8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

[Janik]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Amongst college kids? Hardly. Most will have been born in the same year or two. So those sharing a birthday will also highly likely share a birthyear. It will take the number needed for two to have the same date up a little from 23. But not by much.

[Jah Womble]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

WOM wrote: This style of reiterating your conclusion continues to fascinate me.

Delusional as she may have been

You acknowledge and dismiss, in one breath, an incredibly salient motivating factor of the entire deception....

evidence clearly indicates that Newland went to considerable lengths to ensure that the victim was kept entirely unaware at all times of what was happening to her

Then you restate the facts of the case, which nobody anywhere is even disputing....

evidently in the knowledge (or, at least, the very strong assumption) that her 'partner' would not otherwise have consented to such activities.

You bundle together two years of a relationship, which included an ongoing side-friendship, plus phone-calling, tv-watching, emailing, sunbathing, and yes sexual intercourse...

That makes it without question a sexual assault.

.....aaaaaand reach the conclusion that it was all just sexual assault as any reasonable person would see.

What a few of us seem to feel, though, is that it's far, far more complex and nuanced than that. Yes, the sexual assault did occur. And yes, it should be punished or remedied in some meaningful way, but the charge and the outcome seems to ignore the totality of the situation.

Jesus wept, how patronising are you? A mini-lecture from someone who struggled even to see the (hugely significant) sexual aspect of this case as non-consensual at the start of play. (Something that 'nobody anywhere is disputing', eh? Yeah, right...)

To be clear - which I was anyway - it was a direct response to Mat's earlier post (hence the quote). True, I did, actually, think I was repeating myself in that reply - but only because I was a touch surprised at his comment. But of course I'm not disputing for one second your oft-repeated position that this case is 'highly complex and nuanced'; nor am I dismissing Newland's mental state, as you also seem to have implied more than once. (I've said all along that I think the sentence seems harsh - this clearly is because of its intricate and near-unprecedented nature. Why else do you suppose I'd say that? Because I think she seems like a nice girl underneath it all?)

But perhaps, you know, be clear in your own position before dishing out glib lessons in debating. Just a thought.

[WOM]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Please accept my apologies, then. I didn't mean to come across so dickishly. I allowed my frustrations to get the better of me.

[Edie St Pierre]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Janik wrote: Again, both takes are focusing entirely on what the perpetrator believed to be happening. That is not the determining factor. It is what the victim understood and believed which makes it a sexual assault or not. Which is why WOM is wrong, and these actions are straightforwardly violent criminal offences. Newland may have complex emotional and psychological problems (which places here in a similar category to many male sexual offenders, of course), but the offending they have led her to is not. Nor is the consequences of her offences.

No, I may have read you wrong but I think you're confusing strict-liability offences with the specific charge here of sexual assault of an adult where the motive, intention or guilty mind of the accused is most certainly a key component. The exact wording of the 2003 act is "where (A) does not reasonably believe that (B) consents".

Quickly going back to something you said earlier though.

Janik wrote: As always with such cases the media is selective and sensational in what it reports. The judges sentencing remarks are worth a read, as is usually the case with such apparent disparties between what 'common sense' would apply.

Thing is, clarifying a successful case of the Crown against an accused person is exactly what Judge's sentencing remarks are intended to do. Their purpose is to suggest that all three elements of the process from initial charging, to prosecution in court, to a guilty verdict by the jury have been carried out logically and efficiently. I dunno if you've ever read the sentencing remarks in cases like the Timothy Evans case or the Derek Bentley case or the Guildford Four? There's no nuance in them. They don't say 'we may have made a mistake, but we are where we are', the guilt of the accused for whatever they have been charged with is never questioned. It can't be.

I would say that looking at this case, all three areas of this trial I think there has to be grave doubts that this process has been carried out particularly well.

To start with though, it's worth having a look at the only transcript of the trial I can find on-line. It's on the second and third days when Gayle Newland was questioned and the prosecution and defence teams outlined their cases. I'll cut and paste links below, because I think they're genuinely worth a read.

DAY 3

DAY 4

I've been looking for a full transcript of the Victims testimony in court, but can only find bits and pieces.

Whatever anyway, I think it's apparent that Newland's testimony is all over the place and she's picked up on it time and time again by the prosecution team and the judge. Her arguments seem absolutely piss-weak. She's asked why she texted her friend about 'lies overlaying lies' and says she was just saying anything to get her back. She's asked about why she sent texts to the victim under the man persona that both she claimed knew was a lie and says it was part of a cover-story that both of them were involved in so that no-one would know that the victim was having a lesbian affair. Again, from her direct testimony it sounds as though she had no particular cover-story prepared by her defence team when she went into this trial. Which suggest either that her defence deliberately created a dreadful series of unconvincing stories or alternatively she went into the dock with no particular agenda in mind other than to tell the truth. Or as much of it as she can tell.

It's clear she's embarrassed to fuck and there are details she's holding back. Again this could be evidence of guilt, or it could be that she's embarrassed about the whole thing for entirely non-criminal reasons and what she saw as her private life laid bare for completely public display. Notice at the end of the third day when she snaps and says "I would have done anything to keep that girl. Yes I look stupid, I look like a f***** weirdo".

