It's going viral.
Posted on 12/13/2018 12:29:18 PM PST by Elderberry
Thousands have signed a petition calling for the judge in an ex-Baylor frat president’s rape case to resign or be removed from office after he accepted a plea deal that involved no jail time.
On Monday, Judge Ralph Strother accepted the plea agreement for Jacob W. Anderson, a former Baylor student who was accused of raping a woman referred to as Donna Doe in 2016. As part of the deal, Anderson agreed to plea to a lesser charge of unlawful restraint and will not have to register as a sex offender.
Strother and Assistant District Attorney Hilary LaBorde, who prosecuted the case, were not immediately available for comment Thursday afternoon.
The petition, titled “Request the Resignation of Judge Ralph Strother,” had more than 18,000 signatures on the Care2 Petitions website early Thursday afternoon. The petition attacks both Strother and LaBorde, who agreed to the plea deal .
Donna Doe’s family said LaBorde blindsided them with the plea deal after reassuring them that Anderson would be convicted. In emails between LaBorde and Doe’s family, LaBorde said she thought a plea deal would be best because she had just tried a rape case similar to Doe’s in which the accused rapist was not convicted.
Some of the reasons listed in the petition for Strother’s removal were:
“The sixth amendment guaranteeing the right to a speedy and public trial was not honored. A system created by wealthy white men protects wealthy white men. When judges on benches see themselves reflected in the face of a perpetrator and recuse him of all responsibility, they will not feel a modicum of remorse due to their privilege of race and class. A prior case lost by LaBorde is not a reasonable basis for LaBorde’s lack of attempt to bring this one to trial. LaBorde’s unwillingness to allow Mary her day in court betrays fundamental basic human rights and perpetuates a climate in which future victims will continue to report sex crimes at an alarmingly low rate.”
Strother told KWKT he has also received death threats via email in response to the plea deal.
After the plea deal was accepted Monday, LaBorde issued a statement in defense of the deal.
“Given the claims made publicly, I understand why people are upset,” she wrote. “However, all of the facts must be considered and there are many facts that the public does not have. In approving this agreement, Judge Strother had access to all the statements that have ever been made by all people involved and agreed that the plea agreement offered was appropriate in this case.”
Strother, the 19th State District Judge in McLennan County, ran unopposed in the GOP primary in 2016, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald. Archived news articles from The Baylor Lariat, the university’s newspaper, state that Strother was appointed to the post in 1999 by then Gov. George W. Bush. He served as first assistant district attorney for McLennan County before his appointment.
Strother is listed as a prominent alumni by Baylor University.
In 2017, Strother sentenced a man who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a Baylor student in 2013 to deferred adjudication probation and ordered him to pay for the woman’s counseling, according to the Waco Tribune.
Earlier this year, Strother allowed a man convicted of sexual assault to serve jail time on the weekends. The man was a former Baylor student and was given 30 days in days, AP reported.
Politicians also voiced their criticism of Strother, such as Jana Lynn Sanchez, a Democrat who recently lost a bid for U.S. Congress.
The judge wasn’t the one to negotiate the plea deal. Perhaps the anger behind this petition should have been directed at getting the prosecutor to resign.
“A system created by wealthy white men protects wealthy white men. “
...I know nothing about this but this helps explain it.
” A system created by wealthy white men protects wealthy white men. “
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Here we go———again. It never ends.
.
Yep....how come the same never criticizes black men? You know, the over the top crime that happens amongst this demographic?
It’s always the white guy’s fault. Except when it comes time to winning a war or assistance during emergencies.
The DA and who know how many prosecutors will be gone come January when the new DA Barry Johnson takes over.
There are a whole lot of people wanting Strother gone.
“Except when it comes time to winning a war or assistance during emergencies.”
—
Or building this country from scratch.
They whine and bitch about the country-——but they DON’T LEAVE.
.
The style of writing here screams that the author wants to sound educated but fails.
Call me old fashioned, sexist, and reactionary, but I believe we men should protect our women, if need be with deadly force.
A lot of truth in that, though. Wealthy friends of the judge often walk. Seen it more than once.
