Word: bowens
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...story goes back to Oct. 30, 2004, when Tory Bowen, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Nebraska, met Pamir Safi, an Army reservist, at a downtown Lincoln bar. After sharing drinks, they left the bar together, went back to Safi's apartment and engaged in sexual intercourse. Bowen says she was too drunk - and, she believes, drugged - to consent to sex. Safi says their encounter was consensual...
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...
...when the trial began last October, Mock convinced Judge Jeffre Cheuvront to ban the words rape, victim and assailant from the trial - including from Bowen's testimony - arguing that such words would be "unfairly inflammatory, prejudicial, and misleading." Nebraska state law holds that "evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed" by the potential for unfair prejudice...
Under the language restriction, Bowen testified that Safi "was inside of me and on top of me" when she regained consciousness the morning following their meeting. That trial ended in a hung jury...
...after the defense argued they were "unfairly inflammatory." More neutral terms like sex were allowed. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and on July 12 the second attempt was declared a mistrial because of the case's newfound publicity, driven in part by the outraged plaintiff, Tory Bowen, who says, "What happened to me was rape...