I'm not sure I understand what's meant by this. Did the victims testimony change? How does evidence weaken over time?
This is a copy of a dead comment. Not mine.
I really, really want to be mean to you, but I'll copy and paste the second and third sentences from the article.
Assange, who denies the accusation, has avoided extradition to Sweden for seven years after seeking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012.
The 48-year-old Australian was evicted in April and sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for breaching his bail conditions.
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/22/nils_melzer_julian_a...
This could not possibly be a problem anymore?
A statue of limitations serves a few purposes.
1. At some point closure is better than justice, or at least, that's a theory. Better to get a crime on record because the committer of it confesses to it than not. The idea being that after, say, 10 years, the odds that the criminal would get caught have drifted off to as near to 0 as can be.
2. Records eventually get shredded if you wait long enough; eyewitness recollections in particular slowly mutate into conjecture (whilst said eyewitnesses will believe what they remember is accurate, there's plenty of proof out there that given enough time what they remember is not at all accurate and it gets worse over time). This makes it easier to accidentally convict on flawed evidence, and makes it harder for the defendant to defend themselves.
Many acts are ambiguously criminal, until clarified by a test case. Legal decisions are also often made in the context of time, taking into account what is commonly considered offensive, what a person is presumed to know (in establishing mens rea). It's difficult to try some crimes with a modern perspective and take into account what was considered acceptable in the past.
Its existence points towards having a “legal system” rather than a “justice system”.
Correct, it’s called ex post facto.
(+) arguably it isn't, in ECHR juristictions
"No Bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
Civil laws, such as, immigration laws, are not so limited. That's why I encourage permanent resident immigrants (green card holders) to complete the naturalization process ASAP. (Assuming they want to retain the right to stay in the US.)
Article I section 9 doesn't say anything about the scope being limited to criminal law.
It was just lawfare all along.
If they had obtained internal first-person memos discussion the reasons for dropping the case, then you could probably assume those would be credible.
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/19/sweden-withdraws-arrest-...
Could be wrong though...
Does anyone have some news from back then?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/17/julian-assange...
It sounds like the women didn't really want to pursue the case (which is not at all uncommon in sexual assault cases!), they just wanted to track down Assange and make him take an STD test after he had unprotected sex with them, and the police said, well now that you've told us this, we're going to tell the prosecutor.
(One plausible interpretation is that the assaults did in fact happen as described and that the Swedish justice system was pressured by the US to prosecute it aggressively with the goal of getting him into US custody - the two are not necessarily contradictory.)
At the same time I suspect the oddities in how the case was pursued is more likely to simply have been about domestic Swedish politics - both the prosecutor and one of the lawyers involved are known to have favoured a stricter handling of rape cases, and it's plausible they saw Assange as someone getting away with something they wanted to make an example of.
So he may well have been genuinely worried for all the wrong reasons.
Of course this is just a hypothesis.
Yes he was obviously not running from the Swedish sentence. I used to think that must have meant he ran from the US. But another theory could be that he ran from the reputation hit.
> Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her without her knowledge.
> Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state. It is an aggravating circumstance that Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, still consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her. The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party’s sexual integrity.
If you agreed before to kiss for 10 minutes but stop after 5 it doesn't make it rape either.
If the person asks you to stop and you refuse that's rape.
If she finishes first and asks you to stop and you continue that is rape.
But you don't need to have a detailed conversation agreeing to everything beforehand. If you try something and the other person doesn't stop the action it is not rape.
You could both agree not to do something beforehand and end up doing that act and it wouldn't make it rape unless one party refused that action during the attempt.
If we agree to have sex while she has a blindfold on but only if I wear a clown mask. If I take off the mask before sex and she watches the tape later she cannot claim rape.
Or do you think that's rape as well?
2. Yes, your example describes non-consensual sex, i.e. rape.
If someone has aids doesn't tell the partner and they die they could be charged with murder or assault. But never rape.
If you think pointn 2 is rape then a husband promising to take out the trash if sex is performed and him not doing later makes it rape. Fraud perhaps.. you are missing the violence that rape puts the victim through.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/07/rape-claims-ju...
> What has most engaged the conspiracy theorists and Assange's more excitable defenders, however, are a few key incidents in Miss A career, in particular that she is said to have worked in the Swedish embassy in the US, and wrote her university thesis in 2007 on a vision of Cuba after the death of Castro.
Yes, but is also a case of "your word against mine" unless supported by verifiable data.
Ever heard someone say this..
I didn't want to go to school but I did.
It's like saying I didn't want to kill that person. It is an unfinished statement to what the final decision is. It could be: So I did or so I didn't.
It might seem pointlessly semantic, but I think it's important with issues such as sexual assault and rape. Especially considering the people on either side of this likely have their lives ruined.
