursday. Leah Parsons says her daughter was raped by four boys when she was 15, and then became the victim of bullying and harassment after a picture taken on the night of the alleged attack was circulated.

[...]

Parsons took to Facebook to tell her daughter’s story and shame the unnamed alleged perpetrators. By Wednesday morning, an online petition calling for an inquiry into the police investigation had garnered more than 6,000 signatures.

“I don’t want more bullying. Rehtaeh wouldn’t want more bullying. I don’t think that’s justice,” Parsons said.

She called the police investigation into the case horrible, but said she doesn’t want vigilantes to go after the boys, none of whom have been charged.

“I think they need to be accountable for while that they did,” Parsons said. “I don’t want them to be physically harmed.”

The story has now spread around the world, and there is pressure on the provincial government to commence in inquiry into the case, particularly the RCMP’s seemingly inexplicable decision not to lay charges against the animals who allegedly raped Rehtaeh Parsons and then circulated photos of their own brutality.

I agree wholeheartedly.  The “system” – our schools, our police, our social workers – is supposed to protect young people.  And in this case, it failed miserably.  But here’s the thing: once an inquiry is called, it must be allowed to do its job.

Lawyer and Liberal Party operative Warren Kinsella undeniably speaks for many people in this “open letter” to the controversial online hackers’ collective, “Anonymous”:

Rehtaeh was thereafter harassed and abused and bullied by students at her school.  The torment got bad enough that Rehtaeh had to move to another town.  Months later, she returned, but the bullying and abuse never stopped.  She was sent messages calling her a “slut.”

You may ask what happened to the four males who raped her, and who circulated the photograph of Rehtaeh being raped – which, incidentally, meets the definition in Canadian law of child pornography.

Nothing.  Nothing happened to them.

The RCMP, who allegedly investigated, are led in Nova Scotia by Alphonse MacNeil.  He calls himself a “consensus builder” and has two daughters.  I’m sure you could find his email address if you needed to.

The Nova Scotia government, which agreed with – and energetically defended – the RCMP’s decision to do nothing about the rape or the child pornography, is led by NDP leader Darrell Dexter.  Interestingly, he represents Cole Harbour in the provincial legislature.  His email isn’t readily available, either, but I know you’ll find that, too.

His Attorney-General is Ross Landry.  Yesterday, Landry refused to reopen the case; by the afternoon, he had seemingly changed his tune.  His constituency office email is here.  I don’t know what his email is.

The names of the little bastards who did this, and who are still alive and walk free in Cole Harbour, are unknown to most of us.  But, as in the Steubenville, Ohio case, I am certain anyone who is sufficiently motivated can find out who the little bastards are, and name and shame them.

I’m unclear how to appeal to you, Anonymous.  But if there was ever a case that cried out for your attention – and if there were ever men like MacNeil, Dexter and Landry who deserved to be fired, or worse, for their pathetic responses – I don’t know what it is.  What happened to Rehtaeh and her family is so horrible, so evil, I am ashamed that it happened in my country.

In closing, I should note that Rehtaeh’s heart was sent to Toronto yesterday, to be transplanted into another person.  I don’t know why I feel a need to mention that to you, but I do.

Maybe because, in some way, it feels like Rehtaeh is still watching now, to see who will do something, and who will do nothing.

My own feelings about this kind of online activism are decidedly mixed.  The Steubenville, Ohio case – the first one that came to mind when I read about Rehtaeh’s story yesterday – may never have been resolved at all had it not been for the work of Anonymous.

But I also know that online activism – especially when particularly reprehnsible criminal allegations come into play – can go very, very wrong.  When George Zimmerman shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin while patrolling a gated community in Florida, Zimmerman’s address and contact information quickly circulated online.

Just one problem: it wasn’t the same George Zimmerman:

An elderly Florida couple have been forced to move into a hotel after their home address was wrongly tweeted as belonging to the man who shot teen Trayvon Martin.

The tweets were traced back to a man in California and the address was also reportedly retweeted by director Spike Lee to his almost 250,000 followers.

The couple, aged 70 and 72, have been harassed with hate mail, been hassled by media and had scared neighbors questioning them since the tweet, their son Chip Humble told the Orlando Sentinel.

