Not exactly the Muslim kind, but I thought I would get in a quicky before services:
"Rape cases in Mont. produce legal standoff; Prosecutor ignored assaults, US officials say" by Jack Healy | New York Times April 13, 2014
MISSOULA, Mont. — For three years, this college town in the hills of western Montana has lived under the shadow of stories of rapes gone unpunished and complaints that officials minimized or ignored reports of sexual assaults — especially if the suspects played for the University of Montana Grizzlies, the wildly popular football team.
Maybe I should have posted this on Monday.
Think of it as an Easter gift from me to you.
Over the winter, federal investigators released a report saying the county prosecutor’s office had disregarded sexual assaults to the point that it was placing “women in Missoula at increased risk of harm.”
The Justice Department described accounts of a victim who had been told, “All you want is revenge,” and said a prosecutor had told a mother that “boys will be boys” in the wake of an adolescent’s sexual assault of her 5-year-old daughter.
But rather than bringing about contrition and vows to reform, the investigation set off what legal observers call a remarkable standoff between the elected county attorney, Fred Van Valkenburg, and the Justice Department.
Saying his office has done nothing wrong, Van Valkenburg has gone to court against top federal judicial officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., to ask a federal judge to halt the inquiry.
Van Valkenburg argues that the Justice Department had no legal authority to swoop in and investigate his office.
It is an unlikely public battle for an elected Democrat who has held office for 15 years and twice voted for President Obama. Van Valkenburg said Holder was an “embarrassment” and a “bad guy” whose investigators had lied about how his office prosecutes sex crimes.
He is, but I have no idea whether that matters in these instances.
But federal authorities said they were simply trying to fix what they described as a litany of problems in the prosecutor’s office, including what they called an “extremely low” prosecution rate for sexual assaults.
Overall, the Justice Department found that county prosecutors had pursued charges in 14 of the 85 sexual-assault cases that the police had referred to them for prosecution.
Two related federal investigations into Missoula’s Police Department and the University of Montana concluded last year with agreements between local officials and the Justice Department. Included were promises to improve the way the local authorities handled reports of sexual assaults and the hiring of independent overseers to monitor their efforts.
But Van Valkenburg has rejected any such settlement. He has refused to hand over his case files to federal investigators, citing confidentiality concerns, and said the federal authorities were wrong to issue the excoriating 20-page list of findings against his office in February.
Two Democrats hoping to succeed Van Valkenburg as county attorney — he is not running for reelection — say it is time to rebuild trust with the community and move forward. Josh Van de Wetering, one of the candidates, said a legal confrontation would be expensive and time-consuming, while the “very real problem of appropriately addressing sexual assault in our community seems to have taken a back seat.”
Oh, yeah, the incestuous political infighting made me forget all about the rapes.
But Mark Muir, Missoula’s former police chief, said it was time that somebody pushed back against what he called the Justice Department’s aggressive overreach.
He said federal investigators had misrepresented facts and then strong-armed the police and the university into agreeing to follow the federal government’s own prescriptions for improvement.
“I see a pattern and practice of severe bullying and misuse of their statutory authority,” Muir said.
From the federal government? Surely you jest, sir.
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