Samantha Geimer’s name isn’t nearly as well as known as Roman Polanksi’s, but it’s known enough. She’s his “victim”, when she was a child of 13 back in 1977. But now, she’s had enough .
Geimer’s attorney petitioned the court on March 23 to dismiss the case against Polanski, arguing recent changes to California’s constitution gave her more rights as a victim to influence the case.
“She is a person who is harmed by the maintenance of the prosecution and she wants it to end,” Geimer’s attorney wrote in the petition for dismissal. “She has not been treated fairly.”
Just as the prosecution for a crime is not, contrary to the mindset of victims rights advocates, a proxy for the vindication of individual rights, giving rise to the victim becoming a player in the proceedings, the termination of a prosecution isn’t up to a victim either. Crimes are against society, though individuals may do the bulk of the suffering when there’s a victim to be had.
The prosecution argued against Geimer, as one would expect and, perhaps, demand. After all these years, it would be absurd to have the case die with a whimper. Plus, there is the added concern that Polanski not be rewarded for fleeing the country rather than returning to court, particularly since lower air fares would make this an option for almost any defendant who can make bail.
Geimer’s petition was denied by the California Second District Court of Appeal without explanation. It really didn’t need any, as the Victim’s Bill of Rights passed in California was nothing more than a political ploy to pander to those who thought it sounded really cool to make people think that victims had rights. Another political subterfuge revealed as an empty gesture.
The question remains, however, why those who champion the rights of victims have been silent. Do you not love Samantha, Paul Cassell? Is she not worthy too?
It would be disingenuous of me to raise this if it involved some obscure victim, plucked out of some backwater news story that no one ever heard of. But the Polanski case is pretty big. Certainly big enough to make it onto the birthers victims rights advocates radar. It seems reasonable to believe that Professor Cassell heard about it. Even in Utah.
Obviously, the direction this is heading is down the old one-way street, where victims rights advocates are there whenever a victim wants compensation, or to veto a plea bargain, or to demand a table of her own in the well during trial, lest the prosecution not ask the questions to which the victim demands answers. The table pounding, where is the justice, reverberates through the courtroom.
And yet, Samantha Geimer, as far as victims go, has not only failed to achieve “closure”, that goal so often raised in the victims rights list of demands, but has spent a lifetime living, and reliving, an existence of a prop in a high profile battle that may well have made it impossible for her to exist as anything other than the 13 year old girl given champagne and a Quaalude at Jack Nicholson’s house before being raped by the boyish Roman. Maybe she’s a real person, who wants to have a life apart of being Polanski’s victim before she dies of old age?
It’s not that this petition was any more worthy of being granted than that of victims demanding that the court ignore the terms of a plea bargain and sentence a defendant to five or six thousand years. The decision was clearly correct, and Greimer has no right to demand dismissal, even though it means that she will continue to be the victim against her will.
The legitimacy of the victims rights movement, and the integrity of its advocates, however, is suspect when they only appear to chant “death to defendants.” If there’s no gain to be had by supporting this victim, one who seeks the dismissal of charges rather than ever harsher punishment, then the movement goes silent and its advocates hope that no one notices that they hid under their rocks. Well, I noticed.
H/T Doug Berman
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The hypocrisy you describe reminds me of my complaint about so many misdemeanor domestic violence cases. Many of the same people who loudly proclaim themselves the great champions of female empowerment are often the least willing to dismiss a low-level DV case at the victim’s request. It seems impossible for them to believe that any woman can make this choice on her own, and in her family’s best interests, as opposed to being forced to do it because she’s an unwitting victim of her abuser’s “cycle of violence.”
Um Brian? You’re tarring a lot of people with a braod brush here. Or maybe you don’t believe in psychological evaluations unless they are favorable to your client?
But the cycle of violence in domestic cases is pretty well established: women will go back to an abusive spouse when the alternative is to never feel safe, never feel your children are safe and believe that you can’t live alone, for financial or other reasons.
Being beaten is not generally considered to be “in her family’s best interests”, as abusers rarely stop at one.
The thing that puzzles me is, if you don’t really care either way about victims but hate the guts of criminals, you could very easily and acceptably say “I just don’t like criminals” and not bring victims’ rights into it at all.
If I understood Brian correctly, he wasn’t saying that the pithily named “cycle of violence” didn’t happen, but it’s trotted out every time a woman decides not to cooperate. Because, ya know, they’re women, and all.
Whether it’s “pretty well established,” by the way, is a bit of a politically correct, substantively questionable proposition.
Come on Stephen. That would just be mean and nasty. Even if it was true, you have to tie it to something acceptable for polite company. Everybody loves a victim.
I think it’s equally tarring with a broad brush to say that there is going to be a cycle of violence that stops them going to the police in DV cases.
Domestic violence doesn’t mean systemic abuse, it just means that violence occurred within the context of a home. Systemic physical abuse that happens in the home is domestic violence but so is a one off bust up over infidelity or money or something.
Common sense and my mother and sister tell me you really shouldn’t stay with someone who ever gets violent when a credit card bill arrives and wipes out all your money but it’s not the same thing as beating you and the kids every Friday night and it shouldn’t be treated the same way.
Well I reckon, even if you were sitting at the whitest white tie dinner party and said “you know child sexual abuse? I don’t like it” that would be acceptable with pretty much everyone there whether or not you point to a particular victim.
On the other hand, have I just revealed my latent sociopathy? Oops.
Nice post.
This is reminiscent of the battles of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation. MVFR is an anti-death penalty group comprised of family members of homicide victims and of those who have been executed.
There is a really interesting publication on MVFR’s website called “Dignity Denied.” It chronicles the experiences of family members who oppose the death penalty.
MVFR gets my vote as the most amazing organization that you never want to join.
You may well have killed any chance you had to be invited to the whitest white tie dinner party. Even sexual predators clean up for dinner.
Of course, one wouldn’t just drop it in out of the blue. That would be terribly gauche.
I certainly don’t believe in psychological evaluations conducted by young prosecutors with no more “evidence” to support their conclusion than a few paragraphs in a police report and something they heard in a DV segment during their orientation training.
The desire to criminalize every shove between spouses, and make them all part of some invariable cycle developed by a sociologist, is one more reason for me to hate OJ Simpson. May he rot in the hot Nevada sun.
Fantastic post Scott.
I like the crossed out ‘birthers’ just before victims rights advocates. Too true.
Love this post. Such an under-appreciated point of view in mainstream media land, which revels in the maudlin.
I wish the victim’s right bill here were an empty gesture with no real force behind it, unfortunately it is not and we now have to deal with victim’s statements routinely at things as simple as motion’s to continue trials. Recently the Orange County DA withdrew an agreed upon plea bargain because the victim came in and objected.