Word: assaultive
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Words are powerful. In court, they can make or break a case. But just how far should the judicial system go to control them? That's the question central to one case in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a sexual assault trial has morphed into a federal case over the First Amendment rights of witnesses and, more broadly, the language surrounding rape...
Because the issue at stake was one of consent, not assault, the words that Bowen and Safi chose in court to describe the incident were particularly fraught. And according to Clarence Mock, Safi's defense attorney, the term rape seethes with enough emotion to prejudice a jury and is itself a legal conclusion. Once that word is uttered, Mock says, "the skunk is in the jury box and it's hard to get the smell...
...second trial was scheduled to begin last spring. This time, Bowen refused to comply with the court-ordered language ban, which had been expanded to include the terms "sexual assault kit" and "sexual assault nurse." On Bowen's behalf, protesters demonstrated outside the Lincoln courthouse, and a petition, which Bowen signed, circulated on the Internet to change Nebraska law. Because of the publicity surrounding the case, Judge Cheuvront declared a mistrial during jury selection, accusing Bowen of inciting public furor over her case. "Ms. Bowen and her friends hoped to intimidate this court and interfere with the selection...
...significant that this First Amendment challenge regarding the rights of witnesses has originated in a sexual-assault case. Sex crimes, due in part to their intensely personal nature, tap into a complicated set of cultural values and historical meaning; thus, a ban on sex-crime-related words carries a different weight from one on words like "murder" or "embezzlement." Michelle Anderson, an expert in sexual violence and the law, and the dean of the City University of New York Law School, notes that rulings like Cheuvront's reflect the way that the courts have traditionally viewed rape cases. "The notion...
...third sexual-assault trial has yet to be rescheduled, but in the meantime, Bowen hopes to eventually take her appeal from the federal district court to the U.S. Supreme Court and achieve a national standard for allowable language in the courts - one that upholds a witness's right to free speech without treading on the right of the accused to a fair trial. As Murphy put it, "There should not be a discrepancy as to the fundamental right of a witness to testify truthfully in a court...