McDonald Cover-Up? Sign up for our morning newsletter to get all of our stories delivered to your mailbox each weekday. View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Search WTTW:. Thanks to our sponsors:. Chicago Police Department. Jason Van Dyke. Laquan McDonald. Thomas Gaffney. Joseph Walsh. David March. It included a website that showed a video of the young woman entering the hotel not in such a state of intoxication that she would have been obviously incapable of giving consent: and drunken consent is still consent.
Another video, taken before she arrived at the hotel, purportedly showed her urinating in the street. On his third attempt, he was granted a retrial because new evidence had come to light. Two men came forward to testify that the young woman had earlier behaved with them in a very specific sexual way, precisely as Evans had claimed during the first trial.
The appeals court ruled in this case, however, that the evidence was so specific that it was admissible and, if offered to the jury, might result in a different verdict—as, in the event, it did. The fact that one of the new witnesses described the alleged victim behaving sexually exactly as Evans had described—she had demanded certain practices of the three men—as well as being amnesic the following morning, was particularly useful to the defense.
It contradicted her own testimony that she had never had amnesia before. Evans did not substantially alter his original evidence at his retrial. Both the judge and the defense counsel at the retrial were women, incidentally; the prosecutor was male. He is thus no longer a rapist and will not have to spend the rest of his life on a registry of sex offenders. T hroughout its five-year duration, the case revealed many troubling cross-currents in British society.
When Evans was released from prison, still a convicted rapist, his former soccer club, Sheffield United, proposed to reemploy him. This caused considerable outrage, and an online petition soon garnered , signatures. Prominent supporters of the club threatened to withdraw their support. The tone of commentary was mostly vengeful, rather than thoughtful or analytical, and exposed the limits of the vaunted un-censoriousness of our society.
Just as a secret is what you tell only one other person, so every penological liberal has just one crime that he wants severely punished, cannot forgive, and for which there can be no adequate penance. Evans had committed it, or so it then seemed; he was therefore to be prevented from pursuing his career. I can think of a reason that a man convicted of a very serious crime should not be able to continue a lucrative public career once he has completed his punishment; this has to do with social seemliness rather than vengefulness.
In other respects, however, he should be allowed to get on with his life as best he can, and not be hounded. Unlike Evans, McDonald had been acquitted at the first trial—yet he had, in effect, been convicted by the public of a crime from which there could be no exoneration. As a well-known political figure once said, if you sling enough mud, some of it sticks. Despite the fact that the allegations against him came entirely from police and prosecuting authorities, which Evans himself has always recognized, the young woman at the center of the case faced a barrage of abuse and insult on social media.
No evidence ever came to light that she was seeking to make money from the sordid affair, as commonly stated by her critics, some of whom revealed her whereabouts, so that she felt it necessary to move and change her identity five times. Evans never took part in or sanctioned any of this horrible activity. A s alarming as was the unreflective viciousness of many people, even worse was the revelation of how little people either understood or cared about the rule of law.
A minor manifestation of this phenomenon: many seemed unable to distinguish between acquittal and innocence, suggesting that they did not fully appreciate that the prosecution must prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.
The man acquitted on this basis is to be treated as if he were innocent, which does not mean in many cases that he is innocent. But in a civilized society, the acquitted must not be made to suffer because we believe the not-guilty verdict to be wrong.
Some feminist pressure groups and their journalistic supporters seemed to want conviction for rapes, come hell or high water, and never mind due process or fair trials. In other words, a man charged with rape should almost be considered guilty ex officio. A Guardian journalist specializing in crime especially sex crime , Sandra Laville, wrote:. So for the past fortnight [during the trial], the young woman, who has had to move house because of the social media campaign against her, has been subjected to the kind of criminal dissection of her morality and sexual behaviour campaigners hoped were long gone.
This trial is a throwback to the last century when women who reported rape were assumed to be lying and their sex life was on trial. These passages contain such blatant misrepresentations of the case that the authors must have deemed, consciously or otherwise, that the importance of their cause obviated any moral necessity to cleave to the truth.
Let me mention a few of the more serious misrepresentations. This electronic file is for the personal use of authorised users based at the subscribing company's office location. It may not be reproduced, posted on intranets, extranets or the internet, e-mailed, archived or shared electronically either within the purchaser's organisation or externally without express written permission from WARC.
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In April he pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy and mail fraud and will be sentenced in November. The saga does not end with these latest convictions.
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