And I can easily see a judge who is a lot more concerned with her conviction rate (and those of the prosectors) than the actual victim of domestic violence she busted out a bad Judge Judy impersonation on. “You’re feeling anxiety now? I’ll show you what anxiety is!” What kind of human garbage says that to anyone having a meltdown in front of them?
It took me a long time to get out of a bad relationship where the abuse was, thankfully, psychological not physical. You know what didn’t help me, even a little bit? People who were constantly auditing my motivations – and trying to bully me into doing what THEY thought I should have done, instead of backing my play when I was ready to make it.
If Judge Collins actually gives a damn about breaking the cycle of domestic violence, perhaps she can speak up about all the ways in which law enforcement and the judiciary act against abused women. How about protecting women who DO testify against their abusers from being character-assassinated on the stand, then thrown out without effective social services and assistance afterwards? Or stop making it so damn easy for abusers to track down and harm their victims again, after they’ve done time that barely qualifies as a bad joke?
All Collins has done, tragically, is send domestic violence victims a loud and clear message you shouldn’t even go to the cops.
Or, to be entirely cynical, someone was really pissed off that her conviction rate and media profile was going to take a rather embarrassing hit.
You don’t agree with it, but at the same time you seem to think that it will have a positive benefit for her (or society?) in the future because maybe she won’t let a future abuser slide. And I disagree with you there - I think there is a FAR greater chance that any future abuser in her life is going to get away with it scott free, because she will not cooperate with the authorities in any way, shape, or form.
All along I’ve been saying that the judge did the wrong fucking thing. See? We agree there.
I also explained why what the judge did is legal, and some possible reasoning behind it.
Explaining a thing and defending it are different concepts. You can find individual lines of text from me you disagree with all day long because I do too.
Ahh, I see where the issue is - you were writing from the point of view of the judge, I guess? The way you split out your paragraphs, it seemed to me like you were giving your own opinion there. My bad, I suppose.
I wanted to give some reasoning from the judge’s pov that would seem logical from the bench.
Others keep pointing out that the judgement will discourage her from reporting in the future, and I agree. Here in the real world, if that’s the judge’s reasoning, it’s bad call. But it probably made sense to her nonetheless.
That’s a very generous reading of her behaviour. I disagree with it (primarily because of her complete lack of empathy regarding the victim’s issues), but it’s certainly a possible reasoning behind it. Of course, we’ll never really know one way or the other whether her motivation was greater future justice or petty power tripping.
I think some have been pretending that there’s no possibility of the generous reading of the judge being true. That’s not my experience with legal types.
And she could have had some logical framework like that in place only to justify her pettiness.
But the judge was also legally right because the girl defied subpoena. Whatever we in the peanut gallery think.
