This editorial might make your skin crawl, and it should.
Court decisions were reached in the Steubenville, Ohio, case: “Two members of Steubenville’s celebrated high school football team were found guilty Sunday of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl, and Ohio’s attorney general warned the case isn’t over, saying he is investigating whether coaches, parents and other students broke the law, too,” The Associated Press reported.
“The crime, which took place after a party last summer, shocked many in Steubenville because of the seeming callousness with which other students took out their cellphones to record the attack and gossiped about it online,” continued the report. “In fact, the case came to light via a barrage of morning-after text messages, social media posts and online photos and video.”
It happened in August. Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16, were sentenced Sunday to at least a year in juvenile prison. The details of the case, if you haven’t heard about it so far, are shocking. High schoolers took advantage of a young girl who was too intoxicated to consent to anything. The victim said, according to the AP report, she “believed she was assaulted when she later read text messages among friends and saw a photo of herself naked, along with a video that made fun of her and the alleged attack.”
“They treated her like a toy,” said prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter. All of the details make us feel extremely sorry for the victim. No one should have to go through that sort of violent situation. Could you imagine someone in the national media even slightly defending the accusers? CNN did.
“What’s the lasting effect, though, on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of rape, essentially?” CNN anchor Candy Crowley asked on a Sunday morning broadcast. She wanted to know what this verdict meant because “a 16 year old, sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, they still sound like 16 year olds.”
“There’s always that moment of just — lives are destroyed,” CNN legal contributor Paul Callan replied. “But in terms of what happens now, the most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law. That will haunt them for the rest of their lives.” Are we supposed to be concerned for the futures of young men who were found guilty of rape? Crowley wasn’t the only CNN reporter to express that sort of emotion or concern. CNN reporter Poppy Harlow said it was “incredibly difficult” to watch “as these two young men — who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students — literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.”
We’re not sorry if their lives are ruined. We don’t care how much they sobbed or broke down in court. They made an amazingly horrible mistake, and they got caught.
“You were your own accuser, through the social media that you chose to publish your criminal conduct on,” the victim’s mother said. She added that the case “does not define who my daughter is. She will persevere, grow and move on.”
