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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, February 7, 1983
'Legal' rape must end
Public understanding of rape has changed in recent years. It is time for Kansas laws to catch up.
The state rape statute now completely protects spouses from prosecution for rape. Last week the House Judiciary Committee, by a single vote, passed an amendment to a bill revising the statute that would eliminate spousal exemption. But it may be awhile before the bill gets out of committee.
A few legislators oppose any change in the rape laws. Some would limit the extent of spousal protection. Others would introduce a separate category for marital rape. Hours of debate have already been spent on the statute. The arguments against recommending the bill as amended were numerous.
One representative questioned the effect of the change on family ties. Rape takes place in an atmosphere of brutality. Family ties have already disintegrated when it occurs.
Other opponents fear that courts will not be able to handle cases of rape by a spouse and warn that convictions will be unlikely. Conviction is usually difficult in rape cases. The same standards of evidence are likely to be required for all cases of rape, and a case will not get to court if there is no evidence.
Some argue that wives (or husbands) might bring charges of rape against their spouses simply for retaliation when there is marital discord. Charges of rape already spring from discord in relationships. As in any other case, it will be up to the court to discern when charges have no basis and are brought out of malice.
Along the same lines, legislators are concerned that cases will be brought in time of stress and then dismissed if marital problems are resolved. This is no different from other instances in which criminal charges are dropped and cases resolved out of court.
Perhaps most repugnant of all is the proposal to create a separate statutory category for marital rape in place of eliminating spousal exemption. Marital rape would be considered a lesser crime than "ordinary" rape. We might as well say that a husband who beats or murders his wife should receive a lesser punishment than a stranger who assaults or murders.
So long as the law refuses to recognize sexual assault by spouses as criminal, this violence against wives will continue. Elimination of spousal exemption would state unequivocally that it is never permissible to rape — under any circumstances.
Reagan's relation with press being strained at both ends
By NORMAN SANDLER United Press International
WASHINGTON — Relations between the White House and the news media have been on a roller coaster for years. But at midterm President Reagan has raised new questions about their symbiotic and sometimes combative coexistence.
Such questions always are vexing for two institutions that so depend on — and use — one
But deputy White House press secretary Larry Spokesman himself raised the level of debate last week by accusing the media of a "steady denigration of the president."
"My question to you." Speakes in a speech, "is can the modern presidency survive today?"
Well into his second year, Reagan battled Congress on issues ranging from spending cuts to tax hikes to the sale of AWACS radar planes, and won.
Reagan enjoyed a much-talked-about “honey-eyemon” for much of his first term — not because reporters went easy on him, but because he had encouraged progress toward the goal of his presidency.
But all good things must come to an end. After 20 months, impatience with policies that failed to end the longest recession since World War II and the worst unemployment since the Depression weakened Reagan's political muscle.
His defeats at the end of the 97th Congress were untimely and compounded by Republican efforts to reduce taxes.
As Reagan neared midterm, the budget process — normally completed by early January — labored on, beset by indecision and indications that the Fed would have to stray the course rather than stay the course.
Coupled with a lower approval rating than his predecessors, this produced a rash of critical midterm assessments. Regardless, he is seen as a leader with public airings of what he and his advisers were doing in private
Even after issuing new guidelines for contacts with reporters and embarking on a public relations offensive to show Reagan as compassionate, concerned and in control, some in the
white House still complain about a lack of direction.
One aide says decisions about where Reagan should go and what he should say are made too hastily. Print reporters complain, with mentions of the Reagan television images in planning Reagan's outings.
Part of the problem is that Reagan is at times his own worst enemy. The "Great Communicator" in fact has been spotty in his recent speech deliveries, even when aided by teleprometer.
... The other part of the problem is how the White hat handles his coffee.
The most recent example was his trip to Boston.
Until minutes before his departure, Reagan was home free. The network news would show just what his image-shapers wanted: Reagan with black job trainees; a beer in a neighborhood.
But as he rambled on in response to a final question from high-tech business executives, Reagan raised the idea of abolishing the corporate income tax.
The president of the United States, who had just sought to demonstrate his concern for blacks in Roxbury and working stiffs in Boston, was pressing massive tax relief for corporate America.
The off-the-cuff remark altered the complexion of the Bosten visit. The White House, sensing political trouble, first hedged in explaining the remark, then made the mistake of pretending it did not exist.
Speakens said reporters, knowing Reagan made the statement off-the-cuff, should have soft-pedelled the story, "rather than liking your cloak and clapping your hands and back down
Then Speakes made another all-too-common mistake. He tried to deflect attention from Rezgan's own blunder by attacking the media.
Speakes has the unenviable task of having to face reporters seeking clarification of Reagan's impunity and sometimes confusing remarks. But refusing to address them needlessly raises
Perhaps overly protective presidential assistants should rely more on Reagan himself to straighten out the tangles he sometimes creates.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edi or reject letters.
Ripples of joblessness expand
Unemployment statistics are cold, lifeless figures, difficult to grasp and hard to pin down — unless you happen to be one of the unemployed
unless you happen to be one.
And with just less than 11 percent of the American population or at work right now, the American you or one of your family members is standing in the unemployment line is better than it has been since the Great Depression years.
