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