"Eh, whatever" and "no, not without a condom" aren't the same thing.
If you don't communicate that you don't want to have sex it becomes a really murky topic, as you didn't give verbal nor non-verbal consent. But you also didn't give verbal nor nnon-verbal disconsent. This could be something you regret afterwards, but I don't think you can attribute that to malintent (or rape/sexual assault) on your sexual partner's side.
So removing the condom mid-act would be sexual assault, a broken condom wouldn't be. But the partner consented to sex with a condom.
Or in case a woman says she's on birthcontrol (or has a spiral) and it later turns out that was false, then you also didn't consent to that.
So basically my second point is that it takes a lot of language to define what is and what isn't sexual assault or rape. Condensing it down would be harmful to victims and people accused.
Most people who have had long term sexual partners have had a time or two where they "didn't really want to participate" but did anyway without much/any complaining for the sake of their partner. Are all all those instances "basically sexual assault"?
Watering down the definition of sexual assault to include instances where nobody felt assaulted in any way does not result in it being taken more seriously.
*Disclaimer: The parent post was edited after I began replying to be worded a bit less absolutely.
I'm talking strictly about situations where there is no threat of violence.
Obviously there is a spectrum of varying degrees of consent from "perfectly ok" to "definitely rape" and somewhere in there is a range that constitutes sexual assault but to say that the lack of specifically enthusiastic consent defines the floor of the sexual assault range is farcical when there are so many other variables to consider.
>Disclaimer: The parent post was edited after I began replying to be worded a bit less absolutely.
I changed the order of the three points.
>we are mapping "didn't really want to" very differently onto real examples of emotional state.
I think a lot of people find "didn't really want to" to be equivalent to "really didn't want to"
"Informed enthusiastic consent" isn't so hard to figure out, is it? If you feel like you're being pressured into something you don't want, that's still non-consensual even if you don't put up a fight.
Frankly maybe we should, but until we do it’s going to be hard to make this a bright line.
AFAIK, the sexual interactions where consensual as they occurred. But the two woman withdrew consent after the fact as they learned he hadn’t been wearing a condom (and they discovered he’d been with both of them).
If true, his attitude reminds me of Jeff Epstein's plan to "seed the human race with his DNA" by impregnanting a bunch of women on a ranch he owned. These people see their own supposed genius as justification for violating moral norms.
You can still think Assange is right (or at least important), but he's a deeply flawed person and it's not all propaganda.
You provide zero evidence for that naked assertion.
> it's not all propaganda.
If it has no evidnce and no substance as it seems no to, the rationale behind it is of academic interest alone. Maybe it's pure malice? Maybe it's jealous rage? Maybe it's delusional? Maybe it's propaganda? Maybe it's just not interesting what caused it - it shouldn't be to the legal process. Substance is everything. What seems like a strong lack of it here, stinks.
What I'm doing is what you're doing and what everyone should do: synthesize information into an opinion. I don't claim knowledge, but I have a model of the world, of how people act, and I'm feeding various information into that model and using it to generate an opinion. You have a different model and you've generated a different opinion. That's fine. But to conclude that people can't form certain opinions absent evidence is naive. Human beings are not courts of law.
I made no comment about whether Assange should be convicted in a court of law. I only said that I think he did something wrong and that, if I'm right, I see his behavior as representative of a pattern wherein certain people view themselves as above normative morality.
This isn't Richard Stallman 2.0. Assange told you something that nobody denies is true. He's not head of GNU, let the rape allegations be dealt with by the appropriate people. Your job as somebody talking about Assange is to say, "yea, that shit he told us was terrible, something should be done." Not "he might take his fucking condoms off".
> You can still think Assange is right (or at least important), but he's a deeply flawed person and it's not all propaganda.
Anyway, I agree with you that the release of the "collateral murder" video was a good thing. But I strongly disagree with the idea that I "shouldn't have an opinion about certain things that are beyond my purview" or whatever you're saying.
Prosecutors will wait until the end of time and still trot out memory-based testimony (as long as it still supports their case), so I think the claim about why they dropped the case is specious.
In any case, this was always the most likely outcome: very few sexual assault cases ever make it to court in Sweden.
Rape without physical violence like this rely entirely on the victim testimony and even if there is a record and everything that will weaken the case terribly if the victim is no longer on board.
Stay safe Snowden and all you other possible whistleblowers/leakers out there!
To people downvoting me - check out the vox article on this earlier this year.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/12/18306901/julian-ass...
The women were "vehement" about restarting the case. Reportedly were "willing to do whatever it takes to force case to be re-opened" The statute of limitations is August,2020.
But suddenly it doesn't matter according to sweden