Flutterby™! : Brian Banks

Because the MeFi entry was deleted, I'm going to pretty much copy whole damned thing:

Brian Banks was a heavily recruited high school linebacker, in between his Junior and Senior year. On July 8, 2002, Banks was accused of kidnapping and raping a female student and was forced to leave the team. He pleaded "no contest" to the charges and was in prison for 6 years, forced to register as a sex offender.

On February 28, 2011, his accuser “friend requested” Banks on Facebook, and ended up recanting the story. With the help of The Innocence Project, the rape conviction of Brian Banks was overturned.

The PDF of the full legal filing in the Brian Banks case.

I'm linking this here because I still find my experience earlier this year with jury duty unsettling, and I think this has many of the same issues. It sounds as though the young woman who was the accuser got caught up in a lie to explain being late to class and was railroaded through by the adults around her. I can imagine the political pressure the attorney from the DA's office was feeling, even in the face of inconsistent testimony and a lack of physical evidence, the media blowback to dropping a case like this would be huge. I can see the impetus to plead "no contest" vs spending the rest of his life in jail for how a jury might interpret "reasonable doubt".

And I want to figure out how we can work toward a society that fixes this. Part of that is working away from "slut shaming", so that it's harder to railroad a young woman into a lie like this. Part of that is taking to task people like Long Beach Poly High co-principal of the time Shawn Ashley for statements like the one that said Banks "will not be returning to Poly regardless of the outcome of any judicial procedures".

Oddly, one of those things is not coming down on Wanetta Gibson because if we do that then we're providing a strong disincentive for people to later come clean.