Fearful for their safety, and hoping to escape the spotlight, the couple have temporarily moved to a hotel.

The confusion seems to stem from the fact the woman’s son is named William George Zimmerman and he lived briefly at the address in 1995.

When William Zimmerman pleaded with the man who tweeted the address, the man responded, “Black power all day. No justice, no peace” along with an obscenity.

One of the most devastating books about the legal system I’ve ever read is Dorothy Rabinowitz’s No Crueler Tyrannies, about the infamous Fells Acres abuse cases in Massachusetts.  The Amirault family, who ran a child care centre, were caught up in the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” hysteria – remember that? – of the mid-to-late 1980s, and falsely accused of molesting young children in the most shocking ways imaginable.

The Amiraults were innocent, but thanks to overzealous prosecutors, exploitative media coverage and opportunistic politicians, their lives were destroyed.  If the internet had been around then, do you believe they wouldn’t have been targeted online as well?

I went to high school, I know how freaking horrible teenagers can be, so I’m inclined to believe Rehtaeh Parsons’s grieving mother.  However, we are only hearing her story – we have not heard from the police, her teachers or school officials, or her classmates.

That’s why I want an inquiry.  But emotional cases like this can lead to bad information, bad law, and innocent people getting caught in the net.  I work on criminal cases myself – albeit on the defense side – and I know how what gets reported in the media can bear only the slightest resemblance to what actually happened.

Even before Kinsella posted his open letter to Anonymous, they were already on their way to tracking down, naming and shaming the people who did this to that poor girl.  If they find them – and if they actually did it, assuming they get the right guys in the first place – well, I will shed no tears.

Justice must be done.  But our system protects criminal defendants, and places the burden of proof squarely on the prosecution, for very good reasons.

Postscript: according to CTV, Parsons’s family says donations in her memory “can be made to the East Coast German Shepherd Rescue, Metro SPCA, and the Laing House – a Halifax-based peer support organization for youth with mental illness.”

It reminds me of the infamous Steubenville, Ohio rape case – except that it involves a school not far from my home, and that it resulted in a teenager’s death.  What’s really disturbing is that photos of the rape were distributed among this poor girl’s classmates, who then bullied her to death.

It’s at times like this I thank God the internet wasn’t around when I was in high school.

Rehtaeh Parsons had a goofy sense of humour and loved playing with her little sisters. She wore glasses, had long, dark hair and was a straight-A student whose favourite subject was science.

On Sunday night, the 17-year-old’s family took her off life-support.

Three days earlier, on Thursday night, she hanged herself in the bathroom.

It was 17 months before that when “the person Rehtaeh once was all changed,” her mother wrote Monday on a Facebook memorial page.

“She went with a friend to another’s home. In that home, she was raped by four young boys,” wrote Leah Parsons.

“One of those boys took a photo of her being raped and decided it would be fun to distribute the photo to everyone in Rehtaeh’s school and community, where it quickly went viral.”

Rehtaeh, a 15-year-old Cole Harbour District High School student at the time, was shunned, wrote her mother.

“They all go to the same school. She couldn’t go back to the school,” Parsons said Monday in an interview.

[...]

After Rehtaeh left her school, other kids were relentless.

“People texted her all the time, saying ‘Will you have sex with me?’” she remembered. “Girls texting, saying ‘You’re such a slut.’”

But then there is the question of how the adults handled the alleged sexual assault that Rehtaeh described to her mother.

RCMP spokesman Cpl. Scott MacRae confirmed the police are now investigating a sudden death involving a young person.

“An investigation into an earlier sexual assault was completed, and in consultation with the Crown, there was insufficient evidence to lay charges,” MacRae said.

Out of respect for the family, and because of privacy laws, he couldn’t discuss details of the investigation Monday, and the force sent its sympathy to Rehtaeh’s loved ones, he said.

Parsons said she was unhappy with what she saw of the investigation.

“They didn’t even interview the boys until much, much later. To me, I’d think you’d get the boys right away, separate them.”

When it came to the photo or photos taken that night, “nothing was done about that because they couldn’t prove who had pressed the photo button on the phone,” she said.

She was told that the distribution of the photos is “not really a criminal issue, it’s more of a community issue,” she said.

“Even though she was 15 at the time, which is child pornography.

