Man to Serve 9 Months in Jail for Wife Visiting Him in Jail

Marshall Crandall IV is either the most in love guy or the dumbest guy on the planet, but does he deserve jail time for his wife coming to visit him when he was in the county jail? Evidently yes.... Marshall Crandall of Vassalboro, Maine was sentence to nine months jail time this week after pleading guilty (not surprising given the "advice" accused guys are given by their attorney's....) to three counts of violating conditions of release by allowing his alleged victim to have contact with him in his jail cell. Wait a minute, am I hearing correctly? That's right, even though his wife told the judge the domestic assault for which Marshall was arrested was mutual and admitting that she, "picked him up three or four times and slammed him on the ground," that didn't matter. What mattered was that when his wife came to visit Marshall in jail he didn't remind her (HELLO her paperwork says the same thing) that he was to have no contact with her, the victim, he didn't "shoo" her away. Yep, that's the law in Maine (and elsewhere) if your alleged victim approaches or calls you and you allow the contact it's "my bad" as far as the law is concerned. Read more about Marshall Crandall IV situation below: AUGUSTA, MAINE — As soon as an inmate from Vassalboro had a visitor at the Kennebec County jail in Augusta, he was violating a court order. Marshall Crandall IV, of Vassalboro, was sentenced to serve nine months in jail Tuesday at a Kennebec County Superior Court hearing after he pleaded guilty to three counts of violating conditions of release for having contact with the visitor. Crandall, 39, had been arrested April 4 and charged with domestic assault. That charge was dropped Tuesday in exchange for his plea to violating the court order. A condition of release on the domestic assault charge banned him from contact with the woman — the same woman who visited him at the jail. The violations occurred April 5, 10 and 15, when the woman named as the assault victim visited Crandall, according to jail records. The woman told the judge on Tuesday the domestic assault was mutual, and that she could have been charged with the same offense in the incident. “I picked him up three or four times and slammed him on the ground,” she said. The incident ended when the woman said she asked a neighbor to call police. “All I wanted was for them to take him for the day so I could move my stuff out of the house,” she said. Crandall was indicted in 2002 on charges of assault, violating conditions of release, violating a protective order, aggravated criminal trespass and tampering with a victim, among other offenses, and was on probation for some of them when the April 4 domestic assault charge was lodged. Crandall’s attorney, Hank Hainke, said afterward he expects Crandall to be successful on probation this time. “My client’s been in jail for 82 days, and he thinks this is a good way for him to handle this matter,” Hainke told Justice Donald Marden. Now that the assault charge is dropped, Crandall is not prohibited from seeing the woman. Asked how an inmate could have avoided contact with a banned person while incarcerated, District Attorney Evert Fowle said Crandall should have notified jail officials. “He should have said, ‘I’m not supposed to have contact,’” Fowle said. Url where this article can be found: http://www.badcopnews.com/2008/06/25/man-sentenced-in-kennebec-county-maine-superior-court-to-9-months-in-jail-after-women-visits-him-in-jail-judge-and-county-officials-seen-standing-around-a-huge-bonfire-watching-our-tax-dollars-go-up/

An Open Letter to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ).

An Open Letter to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ).

The National Domestic Violence Hotline with support from the United States Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women has announced a 10-year Blueprint to redefine domestic violence primarily or only as, violence against women. The Press Release notes that 33 million American women are abused each year. The press release ignores male victimization, perhaps believing similar to the majority of domestic violence advocates, public policy makers, the main-stream media and the general public, that male victimization is so rare that they need not care or know about it.

However, what surprises this author is that it appears that the DOJ, through the Office on Violence Against Women, has decided to publicly disclose that the DOJ is either not aware of or simply does not care about the male victims of domestic violence.

If you visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) website http://www.ndvh.org/ it is obvious that the NDVH is concerned primarily about violence against women.

Although the NDVH receives millions of dollars from the federal government it is a private organization and it has the right, as it website documents, to minimize, marginalize or ignore male victimization. However, the Office on Violence Against Women, as an integral department within of the United States Department of Justice, should not be “driven by ideology and stakeholder interests [i.e. NDVH] rather than by plausible theories and scientific evidence of cause.”

The above quote is from page 6 of the National Research Council report, Advancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women. I suggest that someone from the DOJ needs to read this important scientific evidence-based NRC report that is free of ideology and reconsider the DOJ decision to ignore male victimization.
The data below is from page 48 and 49 of that report. The report in its entirety is available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10849

Richard L. Davis

WIFE 'BEATS' HUBBY

For the Complete Article, go to: http://jamaica-star.com/thestar/20070623/news/news1.html WIFE 'BEATS' HUBBY A wife who is charged with wounding her husband wept bitterly in court yesterday and had to be consoled by her loving partner who, amid the laughter of some persons present declared, "Mi still love har, yuh Honour." The court learned that the petite wife had a dispute with her burly husband in early June, during which a knife was used to inflict a wound to the man's forehead, which required eight stitches. The wife was subsequently charged by the police with unlawful wounding, but was later bailed at the station. When the case was called up, a defence attorney representing the wife, told the court that there was a history of disagreements in the family and that on the day in question, it was while the wife was trying to get back in the house, after been forced out, that the knife accidentally caught the husband. She, then asked the court to dismiss the case. However, R.M. Lorna Errar Gayle would have none of it and remarked, "If it was a male who had done this to a female, I would not have thrown out the case. So there needs to be some balance in the administration of justice." The R.M. later mentioned that she would enlist the services of the probation department to counsel both parties after getting an admission from the male that on about seven occasions during the five-year marriage, he had been beaten by his wife. All this time the woman kept crying in the dock. The case will again be mentioned in late July.