Three teens charged with elderly woman's rape.
By correspondents in Detroit From: Fox US News
August 29, 2010 4:44PM
THREE US teens aged 15, 17 and 18 have been charged over a brutal attack on a 90-year-old Detroit woman. Police say they forced their way into the woman's home and raped her.
tTwo of the teenage suspects were arraigned Saturday in connection with the rape and robbery of a 90-year-old Detroit woman.
The crime not only horrified the Detroit community, it brought them together, reported myFOXdetroit.com.
Maurice Randall, 17, and Anthony Hardy, 18, both of Detroit, were arraigned Saturday along with a 15-year-old Detroit boy whose name is not being released because he's a juvenile.
The crime took place August 12 on Detroit's west side. The attack angered residents who started patrolling their neighborhood with bullhorns urging witnesses to come forward. Police say more than 200 volunteers played a key role in helping solve the case.
"I just wonder what type of world we're coming to - teenagers committing heartless acts," said one volunteer. "Detroit has a bad mark right now in America but us coming together to catch these 3 guys it shows we can do a lot more in our community."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/three-teens-charged-with-elderly-womans-rape/story-e6frf7jx-1225911536497
Ex-con Shon Holland busted for rape of 79-year-old Bronx woman
BY Jonathan Lemire
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, August 29th 2010, 4:00 AM
An ex-con was busted for the rape of a 79-year-old Bronx woman he followed into her building's elevator, police said Saturday.
Shon Holland, 40, was charged after detectives matched his DNA sample with evidence found on the victim's clothing after the sick attack on July 19, police said.
Holland was taken into custody Friday after transit cops saw him skip underneath a turnstile at the subway station at E. 116th St. in East Harlem, police said. The officers who made the arrest are part of an anti-terror task force.
Realizing Holland was wanted on an open warrant for violating an order of protection issued to his former girlfriend, cops took the suspect to the Bronx's 45th Precinct stationhouse. He was already in a holding cell when special victims detectives discovered the DNA match.
Holland also resembled the man captured on surveillance video following the elderly victim into her Westchester Square apartment building in the moments before the attack, police said.
Holland was charged with rape, assault and violating the order of protection, police said.
Police said the perv punched the woman in the face and knocked her to the ground before the sex attack.
Before Friday, the suspect had been arrested 14 times. His record shows convictions for criminal possession of a weapon, assault and disorderly conduct.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/08/29/2010-08-29_man_busted_for_rape_of_woman_79.html
How would you feel my dishonest friend if the full extend of the law for rape would be a minor misdemeanor and even then most of the times the police do not bother to press any charges?
Right now, the law is that it is a minor minor minor crime not even a low level felony for a woman to falsely level a rape charge. Full extend of the law indeed<lol>.
To placed innocent men and their families through that kind of hell and try to placed them in prison for decades should be punish at the same level as we now punish male rapists.
The crime is no less evil then rape is.
Daily Pilot
Suspect extradited from Austria
He faces 68 years and four months to life if convicted of multiple rapes.
By Joseph Serna, [email protected]
7:38 PM PDT, August 27, 2010
COSTA MESA — One of Orange County's 10 Most Wanted men, who is accused of raping several women, including one in Costa Mesa, was expected to be extradited to the United States Friday from Austria, where international police tracked him down.
Ali Achekzai, 32, formerly of Ladera Ranch, was expected to arrive at Los Angeles International Airport. From LAX, he was to be taken to Orange County, where he faces a slew of felony charges, including two counts of rape, two counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object, aggravated assault, intent to commit a sexual offense and enhancements for sexually assaulting more than one victim and causing great bodily injury.
He faces 68 years and four months to life in prison if convicted on all counts.
Achekzai's arrival in Southern California would end a months-long international manhunt, while locally police have been looking for him since 2004.
Prosecutors are charging him with assaulting three women in Southern California but are asking for the public's help in identifying other potential victims.
His first victim, according to prosecutors, was a woman outside a Costa Mesa home in 2002. Achekzai was partying with four people in Laguna Beach before they all took a limousine back to a Costa Mesa man's home to drop him off, officials said. Prosecutors claim that when Achekzai remained in the car with two of the women, who were both asleep, he undressed one of them and began fondling her. The woman woke up screaming and Achekzai swore at her and told her to shut up, according to prosecutors.
Authorities said Achekzai raped two women in 2004. In January 2004, Achekzai allegedly convinced one woman to pull over her car when he was following her from a Laguna Beach club. He told her he had something important to tell her, officials said.
When she pulled over in a fast food restaurant parking lot, he got into her car and warned her about another man from the club, officials said.
Scared, the woman ran away from Achekzai, but he caught up to her and pulled her back into the car and raped her, officials said.
He then got into his car and fled, authorities said.
