You call that "railroading" him?
What do you call what happened to her?
HE called it rape.
Considering the amusing video he circulated, he would also call it entertainment.
Or, you could have a son brought up on such charges after attending a typical high school bacchanalia, based on the allegations of a drunken teenage girl, supposedly damning evidence from another, probably equally incapacitated teen’s cell phone, a text message, and a coercive police interrogation.
All this is from a sensationalized media account based on a selective quote from remarks made by the judge. This is after previous, infamous prosecutions like The Duke Lacrosse team, the Rolling Stone smears published against a Virginia fraternity or the fantastic claims made against the last Supreme Court nominee.
Also, despite the writer’s obvious intention to churn up an outrage (’if it bleeds, it leads’), the incident is not described as ‘rape.’ It was described as “sexual assault, ‘ a nebulous term for anything ranging from a joke about ‘pubic hair on my coke can’ to a frenzied attack by muslim rioters on a journalist who wandered too far off the reservation. This is ongoing, and in a culture saturated with media-disseminated (pun intended) incitements to have sex with anything and everything anywhere.
Final point: The parents’ prior efforts to raise their son to be a responsible member of society by such things as years carting him every week to boy scout meetings, and their probable willingness to punish him, are to have no bearing on the outcome. Nor do the illegal actions made by the girl and/or her parents have any place in deciding his punishment.
Now this kid will be labeled a sex offender, the record will proceed him everywhere he goes for the rest of his life, based on a drunken night when he was 16.
Is he guilty of rape? I don’t know. All I know is that he deserves the presumption of innocence granted to any offender.