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Note: 2 separate rape cases noted in this post. -Cindy

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/rape

Note: The following post is a quote:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2028083/posts

Judge’s ban on the use of the word ‘rape’ at trial reflects trend
Kansas City Star ^ | 6/8/07 | Tony Rizzo
Posted on June 8, 2008 5:05:44 PM PDT by Non-Sequitur

It’s the only way Tory Bowen knows to honestly describe what happened to her.

She was raped.

But a judge prohibited her from uttering the word “rape” in front of a jury. The term “sexual assault” also was taboo, and Bowen could not refer to herself as a victim or use the word “assailant” to describe the man who allegedly raped her.

The defendant’s presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial trumps Bowen’s right of free speech, said the Lincoln, Neb., judge who issued the order.

(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...

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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2027586/posts

“Unspeakable horrors as trial opens in torture and rape of Columbia student”
NY Daily News ^ | June 6, 2008 | Barbara Ross and Corky Siemaszko
Posted on June 7, 2008 10:17:07 AM PDT by ruination

ARTICLE SNIPPET: “A Columbia journalism student will tell jurors on Friday how a sadist turned her Manhattan apartment into a “torture chamber” where she was raped, disfigured and nearly blinded.

“He ordered her to stab out her eyes,” Assistant District Attorney Ann Prunty said Thursday as she opened the trial of 31-year-old Robert Williams with a horrific account of the alleged assault on April 13, 2007.

Standing naked in the bathtub with her lips glued and taped shut, her hands and ankles bound, the 23-year-old victim “couldn’t do it,” Prunty said.

“The next thing she heard was the kettle whistling,” the prosecutor said. “She will never be able to stand that sound again.”

Prunty’s description of how Williams allegedly poured the boiling water on his victim stunned the packed Manhattan courtroom into silence and caused a veteran sketch artist to flee in tears.

The testimony that followed was even more gruesome.

“He chose a butcher knife and slowly began to slice into her face and eyelids, carving and disfiguring her face,” Prunty said.

“In her despair, she told him to just kill her, but he was just getting started.”

The 19-hour assault ended only after she blacked out - finally overcome by the overdose of painkillers she was forced to swallow - and he lost interest.

“Then he could no longer feel power over another human being,” Prunty said.

Williams is charged with 71 criminal counts, including attempted murder, arson, rape and sodomy. He faces life in prison.

Shackled and with his hands encased in protective mitts, Williams stared straight ahead as Prunty spent an hour describing the victim’s agony.

The former Bloods gang member tried to cover up the crime by wrapping the victim in a futon and torching her Hamilton Heights apartment, police said.

Prunty said the woman was too smart - and too tough - to die. She used the flames to melt the computer cables binding her to a futon frame. She also remembered everything, even faking blindness so she could “memorize distinguishing features,” Prunty said.

“She described this man to a T,” she said.

The ordeal left the student with a scarred face, severe burns and liver damage from the pills.

She was not in the courtroom Thursday. Her parents were - and they refused to cry in public.”

Previously...

Note: Photo included.

Note: The following post is a quote:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2027374/posts

Prosecutor Details Rape That Lasted 19 Hours
New York Times ^ | 6/6/08 | John Eligon
Posted on June 6, 2008 4:27:09 PM PDT by BlazingArizona

The time crept by so slowly and painfully that the 23-year-old Columbia University journalism student had decided it was time to end her life.

Over many torturous hours, she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized and forced to perform oral sex, a prosecutor told a jury on Thursday. The accused, Robert A. Williams, 31, had doused the woman’s face and body with boiling water and bleach, forced her to swallow handfuls of pills and to chase them with beer, sealed her mouth with glue, and bound her wrists and legs with shoelaces, cords and duct tape, said the prosecutor, Ann P. Prunty. And now, Ms. Prunty said, he was asking the woman to gouge out her own eyes with a pair of scissors.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...