Just a few months later when he was partying with his cousin and some girls in San Diego late one night, prosecutors said Achekzai convinced one woman to take a walk with him in a nearby park. There he pulled her into the bushes and raped her, threatening to kill her if she told anyone about it, officials said.
The woman immediately told her friends and Achekzai punched her, knocking out teeth, according to authorities.
Before DNA evidence from these incidents could be linked to Achekzai, police said he fled to Canada and eventually to Austria. He was arrested and accused of rape there but was acquitted. Because local police and prosecutors successfully got his DNA into the Interpol database, authorities got a match when he had to submit a DNA sample to Austrian authorities.
Prosecutors said Achekzai has lived in San Francisco, Canada, Austria, England, Germany and Afghanistan.
He is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday. Though his bail is set at $1 million, he cannot actually be released because the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has put a hold on him for deportation proceedings after this case concludes.
http://www.dailypilot.com/news/tn-dpt-0828-achekzai-20100827,0,936903.story
Police: Calif. rape suspect captured in NY state
The Associated Press
Posted: 08/27/2010 04:39:56 AM PDT
AVOCA, N.Y.—A rape suspect wanted on a $10 million warrant in California was arrested in an upstate New York town after hitching a ride with a truck driver he had befriended in the Southwest, authorities said Friday.
U.S. marshals in Missouri who had been tracking Eugene Lee Upshaw's elusive cross-country journey with various truckers were tipped off that he was headed to Steuben County in New York, according to county Sheriff Joel Ordway.
Marshals alerted local authorities, and the sheriff department's SWAT team was waiting for Upshaw when the truck he was riding in arrived Thursday night at its destination in Avoca, Ordway said. He surrendered without resistance, the sheriff said.
Upshaw was being held without bail in the Steuben County jail. He will probably be assigned a public defender soon and will be asked to waive extradition proceedings, Ordway said.
Authorities in California said Upshaw, a 45-year-old commercial truck driver from Phoenix, raped a woman in the Los Angeles area in August 2009 after asking her for a ride. He is charged in Los Angeles County with kidnapping, rape, assault with a deadly weapon and sodomy.
Sheriff's detectives there said DNA evidence recently linked Upshaw to the crime along a remote dirt road in Castaic, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.
Upshaw is a suspect in unsolved rapes in Washington and Oregon and is a "person of interest" in a homicide investigation in Phoenix, Ordway said.
Police believe Upshaw used his knowledge of the trucking business to hitch rides with truckers and elude capture.
The sheriff said Upshaw had befriended a truck driver in Arizona and rode with him to Lancaster, Pa. There, the trucker picked up a load of metal pipes destined for a trucking business in Avoca, where Interstates 390 and 86 intersect 55 miles southeast of Rochester.
The trucker is a local man who didn't know Upshaw was a fugitive, Ordway said.
"There are no ties between the trucker and this bad guy, other than meeting down there," he said.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15911823
'Wild dog' rape suspect captured on Corfu
Published: Aug. 27, 2010 at 12:26 AM
CORFU TOWN, Greece, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Police on the Greek island of Corfu arrested a man Thursday suspected of raping four British tourists while he lived in the woods near a beach resort.
The hunt for Dimitris Aspiotis had been going on for six days, The Daily Telegraph reported. Investigators said he admitted the four rapes.
Lefkimmi on the south coast of Corfu is popular with the thousands of British tourists who visit the island every year. In three of the assaults, victims were attacked and raped as they walked through the woods to beaches, The Sun said.
Searching for Aspiotis "was like dealing with a wild dog in territory that he knew better than we did," Yiotis Theocharis, a top commander with the Corfu police, told the Telegraph.
A 23-year-old woman who works for a British travel company told the Sun she was attacked and held for 12 hours. She said she had been to the beach to warn other women to stay out of the woods at night but thought she was safe in daylight.
"He knew the forest well, and kept moving me around to different spots to make sure he wasn't caught," she said. "I keep getting flashbacks and seeing his face."
© 2010 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/International/2010/08/27/Wild-dog-rape-suspect-captured-on-Corfu/UPI-98501282883164/
August 29, 2010
New Law Requires Testing of All Rape Kit DNA Evidence in Illinois
A bill recently signed by Governor Quinn will require all law enforcement agencies to send rape kits (physical evidence collected after sexual assaults) for DNA testing. The bill, introduced in early February and passed unanimously in May, came in reaction to recent investigative journalism demonstrating that many of these kits sit on law enforcement shelves in Illinois without ever being tested.
The new law, which takes effect September 1, 2010, makes Illinois the first state in the nation with this requirement. Questions remain about how the state (already facing a budget crisis) will pay for the additional testing, as well as what effect the requirement will have on those accused of sexual assault and the victims of assault.
