What Stand Your Ground Laws mean in America – How Race & Gender Affect Who Can Stand Their Ground – including women and people of color. An in depth look at armed citizenship from our nation’s founding until today.
July 2, 2021 – The Pennsylvania Supreme Court made a mockery out of a case that had given sexual assault victims across the country new hope that courts would take them seriously – that is, finally dispensing justice to those who had experienced sexual violence, and marking the beginning of…
Guest is Denice Labertew. She is a women’s rights advocate, professor, and former US envoy to foreign states – providing policy guidance to protect the rights of women and girls. Her work includes negotiating regulations in the Violence Against Women Act, and advocating for human rights at the recent UN Universal Periodic Review – on the US Treatment of migrant women and girls detained at the US/Mexican border.
October 26, 2020 – In my recent interview with Dr. Roger Pitman, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and practitioner at Massachusetts General Hospital, we discussed many issues including PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which has as its hallmark, debilitating memories, flashbacks, and intense emotions that traumatized women,…
Discussion on Sexual Assault, Recent Judgments & #MeToo – how the Legal System is all too often more friendly to the ‘alleged’ perpetrator than the victim. Attorney Murphy discusses cases she has been involved where Judge’s trample on the rights of victims, censoring the words they use to describe their assault, making it impossible to describe their ordeal. She describes real cases litigated, including against a judge who ordered the victim to not use ‘certain words’ to describe her brutal unrelenting rape. Clearly, judicial overreach to stifle a victim’s First Amendment Right to choose her words, her speech in a public forum – a court of law. Justice itself is bare if a victim can be ordered to only speak of her ordeal in palatable terms – and not describe what the perpetrator had actually done to her. It is axiomatic, that to get a just result – the ability of the victim to tell her story without judicial censorship and bias is critical for a jury to reach a just result.
A fascinating story that unfortunately, is not out of character with the US judicial system – treating women as second-class citizens, and elevating abusers, and minimizing the effect upon the victim.
Attorney Wendy Murphy. She is a former prosecutor now working as a “victim advocate” and “impact litigator” to assist abused women and children – bringing change to how the courts, legislators, and the public view violence against women and children. She has written numerous briefs in both federal and state courts on Sexual Assault, to violations of Civil & Constitutional Rights – taking place on College Campuses & in the Workplace. Many of her cases and issues are of first impression (never before litigated) in MA and around the nation. She is an adjunct professor of sexual violence law at New England Law – Boston, and often appears as a legal analyst for a variety of news outlets including CNN, PBS & Fox News.
Her book, And Justice for Some is a riveting compendium of insights as a prosecutor as well as a victim advocate – on how lawyers and judges let dangerous criminals go free.
January 9, 2019 – Today, a Senate Panel in Virginia approved to move the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) which had passed Congress but needed to be ratified by three fourths of the states to be a Constitutional Amendment. That process has been ongoing since 1972. However, just last year,…
Oct. 1, 2018 – In recent days we have heard testimony from an alleged victim of sexual assault and a US Supreme Court nominee–vying for an Associate Justice position on our nation’s highest court. What strikes me the most, is the way the hearings have unfolded. If ever there was…
November 15, 2017 – Harvey Weinstein has put a face on a problem that has existed for centuries. Men taking advantage of women because they can. Yet, most thought that in the culture of the western world, this behavior was seen more aberrant or unusual than normal gentry would admit–the…
