Arguments

We received an interesting visitor the other day who claims to be a child therapist, so I thought I’d do a response here; her first foray onto the blog was pretty standard: I’m a horrible fucking person who should be fucking ashamed of themselves, fuckity fuck fuck fuck…so that’s nice. After I explained that neither I nor this blog are pro-rape, she wrote back with a longer attempt to show me the error of my ways, which I always appreciate. Her comments are in bold, my responses are not.

Linda Bailey said...

This is such a horrible blog. The owner of this blog doesn't have a fucking clue. No woman or child deserves to be raped. I see that the owner of this blog is the type that always blames the victim. It doesn't matter what the situation is, no woman or child deserves to be violated and have the rest of her life ruined by nightmares, being afraid to be touched again, PTSD...on top of not being believed. This blog truly does a disservice to women and children everywhere, and the owner of this blog should be ashamed.

Linda,

It's interesting that you would ignore the entire premise of the blog, which is that Carlos Coy was falsely convicted, in order to imply that I'm making excuses for rape. As you can see from the many, many stories presented here, Texas has a habit of falsely convicting innocent men and women, refusing to believe them when they state their innocence, ruining their lives and very possibly causing PTSD by imprisoning them until, years later, they are exonerated.

At what point am I allowed to question a glaringly false conviction? Does any individual who makes an accusation deserve to be believed despite obvious inconsistencies in their testimony and the evidence presented? Or do you prefer that we that we just blindly accept the imprisonment of innocent men, women and children in order to avoid making their accusers uncomfortable?

Linda Bailey said...

There are people who have been wrongfully convicted who deserve support; however, the man you represent is not one of them. I'm a child therapist from the Houston area. I'm very familiar with the case in question.

I’m thrilled to hear it. It saves me time if I don’t have to link back and forth to show the basic outline of the case, so I will take you at your word.

You have to understand how these cases work. With a child molestation case, you usually have the child molester and the victim alone in a bedroom. There aren't going to be any witnesses or surveillance cameras around. Most of the time DNA can't be recovered either, especially if it's a delayed outcry. If the child waits days, weeks, months, or years before he/she tells anyone about the abuse, then there is just no way DNA can be recovered.

Especially if there’s not even the slightest effort to do so; remember, Jane Doe made her outcry immediately, and was interviewed by an HPD officer. The only delay was on the part of the Houston Police, who waited 7 days to bring her and her mother (the outcry witness) in to make a statement, then trashed that statement and brought her in to the CAC 3 days later to make new statements. The accusations changed significantly between day 1 and day 10, as I’m sure you are aware.

So all we have is the child's word. Should we simply ignore the child's outcry? Should we simply let these child molesters get away? Of course not.

Is my other option to simply imprison anyone who’s accused regardless of guilt or innocence, because we don’t want the bad ones to get away? Our justice system is predicated on Blackstone’s Formulation, that it’s better for the guilty to go free than for the innocent to suffer. That’s why there should be an investigation, an attempt to gather DNA, and at least a cursory examination of whether the accusations are consistent.

You yourself admit that there are people who have been wrongfully convicted; do you refuse to believe that any of them have been wrongfully convicted of ‘icky’ crimes, like sexual assault if a child?

The fact of the matter is, the child is a witness to the crime. Like any witness, the child deserves to be heard in a court of law. It then becomes a jury's province to determine how credible the child is. A victim's testimony is evidence, and it can be very powerful evidence. Have you ever listened to a child's testimony in a case such as this? I have. More times than I like to think about.

When you listen to these children recount the abuse, you know they are telling the truth. There is simply no way they are fabricating these stories of perversion and horror.

Is there any way a story about being flown to Mexico to be raped by soldiers and returned before Mom picks you up from daycare, of murdering and eating babies, of seeing witches fly and being flushed down toilets to secret sex abuse rooms could possibly be fabricated? I assume, as a therapist, that you are also familiar with the ‘satanic panic’ that resulted in so much misery for so many falsely accused people.

The therapists, police officers, and judges in those cases were no less educated than you, no less earnest. They truly believed that, as you say, there was ‘simply no way they are fabricating these stories of perversion and horror’…yet now almost all of those imprisoned have been exonerated and released.

Do you know how to judge credibility? You can tell by the way they speak, their demeanor, their body language, etc. Your own experience, intuition, and common sense can tell you when something rings true or not. Do you have children of your own? If so, I'm sure you can tell when they are lying or telling the truth.

You have great faith in your powers of intuition; I have no doubt that those involved in the above mentioned moral panic felt the same way, as did those involved in convicting the San Antonio 4. Those women have been released and are well on their way to exoneration, despite the jury in their case being convinced by experience, intuition, and common sense that the accusers had been subjected to horrific abuse, including being injected with drugs and raped with a knife. None of these things were proven, but they were believed.

Yes, false accusations can happen, but it's not simply, "any individual who makes an accusation" can do this to someone. These children are extensively interviewed by police, therapists, and prosecutors. Then the child must testify in front of a jury with the child molester present in the courtroom. Do you have any idea how much it takes to go through all of that? That's a lot of hoops and hurdles to surmount. The rare false outcries are weeded out way before the case makes it to trial. In my experience, about 6-8% of the children I interviewed were lying, and it was usually because of a custody dispute that was happening between the parents.

Police, therapists, and prosecutors, all of whom, I have no doubt, have only the best intentions. I would agree that those involved in the justice system truly believe they are helping children, but that help can become dangerous when their ‘gut feeling’ tells them that they have the right guy despite what the evidence says. As you are so familiar with the case, you know that Coy has stated he and Jane Doe’s mother were romantically involved; does that raise the possibility, in your mind, that the accusations may have been false?

Or what if the child was being abused, but was encouraged to name Coy as her attacker because of his notoriety? The case of Ricardo Rachell comes to mind. He was convicted of an attack on a little boy and spent 6 years in prison. It’s likely he was identified because his face, disfigured years earlier, gave the victim’s mother the creeps.

Rachell was eventually freed because DNA, the existence of which was never communicated to his defense attorney, proved he was innocent. Despite the ‘hoops and hurdles’, he was wrongfully convicted. The attack was real, but the child testified that an innocent man had carried it out.

As far as inconsistencies, people are not robots. When recounting a story, it is normal for certain details to vary due to the limitations of human memory. This applies to everyone, especially children since their minds have not fully developed. In regards to this case, it is my understanding that the core of the child's story has always remained consistent. Maybe some minor details have varied, but the who, what, when, where, has always stayed the same.

Then I am afraid your understanding is wrong; the child’s story fluctuated wildly before, during, and after the trial. There are a lot of resources here on the blog, perhaps you should look into that.

I really do wish you were in the courtroom the day this child testified. Perhaps if you were there hearing it for yourself, you would realize that this child was telling the truth, and that Carlos Coy is exactly where he belongs.

She must have been very convincing, despite testifying repeatedly in court that she might have dreamed the whole thing. Not having been there, however, I can only look at the circumstances of the case, the testimony that has been made public, and think, “If they could convict a man on no more than that, who on this earth is safe?”

In the end, that’s what this blog is about; if they can convict Carlos Coy on nonexistent physical evidence, malleable testimony, and nothing else, who will they come after next? How many other men and women have been crushed by this non-stop urge to believe the children, evidence be damned?