Since 2005, Chicago police have required that every rape kit received be tested. Until the new law though, there was no statewide requirement that the kits be tested--only that they be retrieved from the hospital where the samples were gathered within two weeks.
Many law enforcement offices across the state did not send all of the kits they received to the state crime lab for testing. Kits have often not been tested when the victim doesn't want to press charges, if the police believe the case isn't very strong or if the state's attorney's office declines to prosecute the case.
Proponents of the new law, including Attorney General Lisa Madigan, point out that rape victims already face difficult hurdles following a sexual assault. Those who take the time to visit a hospital and allow a nurse to gather physical evidence from their bodies--an invasive exam that can take up to eight hours--should not have their efforts merely sit on a shelf, say supporters
Expected Benefits of the New Law
Supporters hope the new law will lead to more rape arrests. FBI statistics indicate that only 11 percent of all reported rapes in Illinois have lead to an arrest. When New York City recently introduced a similar testing requirement, its arrest rape nearly doubled to 70 percent of all reported rapes.
Supporters also point out that even if a victim knows the identity of the suspect, the DNA may be valuable to point out inconsistencies in the suspect's testimony and provide the sort of hard evidence that could impress a jury.
Even if police or prosecutors feel they don't have enough evidence to get a conviction in court, having the DNA evidence could identify a pattern of rapes by the same individual. Furthermore, by guaranteeing that every rape kit collected into evidence will be tested, supporters believe more women may report sexual assaults.
The new law could also potentially benefit those accused of rape. Under constitutional due process protections, people accused of crimes have a right to know all the evidence that the government has concerning a case--both positive and negative. In that sense, the requirement of testing all rape kits can be seen as protecting the rights of the accused. Testing of the evidence could also help exonerate those wrongfully accused of rape.
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/new-law-requires-testing-of-all-rape-kit-dna-evidence-in-illinois-167793.php
Automatic testing might do
more harm to victims, critics say Those critical of automatic kit testing argue it is wasteful, irrational and obscures the fact that the majority of rape cases (up to 80 percent, according to national crime surveys) involve people such as relatives, dating partners or acquaintances. Such cases are the least likely to be prosecuted and DNA is not often useful because the issue isn't whether the accused had sexual contact with the accuser, but whether it was forced or consensual.
Wendy Murphy, a former sex-crimes and child-abuse prosecutor who teaches legal seminars at New England Law in Boston, says victims should not be asked routinely to submit to intrusive sexual-assault exams because most of the time they produce little or no useful evidence.
"If we are completely in the dark about who [committed a rape], an exam is absolutely the thing to do," she said.
But Murphy said that beyond re-traumatizing victims, most rape kits just muddy the water and cause people to question victims -- especially if they have had other recent sexual partners -- rather than investigate the attacker.
In the majority of rape cases, she said the attacker doesn't even ejaculate or leave semen to be tested.
"The reason we have hundreds of thousands of rape kits stacked up in closets all over the country is because they are irrelevant, and even harmful, to cases," Murphy said.
She suggests the idea of throwing money at mass DNA testing is more politically palatable than scrutinizing the reasons that police and prosecutors so often decline to go forward with rape cases. Murphy said that could include such factors as investigations that unfairly focus on a victim's conduct.
Victims' advocates hope mandatory testing of rape kits will lead to broader changes in sex-crime investigations.
"With more consistent collection and testing of rape kits, we believe that the criminal system will get more practice aggressively investigating rape allegations," said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, a director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, "and we believe that more undetected serial rapists will be identified among that population of men who are already coming to the attention of the criminal system, thanks to the brave reports of girls and women who come forward even when they know that they will be disbelieved
...intended to put more fear into the hearts of men who desire to **** women than is already the case.
This 42-page report collected comprehensive testing data from 127 of 264 jurisdictions in Illinois and found that only 1,474 of 7,494 sets of physical evidence, known as "rape kits," booked into evidence since 1995 could be confirmed as tested. That suggests 80 percent of rape kits may never have been examined in the state.
I first told you about the appalling national rape kit backlog crisis in November 2009. At the time, Congress seemed to be poised to address the estimated 400,000 untested rape kits — a collection of any physical evidence the attacker may have left behind, including vaginal swabs, urine samples, blood tests, and fingernail scrapings — with the introduction of the Justice for Survivors of Sexual Assault Act of 2009. Maddeningly, no movement has been made on that bill since it was sent to committee on November 5, 2009.
Now Representatives Caroline Maloney (D-NY) and Ted Poe (R-TX) are ready to try again, this time by introducing the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry (SAFER) Act.
The SAFER Act, introduced into Congress last Tuesday, would provide funding for audits of untested rape kits all across the country. Further, it would create a national database of evidence arising from the kits. Victims would be able to track the progress of their case online, adding a much-needed layer of accountability for law enforcement and empowering victims to be more involved in their cases.
