Here are the lessons from Steubenville:
1) If a bunch of jocks rape a girl in front of a room full of witnesses, and those jocks and their accessories-- who take pictures and vids-- boast about it publicly on the world-wide web, a few of them just might get arrested.
2) If they happen to have a blogger who pays attention to it, refuses to let it die quietly, and forces the issue, (prinnie) the charges might not be dropped right away.
3) If they are then unlucky enough to gain the attention of some vigilantes who drag a particularly repulsive vid of boasting and giggling about it, then a few of you who don't turn state's evidence might get a harsh judge who gives them a whole one year sentence. And they'd have to register as a sex criminal (For rape? Who'd have thought?)
4) And if they're this stupid/unlucky, they need not worry, the MSM will weep for them when they're convicted. Never mind they brought other people's reluctant punishment on themselves via hurting somebody else. Obviously there will be some sympathetic people who will help them get back on their feet when you get out.
5) They might actually overcome their traumatic experience:
I think The Onion was prophetic for the Steubenville rape coverage.
Those are the nauseating lessons of Steubenville. We find illustrated just how difficult it is to gain a conviction on a clear-cut case of rape; we see how adults in Steubenville tried to protect these rapists (and probably succeeded for most of them); how the coach tried to get people to erase their evidence, and how the sheriff deputies somehow accidentally erased videos and pictures from kids phones.
I'll just mention in passing how impossible it is to accidentally erase a video or picture off a phone. Phone manufacturers don't want complaints from people who accidentally erased things so phone makers don't make it easy. If there's one thing that tech geeks have always been obsessed with and that's preventing the loss of data. There's no way the sheriff's office inadvertently erased pictures from multiple phones.
I believe nobody should express sympathy for a criminal when the punishment is just. Express sympathy if you think the person didn't do it, when you think the punishment doesn't fit the crime. There was no doubt this was rape, and one whole year-- not even in prison-- is not up to the crime.
Call his life tragic after he's dead. MacBeth, for example, is only a tragedy long after he was dead, and harmless. Nobody felt sorry for MacBeth when he was alive. For one thing-- as he's contained in fiction-- the character is harmless to the audience, harmless to reality. Meanwhile, the audience can see things about him characters in the story can't. There's a strict separation between sympathy for a character and sympathy for a real person. Many people today blur it.
Maybe part of the problem with CNN-- and the rest of the media-- was that the victim was invisible from the trial, being a minor. They tried to bring the "human side" into it, and the rapists would be the only human interest story they could do. That's a way to make a mistake, where the normal journalistic bullshit leads you astray. It doesn't explain why so many media outlets made it.
If this is what's needed to get a conviction for rape, then the conclusion that our police and court system are inadequate. I shrink from calling it a "justice system." However, the actual problem is social. Slut shaming thrives in this society-- among both men and women, among every class and age group-- and it's still an excuse for rape.
I think the intelligent, insightful Laci Green gives something close to my opinion:
She looks like the way I feel: disillusioned. In the 1980s, I never thought we would still have trouble with this. That the millennial generation would just as given to the myth of bigotry that a careless slut deserves rape, that she brought it on herself, or that there is any justice to it.
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