A Georgia Court of Appeals judge is being criticized for ordering a new trial for a man convicted of raping a woman with Down syndrome.
According to his ruling, Judge Christopher McFadden claimed that a new trial was necessary because the unnamed victim waited a day before reporting the rape, and because she did not behave like a rape victim.
Nor, in his opinion, did William Jeffrey Dumas, who was convicted of repeatedly raping the victim in 2010, “behave like someone who had recently perpetrated a series of violent crimes.”
Judge McFadden also stated that discrepancies in some witness testimony made him feel uncomfortable. The convictions, he ruled, “do not have the approval of the court’s mind and conscience.”
On Wednesday, District Attorney Scott Ballard told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he “had to go visit the Down syndrome woman who was the victim of the rape and tell her that even though a jury had convicted her assailant of the crime, the judge was giving the guy a new trial.”
“Her parents were, as you can imagine, outraged,” he said. “I just hope we can get some justice.”
So, Judge McFadden, just how should a developmentally disabled rape victim (or any rape victim, for that matter) act? And how should an accused, and I might add, convicted, rapist act?
Judge McFadden, you are an idiot. A Medieval idiot.
Politicians Are Poody Heads 
Gee, I wonder to which political party the judge belongs…
😦
Georgia, of course. In my dad’s town, Rome, about 45 minutes northwest of Atlanta, they had the infamous case of the black honor student convicted of raping a white girl, because the white girl couldn’t bring herself to admit to her cracker dad that she willingly had sex with a black man. Absolutely confederate. But, hey, in old downtown Rome there are two things of note. The first is the statue of Romulus and Remus suckling from the wolf, which was a present from none other than Benito Mussolini, who wanted to give similar statuary to all American cities with Italian names. History has it that Rome, GA was the only city to accept such a “gift.” And the second thing is that when you cross the bridge in old downtown Rome, a tiny bridge, maybe twenty yards long, that crosses over a narrow stretch of the Etowah River. As soon as you cross that tiny bridge to the “other side,” you realize quickly that, oh, we’re in Soweto now, this is where all the poor black folk live. My hometown of LA certainly has its Watts and East L.A. and La Puentes, but there’s something so stark about that division on such a small and civil war-influenced scale. Strange days, indeed. Always.
In my boyhood home here in Texas, there was a railroad running through the edge of town. All the black folks lived, literally, huddled together in a small section of town on the other side of the tracks. Step across those tracks and you were in a whole ‘nuther world.
I drove through there recently. The railroad tracks are still there, still starkly dividing the town. But now the second-class citizens, instead of being ‘the black,’ are ‘the poor.’ And that part of town is now larger than the first-class side of the tracks — and getting bigger.
As Brother Dave, a famous racist comic from the ’50s, used to say: “The color of prejudice isn’t black or white or red or yellow — the color of prejudice is green. Because if you ain’t got that green, you’re a second-class citizen any place in the world…”