Make no mistake about it, this legislation is vital to public safety. Representative Maloney pointed out that while evidence for almost all other crimes is processed quickly, often within hours of collection, rape kits can sit gathering dust for over a decade, at which point the statute of limitations has been exceeded. If that is not insulting to every survivor of sexual assault, I don't know what is.
Here are the specifics on what the Debbie Smith Reauthorization Act of 2008 contains:
$151 million per year for the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program to eliminate the current backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples in the nation’s crime labs. This money will provide federal grants to state and local governments over the next six years for DNA analysis of unprocessed evidence in rape cases
$12.5 million per year for the DNA Sexual Assault Justice Act help local law enforcement agencies put the DNA profiles of convicted felons into state and national databases. It also provides training grants to help ensure that nurses, police and paramedics know how to best collect and preserve DNA evidence in sexual assault cases; and
$30 million per year for the Sexual Assault Forensic Exam Grants to ensure that there are trained and equipped personnel to assist with the treatment and examination of sexual assault victims, including Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE) and Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners (SAFE).
This young lady Utah college student said it very well indeed.
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http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/opinion/false-rape-reports-harm-police-real-victims-1.2059487
False rape reports harm police, real victims
Published: Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Updated: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 02:11
Sexual assault is a horrible, life-altering event. It is something survivors never forget but will spend their whole life trying to. Tragically, the entire system is being completely undermined by an increasingly popular trend of false rape accusations.
False reports harm the agencies sworn to protect the victims. The U Police Department kicked into overdrive after receiving a rape report from a 16-year-old girl claiming she was sexually assaulted on campus Oct. 26.
Sgt. Arb Nordgran said the U Police take every report seriously, and as such, a lot of time was used to track down a fictitious criminal. But, he said it doesn’t matter—it’s their job to investigate and expend every effort to get to the truth.
“It’s rewarding in a sense that the department put a lot of man-hours in...it was worth it,” Nordgran said. “It is a lot better to put the man-hours in to prove that something didn’t happen, than to not put in the man-hours and say, ‘Boy, it really did happen’ later on.”
It’s also unfortunate that the time, effort and energy wasted by those officers can never be recovered, and what about the tax dollars being spent?
People who willingly make fake accusations are inappropriately spending public money, and they should have to pay just like any other criminal.
The young woman who made this false report suffered no public penalties. Her name was never divulged or published, and the U Police said there will be no criminal charges. She didn’t have to pay a dime to cover the chaos she created. Apparently, the most we can hope for is a substantial grounding
by her parents.
Time after time, agencies refuse to press charges against individuals making false reports. Apparently, without the threat of punishment, there is no incentive for some people to be honest. In fact, filing false rape reports seems to be the new, trendy way to avoid getting in trouble, to create an alibi or to simply gain attention.
Whatever their reasoning, false accusers are harming real victims’ decisions to report rape crimes. An August 2002, U.S. Department of Justice report based on the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992 to 2000, found that of the 131,950 completed rapes that occurred during the period, only 36 percent of them were reported. As well, only 34 percent of the 98,970 attempted rapes and only 26 percent of the 135,550 sexual assaults were ever reported to police.
There are numerous reasons why sexual crime victims choose to not report assaults, but no one can deny the damaging effect false reports create for real victims. The fear of not being believed by the police increases with each revelation of yet another fake rape allegation. In their diligent pursuit of truth, police officers are forced to question allegations, often treating true victims like they’re the criminals.
The stigma of mistrust is easily understood when considering the detrimental harm false allegations inflict upon innocent individuals and their families. Besides their names being plastered in newspapers, on the radio and TV, they will be permanently affixed to the fake crime in numerous articles published on the Internet. Later retractions don’t erase previous condemning articles or ease the life-altering harm
they inflict.
Innocent individuals are arrested based solely on an accusation. They are often treated as guilty by the public until they prove themselves innocent. They are humiliated, doubted, hated and cursed for being a despicable, vile creature. If they are lucky enough to prove their innocence, there will still be people who believe they were guilty of a violent crime.
I’m grateful the U reinstated its six-week Rape Aggression Defense class this semester. Reflecting on all that was taught about self defense, I learned the most vital defense we have is our brain. We need to be acutely aware of our surroundings at all times. Evaluating potential rape opportunities and then eliminating those vulnerabilities by planning ahead is the smartest defense.
Most importantly, victims have a responsibility to report the crime so the offender cannot harm anyone else. Misuse of this responsibility degrades the entire process. False reports physically, mentally and financially hurt the police, the public, real rape victims and innocent individuals who are wrongly accused.
The system must acknowledge the increasing trend of false accusations. Laws should be established to hold false accusers financially and criminally responsible for their actions. Maybe then individuals will think twice before concocting lies about being raped simply to avoid some trivial consequence.
