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Prosecutor is in grip of ultra-feminists
By Martha A. Churchill
Detroit News - 12/10/99
They are extremists, even by Ann Arbor standards. They want every
man in jail, if he so much as touches his wife or girlfriend. Rude
comments by men should result in criminal prosecutions for domestic
violence. And women never lie about such things, they insist.
These ultra-feminists are none other than Washtenaw
County Prosecutor Brian Mackie and attorney Lore A. Rogers, the
legal director of Safe House, our domestic violence shelter. They
spoke to a luncheon crowd of attorneys in Ann Arbor recently about
domestic violence, as part of “Bias Awareness Week.”
Rogers emphasized the horrible and sadistic crimes
against women disclosed at Safe House, comparing a “survivor” of
domestic violence to a prisoner of war.
While Rogers waxed eloquently about the terrors of
battered wives, Mackie made it plain that he does not limit himself
to prosecutions of the worst cases. He takes minor pushing and
shoving cases, and even crude remarks, as grounds for criminal
prosecution.
“We’re charging pushes,” he declared. “There is no
such thing as a nonserious assault.”
To the glee of his radical-feminist constituents,
Mackie tolerates no plea bargaining with domestic violence
defendants, no matter how minor the incident alleged, no matter how
shaky the evidence.
In a more rational world, a first-time offender
might get a deferred sentence, requiring him to serve a period of
probation and then leave the court system with a clean record.
Mackie actually boasts about his no-deferred-sentences policy, which
forces many defendants to trial.
Ironically, larger numbers of defendants are
acquitted at trial, especially the ones accused of minor skirmishes.
As a result, Ypsilanti Township has jumped ship from Mackie’s office
and prosecutes its own domestic violence cases, so more of its truly
violent men will be convicted.
Despite the defection by one township, Mackie
insists that minor-sounding allegations deserve his utmost
prosecutorial attention. “No murder started out as murder,” he
warned. “There were steps along the way.”
No doubt Safe House harbors some of Mackie’s
strongest supporters. Subsidized by taxpayers and an outpouring of
private charity, the domestic violence shelter flexes real political
muscle for its anti-male stance. Safe House workers assume the worst
about men. Women with fantastic reports of violence get an
unskeptical audience at the shelter.
Rogers is no skeptic. “When the police come to the
scene, they are seeing a snapshot,” she explained. “It’s not usually
the first assault” that they see, even if it is the first report of
domestic violence from that family. Staff from Safe House generally
get to the truth of the matter, as Rogers tells it, by digging for
more information — that the man has previously held a loaded gun to
the woman’s vagina, for example.
“It’s wrong to treat him as a first-time offender”
just because he is reported to the police for the first time,
according to Rogers. In her view, the guy should be punished as a
repeat offender on his first arrest, since he was probably guilty of
earlier crimes and just didn’t get caught.
Mackie echoes the Safe House view that women are
innocent, passive creatures. That’s why he makes an exception to his
no-deferred-sentences policy for the occasional damsel in distress,
if she is charged with domestic violence.
“Usually, the man has been assaulting her” before
the police show up, Mackie observed. The poor woman, worn down by
abuse, erupts in frustration. “So she smacks him right in front of
the deputies,” as Mackie tells it.
That explains why the prosecutor gives deferred
sentences to women. Any female who strikes her mate has good cause.
Get it? And any man who does the same thing to his wife or
girlfriend must be a sadistic, loathsome predator.
Under the Constitution, everyone should be treated
equally by our elected officials, regardless of race, gender or
ethnicity. But in Ann Arbor, men seem to get prosecuted on the
flimsiest evidence, while women get a free ride even if they are
caught in the act.
A divorce lawyer in the audience gently challenged
the male-bashing attitude expressed by the prosecutor and asked how
the courts should deal with accusations made during a bitter
divorce, especially when child custody is at issue.
Rogers quickly dismissed the notion that women might
make false accusations. “We know about separation and leaving,” she
explained. If the woman has been tortured for years, she will speak
up only after she has left the beast who hurt her.
Not surprisingly, domestic violence cases doubled in
Washtenaw County soon after Mackie took office as prosecutor seven
years ago. Mackie does not attribute a single case to the combative
woman trying to manipulate her divorce judge. The way he sees it,
every accusation by a woman is the Gospel truth. “People know it
will be taken seriously, and so they report it,” he says.
The prosecutor should take it seriously enough to
ask whether the accusations are true in each individual case. Then,
we could protect our women — and men.
Martha A. Churchill is an attorney in Milan, Mich. Write
letters to The Detroit News, Editorial Page, 615 W. Lafayette,
Detroit, Mich. 48226, or fax us at (313) 222-6417, or send an e-mail
to letters@detnews.com
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