There is life — and death — behind those statistics. There are the millions of laid-off factory workers and steelworkers who know they will never have their old jobs back because of the great change in America's industrial peeds.
There is the desperation that a man who has worked the same job for 35 years feels when he knows his last unemployment check is the one he has just nicked up from the mail.
There is the fear that the single parent, who just went back to work, feels when she reads in the newspaper that the department store she works for will be laying off some sales clerks next month. It's the same old story, last hired, first fired.
This recession, deeper and longer than others, is leaving families and relationships scarred, many beyond repair. A litany of problems caused or aggrivated by the recession — alcoholism, child and spouse abuse, suicide.
mental illness    makes for a sad refrain that seems to repeat itself whenever hard times hit.
Although Lawrence's unemployment rate is less than 5 percent, which is below the national average, the city has not been spared that it must have hit other parts of the country so hard.
Local social service agencies have helped record numbers of unemployed and low-income
KATE DUFFY
people with food, medicine, emotional support and money to pay back utility bills
In the last decade, a series of studies on the effects of unemployment have shown a link between joblessness and various forms of violence and sickness in communities hit hardest.
by Precision.
One of the most widely circulated works on the relationship was produced by M. Harvey Brenner, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. In a recent Washington Post article, Brenner cites a study he conducted in 1976 which
found that for every 1-percent rise in the unemployment rate, 4.1 percent more suicides would occur over a six-year period.
The same study showed that every time the unemployment rate climbed 1 percent, 5.7 percent more murders would be committed. There would also be 2.3 percent more admissions of women to mental hospitals and 4.3 percent more of men.
In addition, from that same "small" 1-percent bike, 1.9 percent more Americans would die from cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease and other stress-related diseases.
In the article, Brenner warns that the figures will be dramatically higher because of the federal government's massive assault in social networks. This is why a safety net for the unemployed in previous years.
Brenner thinks the economy's dreadful state will have an even worse impact on the number of jobs in 1983. In an update on his report for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, he says that a rising number of companies could be outweighed by the job market and that the number of bankruptcies has increased.
family violence, alcoholism and suicide are all signs that the system that so many Americans worked long and hard for is not working for them now. The America that the steel and factory workers built into a position of strength in the world is not returning the favor;
Death penalty arbitrary, ineffective
"There is no god but Allah. Verily do we belong and verily unto him do we履行." — Charles Brooks, convicted murderer, about to be executed, Dec. 7, 1983.
We are a nation preoccupied by death. Here, especially, that is ironic. It is here, more than anywhere else, that religious thought has been free to grow and evolve. And it is here that we have gone from our or at least very expensive weapon to protect our citizens from foreign and domestic attacks.
however, we are failing. We are failing to stop crimes from being committed, and we are failing to do anything productive with the few offenders we manage to apprehend.
Witness the fact that there are now more than 1,000 condemned prisoners in death rows all over the country, most living in conditions that must surely drain their will to fight on.
Letters Policy
And witness, too, the fact that many of these men and women will be "condemned" to live on in prison. For them, the years spent idylying were much greater than a breadbox will have been a terrible waste.
America's penal institutions have long operated on one of two premises. Either we feel responsible for correcting misguided, criminal behavior, or we want the Old Testament notion to be a tool to loath for a tooth, or we meet out a punishment, we think is appropriate for the crime.
Central to the latter premise is the concept of deterrence.
deterrence.
We want to deter murder, so we match this worst possible crime with the worst possible vengeance — death. But if the history of capital punishment tells us anything, it tells us that even when we agree on this basic premise, we still cannot bring ourselves to carry it out quickly and without favor.
Evidence that death by electrocution or lethal injection has any deterrence
MATT BARTEL
simply does not exist. For every statistic on either side of this issue there is another refuting what the first purported to prove.
The reason for this is easy to see. Even the most severe penalty has no deterrence when capriciously applied. It becomes only a thinly veined line in the background and probably worse than the original murder.
Bob
The real deterrence of any penalty, whether it be a parking ticket or death by electrocution, lies in the fact that most punishments are based on
offense, regardless of the wealth or prestige of the defendant. In this sense, death is the least reliable penalty of all.
Even if 100 persons were executed annually, an "optimistic" figure in today's court system, the chances of a murderer being caught, convicted and executed would be about 250-to-1.
That is 250 to-1 for all eligible defendants. The sad truth, here as in virtually every other area of human existence, is that not all people are treated equally.
Clarence Darrow once said, "Since the world began, a procession of the weak and the poor and the helpless has been going to our jails and our prisons and to their deaths."
In addition, lawmakers and politicians who claim to speak for "justice" often do little more than toss out a few old clichés and cite a few numbers based more on their popularity than on the actual lives of 1,000 or more inmates who languish on death row.
So let's choose up sides, forage for statistics, toss around eliches and have at it. In the end, the problem will remain. We can kill off the killers, but we will never stop the killing.
as long as we choose only destructive solutions to destructive behavior, we will have nothing but destruction, not only of lives but of the values we cling to. When the state sanctions its own form of murder, it cheapens the value of life for its constituents.
Today, the poor or black continue to dominate death row populations. Can we justify killing by the state as long as this condition persists?
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