Word: palm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that awarded $97,500 to a rape victim whose name was published by the Florida Star on the ground that the information had been legally obtained from police records. Florida's law, passed in 1911, is of such doubtful constitutionality that Palm Beach County state attorney David Bludworth has asked for a declaratory ruling on whether he can press charges against news organizations that have gone public with the woman's name in the Palm Beach case...
...that the Times had the obligation of "telling our readers what we know." Thus the newspaper had no choice but to include the woman's name in a long article describing her "little wild streak" -- speeding tickets, an affair with the son of a once prosperous but now bankrupt Palm Beach family, a daughter born out of wedlock and poor grades in high school...
...Times did not apply the same standard to another highly publicized sexual assault, the rape and near fatal beating of a jogger by a mob of teenagers in Central Park two years ago. In that case, unlike the Palm Beach incident, the victim's name was available in official documents. It was published by a local weekly, broadcast on a local TV station and featured on placards of protesters who claimed that the defendants were being railroaded. Yet in dozens of stories the Times never published the jogger's name...
...incident was a random, violent attack by strangers and the other could fall into the murkier category of date rape, in which the victim and her alleged assailant know each other. Susan Estrich, who teaches law at the University of Southern California, contends that reporting the name in the Palm Beach case and not in the Central Park jogger case proves "how much acquaintance rape is still not considered to be a real rape." Date-rape cases can be messy: Was it an unambivalent lack of consent, or mixed signals, next-day regrets, confusion from large amounts of alcohol? When...
...remains to impugn the victim's moral character. Courts have come to outlaw testimony about a rape victim's sexual history unless it can be shown that the evidence has a direct bearing on the assault in question, but there are no such restrictions on the press. In the Palm Beach incident, it may be too late to repair the damage from having named the alleged victim and the suspect. But at least the case does present an opportunity to rethink the issue...