The main thing I get from reading this transcript though is how utterly inept her defence team was. The two of them spent 100 hours together before they started having sex and they didn't always meet up for sex. One of the occasions mentioned was where Newland took the victim to her parents house, played with her dog and cooked her dinner. The victim says that she remained blindfolded throughout as she was under the impression she was with the male persona. So she remained blindfolded for the whole however many hours in Newlands back-garden? even ate dinner blindfolded. Is this credible to you as a story? Also the victim claimed that they had begun sex with the dildo earlier than the dildo had been ordered. This was the two charges Newland was found not-guilty on as the defence pointed out in their summing-up that they couldn't logically have happened. There's acres of room for the defence to completely tear the Crown's case to shreds but they did absolutely nothing.

Thing is jury's aren't blessed with magic powers, they can only go on what they've been given. And what they've been given in this instance is a well-presented if not entirely solid case for the prosecution and a dreadfully weak case for the defence. I'm also amazed given the complexity of the evidence and the case itself that the whole thing was wrapped up in four days. There seems to be whole areas unexplored, not just of the personalities of the two women involved, but also the chronology of the thing. How did it develop, not just on the odd occasion they had sex, but every time they met. The whole thing is just too confusing for words really.

And why i'm bothered about all this is because miscarriages of justice do happen, they've happened throughout English legal history and they'll happen again. One may have happened here. I'm not saying it did obviously - I mean obviously! I don't bloody know - but I have do have real doubts that the woman serving eight-years for a serious sexual assault had an entirely fair trial.

[Jah Womble]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Gayle Newland's conviction quashed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/12/gayle-newland-blindfold-sex-attacker-accused-of-impersonating-a/

[Incandenza]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Her lawyer argued on Wednesday that her conviction was "unsafe".

The appeal judges allowed her appeal and quashed her conviction following criticism of the trial judge's summing up.

Any more information on that? How was the conviction "unsafe"?

[ursus arctos]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

It's a term of art in English Criminal Law

A conviction may be unsafe despite the applicant having pleaded guilty where:
the plea was equivocal or mistaken or;
the effect of an incorrect ruling of law on admitted facts was to leave an accused with no legal escape from a verdict of guilty on those facts. However, a conviction would not normally be unsafe where an accused is influenced to change his plea to guilty because he recognizes that, as a result of a ruling to admit strong evidence against him, his case on the facts is hopeless.

A conviction may be unsafe even if the appellant admitted his guilt at trial if an application that there was no case to answer was wrongly refused. A conviction obtained on this basis is an abuse of process.

My guess is that the appeal here focused on the "incorrect ruling of law" prong of the test.

[Incandenza]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

I figured it was something like that.

[Diable Rouge]

Detailed article in the Guardian today:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ewland-retrial

[Lucy Waterman]

Hattenstone is one of the peerless "terrible Guardian writers". I THINK his aim was to make us sympathise with Newland, but with characteristic dexterity he gets us to a place where the whole case seems intractable, and the verdict and original sentence not unreasonable.

[Janik]

That Newland has been convicted again rather went under the radar, didn't it? Probably because the press were bared from reporting it so the salacious/bizarre details couldn't be used to generate momentum about it.

From the sentencing guidelines it looks like a category 2A offence, which means a starting point of 8 years and a category range of 5-13 years. Newland's best hope is that the judge rules it a category 3A offence, which is 2-6 years in prison. The 'harm' element is where the most doubt is. Would her victim have been said to have suffered severe psychological harm, have been penetrated using large objects (her defence sounds like it will be counter-productive on that front) or suffered additional degradation/humiliation? Or indeed suffered a sustained incident? It is going to be quite difficult to sustain that none of these applies. Culpability leaves even less wiggle room. Significant degree of planning and abuse of trust? Those are both no-brainers here. It's going to be another sentence that doesn't feel like it fits the crime, basically.

[ursus arctos]

Though Newland appears to have offered zero independent evidence of her basic claim that the other party was a willing participant in the "fantasy"

[Satchmo Distel]

It's very clear-cut if we focus on the perpetrator's behaviour. Incredulity about the victim's behaviour is not a rational approach.

[Janik]

Its less that than the guidelines were not written with this type of offence in mind. So it is being squeezed into box that is the closest available fit, rather than one that gives what feel like appropriate outcomes. The prescriptive approach to sentencing can lead to that in exceptional cases, and this is just such. But the judges hands are mostly tied.

That Newland's behaviour constituted criminal sexual assault is not something I have any issue with, only the level of punishment she is presumably about to receive for it.

[Satchmo Distel]

Agreed, but that also reflects the fact that evaluation of appropriate punishment is also subject to subjective judgments, culturally conditioned to some degree.

[Sam]

What a weird coincidence that this thread just got resurrected - I was just telling my girlfriend about this case (she thinks for the first time) a couple of hours ago.

[Janik]

6 and a half years this time around. 6 years for the sexual assaults and the other 6 months for another crime entirely!