Dangers in Rape Case ‘Reforms’

In his article (Editorial Pages, April 8), “New Dangers Are Evident in Rape-Case ‘Reforms,’ ” Alan Dershowitz used the claim that an Illinois man had been falsely accused of rape to question a series of reforms that have occurred in the area of rape prosecutions. He believes that the recantation “raises profound questions that go beyond the injustice done to Gary Dotson.”

On the contrary, the recantation is unique to the case of Gary Dotson. Why is Gary Dotson front-page news? Not because what happened to him is commonplace, but because it was an aberration. Day after day, in criminal courts across the land, hundreds of rapists enter guilty pleas or are found guilty by juries of their peers. They are found guilty because they are guilty and only a very few sensational cases are even mentioned by the media (often on the last page of the newspaper).

In a criminal-justice system in which human beings must judge one another, there will always be the rare case where an innocent person is convicted. All caring and compassionate people mourn for the wasted six years of Dotson’s life. But let us not follow in Dershowitz’s illogical footsteps and question a series of much-needed reforms that have nothing what-soever to do with Dotson’s case.

Dershowitz’s first mistake is to state that “the rules of evidence have been changed to make it easier to convict defendants of rape and harder to cross-examine alleged rape victims.” The motivation behind rape-reform laws has been to treat rape like any other crime. In no other trial but a rape trial was a prosecutor ever required to provide corroboration for a victim’s testimony. A robber could be convicted on the victim’s testimony alone; a rapist couldn’t. The law was changed to make the state’s burden in a rape case conform to its burden in other cases.

How does this change relate to the Dotson case? There was plenty of corroboration--torn clothing, injuries, all apparently self-inflicted. Reinstituting the need for corroboration wouldn’t have helped Dotson.

Another critical improvement has been the severe limitation on a defendant’s ability to question a victim about her past sexual history. In the past, allowing a defendant to ask such questions was based on a false assumption--that a woman who had consented to sexual intercourse with anyone in the past was more likely to have consented with the defendant. This grossly sexist assumption led to some of the most blatant harassment of witnesses in our criminal-justice history.

Does Dershowitz really mean to suggest that we return to the days when rape victims were fair game for all sorts of humiliation and embarrassment? And again, as to the Dotson case, would such questioning have helped him? Apparently the young lady was so fearful of pregnancy from her first sexual experimentation that she invented the rape story to appease her parents.

A third change that Dershowitz questions is the policy of most newspapers of not printing the names of rape victims. He believes that printing such names would enable a defendant to discover a “prior history of false accusations.” Does he really think it’s the norm for women to go around blithely accusing men of raping them?

In my experience, a false claim of rape is extremely rare; the trauma of reporting and prosecuting a charge of rape discourages such attempts. So what purpose is served by revealing to the world that a woman has been raped? And, again, would such a policy have helped Gary Dotson? I don’t think his accuser had made any prior false claims.

SANDRA L. BUTTITTA

Los Angeles

Buttitta is the deputy in charge of the sexual-crimes program in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.