Katzav was condemned to seven years of jail. The conviction and even the charges themselves were a matter of hysterical farse in that no evidence was presented against him. It was a case of his word against hers - and the judges chose to believe her, convicting the man who was a former Knesset Member, Transportation Minister and President on two counts of rape. He was stereotyped as the veritable prototype of all those swarthy rapists that terrorize Tel Aviv females. He will pay for it.
4 comments:
We no longer live in the days of halachic criminal law (and not yet in the days of sharia), so the requirement that there be two competent male witnesses to the crime of rape no longer applies.
In the common law system, the trier of fact determines the credibility of each witness and in this case they found the victim to be more credible than the defendant, beyond a reasonable doubt. I think Katzav has only himself and his slimy defense counsel to thank for that (and let's not even get into the fact that he could have had a much more lenient plea bargain). In order to make yourself even less credible than a hysterical female, you really have to try hard, but he managed somehow.
You may disagree with that determination, but you were not the judge and were not presented with all the evidence.
The halachic system made conviction for rape almost impossible, which doesn't strike me as right either.
K
He did manage to sound like an Oriental pasha who thinks all her subjects are his legitimate property. He was born in Iran and this is a cultural thing - that's the way they talk. The supposed rape happened 13 years ago, the woman said nothing ever till the police forced her to testify against her former boss. It was a lynch, in the Republic of Gilead (of Margaret Atwater) he would have been beaten to pieces by a female crowd in a public stadium.
In the US (and many other countries) it is now being revealed that Catholic priests (hundreds and hundreds of them) molested children (mostly boys) many years or decades ago. In the overwhelming number of cases the victim said nothing at the time. That's the nature of these cases - the victim feels helpless, that the abuser has much greater power, that complaining would result in adverse consequences to themselves and not their abuser, etc. The other common thread with Katsav is that even though there are never other witness present, once the abuser is revealed, other people come forward to say that they were also victims. 1 accuser might lie but they can't ALL be lying.
Maybe Katsav felt that the rules of the game changed on him retrospectively, but this is not a game he, a married man and a leader who is supposed to be the example for the rest of us, should have been playing in the 1st place. There is a simple rule that he should have observed and then he (and Clinton and Edwards, etc.) would not have been in this pickle:
keep it in your pants. How hard is that to understand?
K
In the specific case of Katzav, he was the one who asked legal help against his secretary who was blackmailing him. This secretary invented that she felt imperative to visit Katzav's hotel room and open her legs. A pro-active police-woman then made a deep investigation of all of Katzav former offices and intimidated (the police know how to do that) the women to testify against their former boss. Only two testimonies stuck and the rest was thrown out as invented. Being a traditional Oriental male is his disgrace, and like all Levantines, he comes through as a born lier even when he is trying to say the truth.
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