The court was told the 12-year-old victim had been out playing with friends when she visited the Late Shop on Parrin Lane at around 5.30pm on January 18.
She was standing outside the shop with a 9-year-old boy when the teenager, now aged 15, approached them and told the little boy to go into the shop.
He and the girl then went to a nearby alleyway, while he was still carrying the knife, and he told her to undress.
She performed oral sex on him before he allowed her to get dressed and walked her back to a bus-stop outside the shop.
The boy was arrested the following day and later charged with rape.
So, we have a boy who, at the age of fourteen, has raped a twelve-year-old girl and threatened her with a knife. Some of us might suggest that a boy like this is a serious problem for society at large and therefore needs to be put somewhere safe. According to Judge Jeffrey Lewis, we would be dead wrong.
You see, although the boy threatened his victim with a knife and then raped her and then threatened her with the knife again afterwards to dissuade her from telling anyone, he didn't use the knife and rape her at exactly the same time. And, apparently, that means that he's so non-dangerous that we can just let him straight back out on the streets. Seriously.
But Judge Jeffrey Lewis found that although the teenager had intimidated the girl with the knife, he had not used it during the rape.
....
Judge Lewis ruled this was not an incident where the girl had been raped at knifepoint, adding there was "no nexus between the knife and the commission of the crime".
He said the boy had intimidated the girl with the weapon but this was in order to attempt to prevent her from telling others about the attack.
Which, apparently, is OK. Mafiosi, take note: threatening people with lethal weapons in order to stop them talking is not a serious offense.
This is just a fantastic precedent for rapists, isn't it? "M'Lord, though my client admits to threatening his six victims with a machete and admits to raping them, I would like to make it absolutely clear that, while he was raping them, he put the weapon down as he needed both hands free to cover their mouths. Surely, then, the prosecution's claim that these crimes were somehow violent in nature is sheer nonsense. The machete was in no way involved in the rapes." The phrase "reality trumps satire" is getting a little tired these days, but, really. This is too unrealistic even to work as comedy, and now, unless there's a successful appeal, it's the law of the land.
So what has this rapscallion been sentenced to, exactly? Well, not much. He's under a two-year supervision order — oo, supervision; nasty — he has to sign the sex offender's register for two years (which will require a very large signature), and he's going to be under a curfew between 8pm and 7am for three months. Regardless of your views on sentencing, that curfew is simply stupid on its face. He committed the crime shortly after 5:30pm. Had he been under this curfew at the time, and even had it been enforced perfectly, he'd still have raped the girl. It's like banning a joyrider from abseiling.
Just in case you're thinking that it's only us Nazi bastards on the throw-away-the-key Right who have reason to hate this idiot of a judge, here's something for you lefties to get up in arms about:
[Judge Lewis] added the girl had joined the boy in the alleyway voluntarily.
Yeah, the little tart was asking for it, wasn't she?
Think back to when you were twelve. Think of how many times you hung out with other kids, sometimes a bit older than you. Think of how easy it would have been to find yourself in this situation, had any of those other kids been sadistic amoral bullies. Now think of the message our legal system has just sent to every sadistic amoral little bully in the country.
I can think of no way to encourage vigilantism in this country any more than our sentencing already does. If this rapist had any sense, he'd be asking to be locked up for his own safety.
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