CASSANDA KENNEDY RECANTS

On April 4^th Huffington Post reported in an article that a 23 year-old woman who at the age of 11 and in the midst of her parents’ divorce process had accused her father of raping her – for which crime he was convicted and served 9 years of a 15 year sentence – recanted her accusations and said she had lied. She said that after some years of rehab for addiction and participation in a Christian religious community she could no longer live with the guilt (she is currently overseas working in a mission in Africa). The current DA notified the court and the father has been released; the DA said she will not prosecute the young woman now since it would discourage others in a similar situation from coming forward.

The Huffington Post site got 1500 comments within 6 hours and presently, after about 24 hours, has logged 4500 comments.

It is the comments that attracted my attention and which I will discuss here.

There are several themes that keep turning up in the comments.

One is that the woman (Cassandra Kennedy – hereinafter ‘CK’) is lying now but wasn’t lying then; and that she is doing this because she merely feels sorry for her father and/or wants the family back together again.

It is stunning how people will contort themselves (and reason and truth) to protect their accustomed way of looking at things. The possibility of a child lying under whatever pressures arose from or were exerted by elements within a parental divorce is rather clear. But the convolutions of possible ulterior or unconscious motives for telling the truth (besides the simple motive of just wanting to tell the truth) are a murky swamp of conjecture. But it is precisely into this murky swamp that so much of SO Mania thinking must inevitably take the legal system, the people involved, and the entire Citizenry’s estimation of the legitimacy and credibility of the law and its enforcement and its very creation through legislation.

A variant of the above is that she recanted because of “fear or not wanting to re-live the assault”. Whatever that might mean. That somehow, even if you are assaulted and tell the truth about it, then you will lie later because somehow that is supposed to help you avoid ‘re-living’ the assault? So the guilt of later lying is supposed to somehow assuage the memories of the original assault?

Nor is it sufficient to claim in response that somehow this is just an example of how ‘complex’ human psychological processes and emotions are; it is one thing to be ‘complex’ and another thing to be so irrational that you wonder how the species has survived this long.

But since there is no ‘human nature’ in the postmodern and secular world, then – truly – anything is possible, no matter how whacky, daffy, or lethally contrary to any common sense whatsoever. And there is always some ‘practitioner’ who would be willing to swear to it, and even more of that pandemonium who will gladly assure ‘consciousness-raising sessions’  (and legislators) that it is all very right and true.

Another theme is to blame the police interrogators a dozen years ago in the initial investigation; they should have been more careful and they should not have “jumped the gun”. But once you have gone and started a Mania, and gotten the media and the legislators to aid and abet it, and established the cartoon-type logic that if you don’t support it all, then you’re probably a perp yourself … then what can you expect from the police? Is the average police department or officer going to stand up in front of that speeding freight train and hold up his badge and expect it to stop for such ‘abstractions’ as truth and justice?

And as we have often seen, many law enforcement agents and DA’s will  hop on the train themselves, badge, gun, prosecutorial authority and all. It is fashionable nowadays to claim that the interrogation techniques used – especially with children – in sex crime cases are now much better; but the browbeating and leading suggestions and promises of ice cream cones for the ‘right’ answer and playing on emotions and threats and all of that … they were palpably wrong then and no decent and honest law enforcement agent would have engaged in them. But in a time of Mania, decency and honesty tend to get thrown off the train.

Especially when Congress and just about all the State legislatures helpfully added that bit in all the original enabling legislation that law enforcement agents who ‘mean well’ in pursuing SOs can’t be held criminally or civilly liable if mistakes are made. This is lethally similar to Nazi-era police advisories to the effect that the regime will not hold officers responsible for whatever happens when they encounter ‘Jews’ (and may very well hold them responsible if certain things do not happen when they encounter same).

And a variant of that theme is the cluck-clucking by advocates that it’s really too bad and who woulda thunk such things could happen? But again, you start a stampede and things like this are almost guaranteed to happen: the herd runs wild and may very well go right through town, ripping up stuff and trampling folks as it goes. It’s not enough to say – even if it were true – that you never intended all the wreck and dreck to happen and that you just wanted to ‘help’ and to ‘solve the problem’ (and that maybe therefore you shouldn’t be held accountable for having started the thing in the first place).

Another theme is that this story makes victims look bad and should never have been reported. For anybody concerned that the quality of media reporting is no longer reliable, the advocacy/victimist effort to manipulate the news and reporting in regard to sex-crime allegations is surely a key element in that lethal derangement of the media.

Seducing the media with the carrot of sensationalist and melodramatic Good-vs-Evil, Innocent-vs-Monster stories; suborning the media with agitprop threats to claim ‘re-victimization’ by an ‘insensitive’ press; luring the media with the heady offer to not simply report ‘history’ but to actually ‘make’ it … did the advocates not realize what poisonous consequences would most surely flow from such propagandistic strategies?

And a related theme is the insistence that while most sex-crimes are under-reported, yet ‘false claims’ are demonstrably very low (one commenter quoted government reports of 2-7pct). How can anybody possible determine that? The only way I can see is to merely tote up the number of recantations and extrapolate from that: if there have only been x-number of recantations in a crime-category, then that’s the percentage of false-charges for that category, as if the number of actual recantations is precisely equal to the actual number of false-accusations made in that crime-category.

But who really knows how many people have filed false police reports, committed perjury, and are still keeping all that to themselves while their targets languish in jail and/or on registries?  This is in too many cases just a self-serving sop victimists and advocates tell themselves to avoid having to face up to the horrors that their deliberately-incited stampede has caused.

Nor does it help when laws are passed enabling prosecution without a victim’s formal participation, thus sweetening the pot by perhaps sidestepping the dangerous matter of having to perjure oneself.

Another theme, though not widely embraced in the comments, is that the whole thing is sad but Jesus will sort it out in the end. I strongly support religious faith, but you can’t erect bad laws and endanger – let’s face it – the entire integrity of the legal system and even the legislative authority and then continue those bad laws on the assumption that ‘God will sort it out’ on His end. This is precisely the equivalent of that old saw about soldiers killing everybody they can find in a village and ‘God can sort’em out’. A nice brassy sound-bite but no way to run a war or run a country.

And God might well decide to take action sooner than expected. Even if that action is simply to allow a country thus so willfully deranged to suffer the consequences inherent in its bad laws and policies. The American SO Mania participates fully in the presumption that somehow God or some Invisible Hand will protect the country from the consequences of its official actions – and that presumption is truly unwise and actually reaches the level of an insane delusion.

Another theme is that ‘children never lie’ and you should always ‘believe the children’. But one commenter mentions that when being interviewed as a potential juror in the voir dire stage of an upcoming trial, s/he was asked by the prosecutor if s/he would be willing to vote for a Guilty finding only on the testimony of a child. No, s/he responded, because I have kids of my own and I know you can’t always trust them to tell the truth, even if they mean to.

And a final theme is that the justice system is “permanently broken” now. The insight as to the amount of damage done to the integrity (and perhaps legitimacy) of the judicial and legislative processes by all synergistic elements of the Mania stampede … that insight is accurate.

But the conclusion that the system is “permanently broken”, while it is a very clear and lethal danger, is not yet the actual situation.

But in light of how difficult it is to get bad laws repealed and bad convictions overturned, then we should not underestimate the problem we now face. The command staff has run the ship into a berg and ripped her open; nor is it willing to admit the problem.

But we are not merely ‘passengers’. We are the governors of the government in the Framing Vision. And for as long as the Framing Vision lasts in authority around here, then we – We – are still The People.