Terry Mitchell

Should You Be Forced to Mitigate Someone’s Crime Against You?



Posted: Friday, September 16, 2011

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

Recently, a young woman was arrested in Richmond, Virginia for being drunk and topless in public. She was booked and charged with public drunkenness and indecent exposure. The fact that she was drunk in public was clearly her fault. However, she explained to the police that she was topless as a result of someone beating her and removing her shirt. But this did not prevent the police from charging her with indecent exposure. It should have. If someone else removed her shirt, then it is not her fault that she was topless.

This is yet another case of blaming the victim. A crime was committed against her and she was not under any legal obligation to mitigate that crime. In order words, someone else illegally undressed her in public, so she was under no obligation to cover up or go home. It was the offender’s responsibility – and that person’s responsibility only – to restore her clothing. Since they put her into a state of undress, it is incumbent upon them to take her out of it. Instead of charging this woman for something she couldn’t help, the cops should be out trying to hunt down the person who brutally attacked and stripped her.
Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

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