Harlem State Senator Bill Perkins is out with an open letter slamming Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance for leaving the alleged rape victim in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case “totally abandoned.”
In the letter, Perkins urges Vance to continue to pursue the charges against DSK despite recent reports undermining her credibility.
“There appears to be enough compelling physical evidence in support of the victim’s allegations for the District Attorney’s office to move forward with the pursuit of this case,” he writes. “Nothing that has been said speaks to the original charges of forced, unconsentual [sic] sex.”
Politically speaking, it shows what a dangerous place Vance is in even as the 2013 elections remain two-and-a-half years away. If he were to lose the support of Manhattan’s African-American political class, he would struggle to win re-election — and today’s news of acquittals in the Deutsche Bank fire trial probably won’t help.
Adds Perkins:
“To preserve the principle of due process, the decision to bring charges should be decided on its merits, not the character of the victim or the victimizer. If anything less than due process is delivered in this case then justice will have been unduly denied. This will only confirm the cynicism and fears many women have of coming forward when they have been violated. In the words of one of the religious leaders in the African community ‘a daughter of Mama Africa has beenviolated and her dignity snatched… and she is disgraced/dishonored publicly by the media. Nowonder rape victims don’t report rape.’”
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Perkins went to Brown–he should spell better than that.
Senator Perkins is clearly stepping in to make this a political and community matter while he should let justice run its course.
As a political representative, he’s entitled to question the american justice system’s efficiency, and the opportunity to have it influenced by the public to level that appears evident to everyone now, including himself.
But his action toward this affair, unfortunately, is adding up to a flow of pressure that seriously undermines the serenity that should prevail in the action of justice.
I don’t know if Mr Strauss Kahn is guilty or not, and neither should Senator Perkins. But I can’t help but reminding of the book by Tom Wolf: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” where Shermann Mc Coy, is sacrificed to serve an electoral purpose, to slay a symbol of white power and giving the illusion of justice to the black community.
The problem I have with this, is that it doesn’t solve any structural problem, it doesn’t make justice more independent, more egalitarian, and as judge L.White Character in Tom Wolf’s book rightfully put it: more decent.
So instead of trying to influence Mr Vance, Senator Perkins should probably direct his efforts into ban the perp walk, keep defendant name secret by law, as it should be for the alleged victim, and ban the electoral system for the Judges and D.As, which a lot of american lawyer such as Alan Dershowitz consider rightfully as absurd.
Then you will have a truly independent justice, impermeable to public opinion, in US of A.
But do you want this to happen ?