Thursday, March 24, 2016

Some thoughts on the Ghomeshi verdict

One would like to believe that the team that made the decision to move forward with the case against Jian Ghomeshi were intelligent, well-educated, serious people, supervised by seasoned senior legal professionals intimately acquainted not only with the minutiae of the law, but also with the realities of what might and might not fly in the courtroom.

But you have to wonder...

First off, is it an asset or a liability when the complainants all come forward more than a decade after the fact? I'm no legal scholar, but it seems to me this would be a major liability.

And what the hell is "overcoming resistance by choking?" Really? If they thought they had a case on the sexual assault charges, something that everybody understands, why would they muddy the waters with this bonus charge that nobody has ever heard of? Generally speaking, if someone is preventing me from breathing, wouldn't that be attempted murder?

So this dream prosecutorial team put together the most high profile case Canada has seen in a generation, only to come out looking like vindictive dupes. They went after him because he was famous. They went after him because he's Iranian. They went after him because of his unconventional sexual lifestyle, and so on.

The professionals took a chance and lost. But it wasn't just the dream prosecutorial team that lost; it's every victim of sexual violence, past, present, and future.

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