But the real help came from 17th-century lawyer Sir Matthew Hale, whose case law dominated the trial. Sir William Blackstone’s “Commentaries” on English criminal law provided the Colonies and later the new country with a basic understanding of many crimes, and Blackstone took Hale’s ideas about what makes a prosecution for rape plausible. According to Sweet, Hale, who was very concerned that malicious women would make false accusations against innocent men, that “the question was not only whether a woman had been forced to have sex against her will, but also whether her reputation was good enough. , whether she had resisted vigorously enough, whether she had screamed loudly enough, whether she had sustained enough notable physical injuries, and whether she had reported the crime quickly enough.” Nearly every attorney ran his questions through the Hale framework, and when it was the judge’s turn to instruct the jury prior to their deliberations, he declared Hale’s ideas “correct,” thus completing, as Sweet writes, “the transformation of Hale’s comments of suggestions written by a retired lawyer in rigid rules that defined the nature of the standing law and were binding on the jurors.”
Major Supreme Court decisions this term
A memorable term. The U.S. Supreme Court has made several important decisions during its last term, including rulings on abortion, guns and religion. Here’s a look at some of the important cases:
Perhaps we can’t imagine a lawyer today saying, as one of Bedlows did, ‘Was it wise to pick up a man on the street and get to know him right away? … Was it discreet to go on the Battery with this stranger and have fun with him after midnight?” But rape myths persist: that a woman should do whatever it takes to fend off her attacker, or that her resistance is a critical factor in determining the rapist’s guilt.
This is not Hale’s only legacy. The reader may recognize his name from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states (and the federal government) to criminalize abortion without apparent limitation or exception. . In the opinion, Judge Samuel Alito cites Hale’s dissertation eight times as proof that abortion was considered a crime at the time the constitution was written. According to the court, the Constitution cannot therefore contain a right to opt for termination of pregnancy. Dobbs’s opinion is undoubtedly correct about Hale’s status at inception, and Sweet’s book confirms it. But the book also provides an opportunity, beyond the heated politics of abortion regulation, to reflect on the power we give today to legal authorities whose views on fundamental matters — such as what it means for a man to sexually assault women — be so different from what we think, or want to think we think, right now.
The acquittal was not the end of the story. Sawyer and John Callahan, her stepfather, didn’t give up: like modern litigants frustrated in the criminal court, they turn to civil court. Callahan took advantage of the patriarchal laws of the time and sued Bedlow for seduction – a fabricated claim, man to man, that cost Bedlow’s seduction of Sawyer callahan losing hair labor. This is the first known time a seduction suit was used for story in New York after a rape trial, and it worked; the jury awarded Callahan a staggering amount of damages – 1,800 pounds or $4,500 – enough money for Callahan “to buy the house he rented on Gold Street and a half-dozen similar ones” and to land Bedlow in debtor’s prison.