In a move that underscores the indecent state of immorality in Indiana’s sex crime laws, rape charges against Donald Ward were recently expunged from his criminal record. This revision underscores how desperately every resident of Indiana, and certainly every student attending college there, needs Indiana’s laws to change!
Ward was arrested for engaging in sex by climbing into a male student’s bed in a dark, dorm room at Purdue University, where his girlfriend had fallen asleep. Ward penetrated her before she realized he was not her boyfriend. Then, he admitted to the police that he knew he was deliberately tricking her at the time.
Expunging his record places a gag order on the authorities who dealt with the case, including Prosecutor, Patrick Harrington, who represented Tippecanoe County, IN against Ward.
Will the location for the memorable 1840 presidential slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” champion new sex crime laws for the state and adopt a new mantra….. “TIPPECANOE FIGHTS SEX CRIMES TOO!!
Ward’s attorney unknowingly makes the case for enacting new laws to protect Indiana’s residents
Kirk Freeman, Esq. represented Donald Ward at his rape trial. According to Dave Bangert, reporter at the Journal & Courier, his comments to the press, excusing Ward’s behavior, included such blatant ignorance as:
“That’s not rape just in the fact that lots of women this weekend are going to have sex with Navy Seals, going to have sex with football heroes, going to have sex with guys that rescue kittens from the middle of the interstate, and are going to have sex with men who tell them, ‘I love you,” and, ‘I’m ready for a commitment. Just because they are lying doesn’t make it rape.”
Actually- Freeman is just plain wrong. Lies are a crime when someone is harmed by the lie. Anyone who passed Fraud 101 in college knows that fraud, harming someone with a lie, is a criminal means to induce behavior such as theft by fraud or rape by fraud. Theft by fraud is routinely prosecuted. Sexual assault is less frequently prosecuted because lawmakers, who are principally men, fail to recognize the horrific impacts this crime has on women, the lion’s share of sexual assault victims. They, therefore, ignore this crime when creating penal code.
Ignoring this deplorable way to gain access to someone’s body has become common place by people with rape mentalities. Freeman demonstrates the wide use of this harmful inducement, but also his personal obliviousness to the harmful impacts on the victim. His sense of sexual entitlement is glaring!
Ward’s admitted actions were a sexual assault whether IN penal code recognizes this form of sexual assault or not. The problem is that not all forms of sexual assault are illegal in Indiana, where consent is neither defined in its penal code nor serves as the basis for all sex crimes.
With certainty, rape by fraud or impersonation is omitted from Indiana’s penal code. This needs to change. Adopting a consent-based law, with an accurate definition for consent, freely given, knowledgeable and informed agreement, would protect Hoosiers from all forms of sexual assault. Enacting a Rape by Impersonation law would, at least, address the form of sexual assault admitted to by Donald Ward.
Freeman is using the trickery of hysteria-baiting to keep sexual trickery off of Indiana’s books. Whenever fraud is the basis for committing a crime, two specific elements keep the bar high to prevent random and de minimis claims:
- There must be a reasonable basis for the victim to have gone along with such trickery. Penal codes refer to this “reasonable basis” as “behaving as a ‘reasonable person’ would behave.” Victims who fail to conduct reasonable due diligence or who assume facts with no reasonable basis for doing so, would not meet the litmus test required for prosecuting the offender.
- There must be credible evidence that the trickery, in fact, took place.
In the state of TN, which has the widest law on sexual trickery in the US, only two cases have ever been tried.
Freeman went on to say…..
“Save it for Sunday. You can bring it up at your prayer circle. You can bring it up at your Bible study. You can bring it up at a mosque or a temple. It wasn’t church law. We weren’t there to have a moral trial. … The threshold isn’t: This offends me, therefore, I’m going to prosecute you. That’s the rule of man, not the rule of law.”
He obviously fails to understand that man, not God makes laws, that laws can change, and that laws shape moral reasoning.
Freeman’s failure to grasp the harm in undermining a person’s sexual sanctity, carries over to his inability to recognize additional sexual predatory behavior. He told a State Representative, who was addressing the problem of sex trafficking in IN, that sex trafficking could easily be solved by legalizing prostitution. He failed to recognize that coercing, forcing, or tricking someone into sex is a sexual assault and that IN needs to step up to protect its residents from this horrific form of defilement.
In Freeman’s words, here’s exactly why Indiana needs to pass the law that makes rape by impersonation a crime……..
“Here’s the problem: People are offended, so people are saying, ‘There ought to be a law.’ There is a law. And it’s not ‘unaware of the other person,’ or ‘unaware of the true identity of the other person.’ … I’m going to protest law enforcement using their biases to tell me what the law should be when it differs from what the law is. I will jump up and down, roll on the ground and froth at the mouth about that.”
So come on Indiana lawmakers! Let’s get it straight so sexual predators that undermine a person’s freewill through trickery are recognized as sex offenders. Until that happens, IN’s laws are aiding and abetting IN’s INdecency!
BTW- can I get a front row seat to Freeman frothing at the mouth when a law passes in Indiana?
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You can help! Watch this TEDx Talk and forward it to each and every law maker in Indiana! Here’s a link to a source for their email addresses.
Get your copy of “Your Consent – The Key to Conquering Sexual Assault” Forward it to every lawmaker in Indiana. It’s easy to do.. it’s a PDF.
