Don't Want to Be Interrogated by Your Rapist? Then You Have No Case

Earlier this week, I wrote about the 21-year-old Seattle woman who threatened to jump off the King County courthouse roof to escape being cross-examined by the man on trial for raping her over a span of years as a child. The solution to her inability to undergo the trauma of being cross-examined by her rapist? Dismiss the charges.

Salvador Aleman Cruz was representing himself, which gave him the right to interrogate all the witnesses — including his victims — on the stand. The prospect of undergoing this ordeal, which essentially empowered her childhood rapist to again assert control over and intimidate her, pushed the victim to the brink of suicide. So prosecutors asked that the charges against Cruz involving this victim be dismissed, as Cara reports in a follow-up on The Curvature.

This is not the first such case in the area: in another King County case, a woman who was raped at knifepoint in her while her children were asleep had to put up with being questioned by her attacker. The woman, who endured two days of questioning at the hands of her rapist, complains that perpetrators "want to interfere with the process, put their victim through it again and assert their authority."

This sure does seem to be awfully beneficial to a rapist. Who needs a lawyer when  you can undermine justice by directly intimidating your victims into dropping the charges? The perpetrator is put into the perfect position to reassert domination and inspire fear in his victim, or trigger post-traumatic stress disorder. Because this case involves a young woman who was raped as a small child and death threats, the power dynamic of putting her rapist into a position to hostilely interrogate her is especially problematic.

Cruz, fortunately, faces seven other felony counts related to a number of other victims, which include first- and third-degree child rape and first-degree child molestation. So we can hope that his other victims will be able to undergo the unbelievable ordeal of submitting to his cross-examination, in order for the trial to move forward and the guilty party to end up behind bars.

But no victim should have to choose between seeking justice and escaping the horror of being interrogating by their abuser. Over 200 hundred of you have told Washington legislators to pass a bill protecting rape victims from being cross-examined by their rapists. We need more of you to take action today to make certain that this travesty of justice does not occur again: it is harmful to rape victims and provides too much of a "get out of jail free card" to guilty persons.

The accused will still receive a fair trial with the aid of a lawyer, appointed by the state if they cannot afford their own, who would proceed with the actual questioning of any victims, even if the defendant wishes to self-represent in other areas of the trial. And victims wouldn't be intimidated out of pressing charges with the cooperation and sanction of the legal system.

Legislators in Washington have plans to introduce a bill to prevent this miscarriage of justice from occurring again that recognize "sexual-assault victims can be traumatized to the point that they become incapable of speaking.." This bill didn't make it through last session, so it's imperative that we put on the pressure to make certain it succeeds this time.

Photo credit: Andrea Allen