Articles related to sexual assault

Suppose the State is prosecuting a defendant for the sexual assault of a young child. Though the child has been identified by name in the arrest warrant and investigative reports provided to the defendant, the State would prefer not to name the victim in the indictment. May it refer to the victim in that document as “Victim #1”?

Over the weekend, the judge presiding over Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial declared a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. I hadn’t followed the case very closely and my knee-jerk reaction was, “wait, fifty women have accused this guy of sexual assault and he didn’t get convicted?” As I thought more about it, I began to wonder how many accusers — other than Andrea Constand, the alleged victim in the case — were allowed to testify against Cosby. It turns out that it was only one.

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town. Not a day has passed since I closed the cover that I haven’t contemplated its harrowing account of the sexual assault scandal that enveloped the town of Missoula, its university (the University of Montana) and its revered football team, the Griz, from 2010 through 2012. The book is a powerful work of investigative journalism that challenged some of my beliefs about the incidence of sexual assault on campus.

In the 2015 case State v. Hicks, __ N.C. App. __, 768 S.E.2d 373 (2015), after holding that the trial court committed plain error in its jury instructions, the N.C. Court of Appeals urged the General Assembly to clarify the relevant law:

My last post discussed the applicability of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to North Carolina’s jails. Today’s post looks at the substantive standards themselves. These are the standards with […]