“The whole case was full of things like that. We didn’t have a rape kit done because we didn’t even know (anything had happened) until several days later when she had a breakdown in my kitchen.

“She was trying to keep it to herself.”

I know from experience that criminal investigations can be much more complicated than they’re portrayed in the media, but it seems strange that none of the animals who did this were charged despite photographic evidence showing them raping her.

You can bet everyone who went to school with these guys knows who it was.

North Korea does some legitimate trade with China, supplies cheap labor to South Korean companies operating factories in a “special economic zone,” and builds grandiose monuments in Africa.  But most of its earnings come from weapons, drug trafficking and counterfeiting:

To learn more about the country’s illegal exports, we spoke with Ma Young Ae, a defector who used to work as a North Korean spy. Ma now lives in Virginia where she runs a North Korean restaurant. But back in Pyongyang she was one of the country’s elites.

Ma worked for Kim Jong Il’s internal police force. Her job was was to track down drug smugglers. That sounds like pretty normal law enforcement, except for one difference. She was supposed to stop small-time Korean drug dealers in order to protect the biggest drug dealer in the country: the North Korean government.

Ma told us the North Korean government produced opium on a large scale. But it hid its poppy fields from most of the population. Ma only saw the fields because she was an insider.

After harvesting the fields, the government would put its empty factories to use. The government would turn on its production lines at night and process opium, Ma says. Then they would pack the product in plastic cubes the size of dictionaries and smuggle it out of the country through China.

This was in the mid-eighties, when opium was the big drug. These days the drug of choice for export out of North Korea is ice, also know as methamphetamine.

Ma never smuggled the drugs herself. But she did smuggle something else. When she traveled in China, tracking down those non-government-approved drug dealers, the government didn’t give Ma a corporate credit card.

Instead, she was given a wad of counterfeit dollars. This is another of North Korea’s exports: Counterfeit $100 bills known as super-notes.

Nobody was going to just accept a brand-new $100 dollar bill from a North Korean. Instead, the Chinese would give the North Koreans sixty real U.S. dollars for every fake $100 bill.

It was during these trips that Ma noticed that the Chinese across the river had a much better standard of living than the North Koreans. So, when she had the chance, she defected.

Besides the illegal drugs and the counterfeit currency, North Korea is believed to deal in lots of weapons: rifles, missiles, perhaps even nuclear technology. Just a couple of weeks ago in Lybia, the rebels found a bunch of North Korean rocket launchers in a box labeled “bulldozer parts.”

The criminals claimed they were making a £20m gangster film called A Landscape Of Lies so they could claim £1million in tax credits and VAT repayments. 

When HMRC became suspicious former property developer Bassar Al-Issa, 33, film producer Aoife Madden, 31, Tariq Hassan, 51, Ian Sherwood, 53, and Osama Al-Baghdady, 50, cobbled together a script and cast to try and convince investigators the project was real. 

[...]

At least ten versions of a the script were drafted, pre-production work was done to try to con HMRC investigators but it failed, Southwark Crown Court was told. 

‘The documents were mere window dressing, they were produced to fool HMRC and the accountants who acted on their behalf to claim film credits that there was a film being made’, said prosecutor Shane Collery.

‘It was a fiction, they were intended to deceive. The work had not been carried out to anything like the level set out in the invoices.’

The Landscape Of Lies website boasts: ‘This gritty British drama is a complex exploration of lives that will draw you into their seedy world of power, lies, and betrayal. 

‘The dark themes are subtly illuminated by the characters’ poignant stories, The storyline challenges peoples notions of what’s right and what’s wrong.’ 

Al-Issa was found guilty of two counts of conspiracy to cheat the public revenue. 

Hassan, Al-Baghdady and Sherwood were each found guilty of a single count of conspiracy to cheat the public revenue but cleared of a second conspiracy charge. 

Madden, born in Newry, Northern Ireland, earlier admitted the two conspiracy charges.

Al-Issa, a bankrupt former construction company boss from Iraq, dreamt up the scheme while studying at the University of East London.

 

In a hilarious twist, the patched-together “fake” movie actually won a “Silver Ace” at the Las Vegas Film Festival, though festival organizers now say that was little more than a participation award.   How is a (real) movie about this not already in production?