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posted by martyb on Monday July 25 2016, @03:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the adding-injury-and-insult-to-insult-and-injury dept.

The anonymous woman was raped in Houston in 2013, according to court documents, and was cooperating with prosecutors when she suffered a breakdown while testifying in December 2015.

She has bipolar disorder and was admitted to a local hospital for mental health treatment when the judge ordered a recess for the holiday break until January 2016.

According to the documents, authorities were scheduled to be on vacation and "did not want the responsibility of having to monitor Jane Doe's well being or provide victim services to her during the holiday recess."

The complaint alleges that the district attorney's office obtained an order from the Harris County sheriff to take the woman into custody so she would not flee before completing her testimony.

The employee booking her into Harris County Jail identified her as a "defendant in a sexual assault case, rather than the victim." That impacted her treatment from jail staff, as the complaint reads:

The Harris County Jail psychiatric staff tormented Jane Doe and caused her extreme emotional distress and mental anguish by further defaming her, falsely insisting to her that she was being charged with sexual assault, and refusing to acknowledge her status as an innocent rape victim."

Doe also suffered beatings from other inmates and from a guard, who then requested assault charges to be filed against her "in an attempt to cover up the brutal abuse," according to the complaint.

[...] The complaint notes that her "rapist was also an inmate in the same facility" and treated more humanely. "Her rapist was not denied medical care, psychologically tortured, brutalized by other inmates, or beaten by jail guards," it reads.

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487073132/rape-survivor-sues-after-texas-authorities-jailed-her-for-a-month


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by VLM on Monday July 25 2016, @04:30PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 25 2016, @04:30PM (#379886)

    Three weird issues tapdanced around in the article.

    1) She's bipolar so they treated her awful. I'm not saying its good that they treat bipolar people poorly, or that they should. But its weird that her victim status trumps her medical diagnosis to the point that its not being widely advertised as a mentally ill person being brutalized but instead she's a crime victim. If you read the story closely, she is both. This just sounds weird and the story behind that is likely more interesting than what was reported. I just find it weird that brutalizing sick people is BAU and therefore not clickbait but brutalizing victims is also BAU (although this is worse than normal) and therefore is clickbait. Journalists have very strange ideas when they frame their narrative.

    2) Apparently, everyone in the system hates her and loves her attacker. Why? Who is he? Again this part of the story smells more interesting than the blah story provided. So is her attacker a cop or doctor or local politician or crime boss or other employee of the system? With all due respect, this is Houston, she's not the only criminal case in the system. Unfortunately there's nothing interesting or unusual about the crime she was involved in, at least not that was reported. So.... there's obviously an unreported story here? Obviously the attacker must be someone interesting?

    3) No one higher up is interested in the case? No DA looking to make a name fighting corruption? She's claiming its solely a local level individual accident? There's a reason nobody higher up is on the case. We aren't being told, but I'm sure its fascinating. Maybe since its already been determined she's got mental problems, her entire story runs smack into a wall of multiple CCTV surveillance cameras showing that she's hallucinating the whole thing, and the higher ups know that. Anyone can sue anyone for anything, after all. Maybe she'll settle for less money than it'll cost the hospital to provide the video logs showing nothing happened to her. This is just a weird aspect of the story carefully not reported in the linked article.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @05:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @05:07PM (#379913)

    According to the documents, authorities were scheduled to be on vacation and "did not want the responsibility of having to monitor Jane Doe's well being or provide victim services to her during the holiday recess [...] an order from the Harris County sheriff to take the woman into custody so she would not flee before completing her testimony

    You need to re-read TFS. The victim was not necessarily "in the system" at the time of the alleged rape and they just put her in jail because they didn't want to keep tabs on her during Christmas vacation.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @08:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @08:06PM (#380016)

    But its weird that her victim status trumps her medical diagnosis to the point that its not being widely advertised as a mentally ill person being brutalized but instead she's a crime victim.

    It's not that weird. It's because her victim status is relevant to the story and her bipolar situation is not. I don't mean this cynically... I mean this as superflouous information. For example, her ethnicity isn't really emphasized, nor her blood type, nor her having four functional limbs (I assume), nor...

    The story here is "person who was allegedly a rape victim ends up misclassified and bad stuff happened to her as a result."

    Imagine instead she had had been given a lethal dose of anti-psychotic drugs. Then the story would have emphasized her bipolar status and its mis-rteatment, rather than her being an alleged rape victim. Imagine she had a limb amputated by mistake at a hospital. Then both her bipolar status and her alleged rape victim status would both have been de-emphasized in favor of why she had gone to the hospital.

    No conspiracy or hierarchy of status here.

    Apparently, everyone in the system hates her and loves her attacker.

    Why do you say this? I had read it more as "U.S. prisons are a terrible place to be in" and "they don't treat people think they of as rapists well in women prisons." Do you have reason to think that this was all done in support of her alleged attacker?

    No one higher up is interested in the case?

    No idea here. Maybe (and hopefully) they are investigating, but we just haven't heard?

  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 26 2016, @04:58AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday July 26 2016, @04:58AM (#380191) Homepage

    Somewhere along the line I began to wonder if she was actually raped in the first place.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.