This story has been fairly widely reported:
A judge decided Wednesday not to force a woman to watch a videotape of two men having sex with her as a 16-year-old, a key piece of evidence in the trial of a man accused of raping her.
On Tuesday, Cook County Circuit Judge Kerry Kennedy had threatened to charge the Naperville woman with contempt of court for refusing to watch the tape, a move that drew outrage from victims’ groups and Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Kennedy said defense attorneys could cross-examine the woman without her watching the 20-minute video, said Cook County’s State’s Attorney’s spokeswoman Marcy Jensen. Kennedy ruled the tape can be shown after the woman, now 20, has testified and left the courtroom.
Kaethe Morris Hoffer, a private attorney working with the woman, said Kennedy made the about-face after realizing he had “no legs to stand on” legally.
“The right to confront and the right to cross-exam were not even remotely threatened by keeping this particular activity from happening,” Morris Hoffer said. …
Outstanding feminist commentary on same comes from I Blame the Patriarchy, where Twisty Faster observed:
Mine is a brilliant legal mind, so naturally I have an opinion, and here it is: that the Establishment’s contempt for rape victims dovetails so brilliantly with its love for porn that this prurient subhuman slug of a judge simply could not resist the opportunity to combine torture with titillation in his courtroom. The woman, who was 16 and unconscious at the time of her assault, won’t have to watch the tape after all, but a courtroom screening is still planned, so that everyone else can still get off on her drunken teen slut film debut. I add, for the sake of the big picture, that this court has already found the tape to be child pornography.
If the rule of law demands that women watch videotapes of men humiliating, assaulting, and raping them, the rule of law is inexorably, excuse my French, fubar.