If they didn't know until after the trial they weren't doing their job.
If they knew at the start of the trial or learned it along the way and didn't contest the judge, they knew they had a weak case and wanted to cause problems after they lost.
What the hell is in the water being drunk by the judges and prosecutors in the Waco area?
We only learned of this case after the plea deal and it became a national story; likely promoted by the same group of people who present a distorted narrative of events.
I don't know all the facts but I suspect if we knew the full story of the claim of rape it might not be as clear cut.
This may be just another example of 'regret sex' which feminists will now use to beat us over the head that there's an 'epidemic of rape' on college campuses and guilty white rich frat boys are all rapists.
I'd love an objective report on the series of events but we usually only get the feminist-rape perspective.
It's going viral.
March 9, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/sports/baylor-football-sexual-assault.html
Ms. Hernandez, who has appeared on ESPN and who spoke to The Times for this article, assumed that her rape was a horrible but isolated incident at Baylor, a private university of nearly 17,000 students that takes pride in its Baptist foundation. And she wasn’t alone in believing that: Even after Mr. Elliott was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in 2014, Baylor officials said they considered him to be a solitary bad actor preying on a campus of goodness.
As three leading members of Baylor’s Board of Regents later described their sense of him at the time: “an isolated case.”
Mr. Elliott has subsequently been accused of sexually assaulting several other women, and since the rape of Ms. Hernandez in 2012 the allegations of sexual assault by Baylor football players have multiplied, causing incalculable damage to the university’s reputation and leading to resignations and firings, including those of the president, the football coach and the athletic director.
The crisis has left alumni apoplectic, students outraged, donors turning on one another, and the Board of Regents bracing for the next blow. Lawsuits clutter the courts, with more than a dozen women, including Ms. Hernandez, claiming that they had been assaulted amid a campus culture that put them at risk.
Two months ago, John Clune, a Colorado lawyer who specializes in cases of campus assault and who had already resolved three other women’s claims against Baylor, filed a lawsuit on behalf of an alleged victim that sought, in part, to quantify the crisis. It made the startling claim that at least 52 rapes by at least 31 players had occurred from 2011 through 2014 — a period when the once-hapless Baylor football program became a dominant force in the highly competitive Big 12 Conference.
Baylor’s interim president has said in a statement that he cannot confirm Mr. Clune’s numbers, which followed other troubling figures that Baylor’s board gave to The Wall Street Journal in October: assaults on 17 women by 19 players, including four gang rapes.
Collectively, the cases have become a cautionary parable for modern-day college athletics, one in which a Christian university seemed to lose sight of its core values in pursuit of football glory and protected gridiron heroes who preyed on women.
Last week, the Texas Rangers, the statewide law enforcement agency, confirmed that it had begun a preliminary investigation into Baylor. That announcement came days after a state representative, Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio, filed a resolution urging Gov. Greg Abbott to have the Rangers investigate “the obstruction of justice surrounding the sexual assault of young female students at Baylor University.”
And this week, a federal judge rejected Baylor’s request to throw out a lawsuit filed against the university by 10 women who say they were sexually assaulted while they were students. Judge Robert L. Pitman of Federal District Court ruled that each plaintiff had “plausibly alleged that Baylor was deliberately indifferent to her report(s) of sexual assault, depriving her of educational opportunities to which she was entitled.”
Much more at link
Virtue signaling convinces the left of its own unimpeachable morals. When push comes to shove, it rejects guilt for any of its wrongdoing and attributes such allegations to conspiracy theories.
Peter Daou, a Democratic strategist and former advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, tweeted on Monday that Ford will be "attacked, smeared, and demonized" and that people must "BELIEVE WOMEN."
Thank you for your response. I suspect we are in
broad agreement. I’m not proposing a vigilante
response to “regret sex”: if the victim cannot put
up a minimal defense that leaves a mark she was
not a responsible adult.
But in my view, killing a rapist caught in the act
is a righteous deed, not least because it will probably
prevent a lot more rapes in the future by the same
perp.
When I read the verdict to my husband the other day he said, “the girl’s father needs to take care of this.”
There is lots of stink in WACO
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