© Brittany Murray / Staff Photographer The DuranBrian Banks is an innocent man as he walks out of the courthouse flanked by his parents, Jonathon Banks and Leomia Meyers. Judge Mark C. Kim of the Long Beach Superior Court exonerated Brian Banks, 26, who was wrongly convicted of the rape and kidnapping of a high school acquaintance following a consensual encounter on the campus of Long Beach Polytechnic High School in 2002. For the last five years Banks has been wearing a ankle bracelet GPS tracker and had to register as a sex offender. Now Banks hopes to make up for lost time and possibly join the NFL.
In England, the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 saw women confessing to impossible crimes, while the 1682 case in Scotland of Issobell Gowdie and her accomplice Janet Breadheid saw a four day long confession by the former to renouncing her baptism to the Devil, being baptised in his name, and even having sex with him, his being "abler for them sexually than any man could be. His members were exceeding great and long, but he was as heavy as a sack of malt and as cold as ice."
The above quote is taken from the 1975 book Why Men Confess by O. John Rogge.
The same author covers the Moscow purge trials of 1936-8; there were 16, 17 & 21 defendants respectively, including former members of Lenin's Politburo. They all confessed, one even explained that he hadn't been drugged or hypnotised. He said that if he had to be executed he would rather die a good Bolshevik.
If that can be put down to communist indoctrination and brainwashing, a much simpler case from the 1950s showed sometimes people will simply confess. The tale of Brenda Lamb made only page 5 of the Daily Express on July 21, 1958.
This young woman who had been working at a hospital in the North of England, came under suspicion over the disappearance of some rings from a patient's property. She was said to have been questioned 3 or 4 times for an hour or two at a time at Lancaster police station before telling the police she'd stolen the rings then thrown them in the river. When she appeared in court she was ordered to pay restitution and given two years of probation. Then a woman appeared and said she'd taken the rings home for the patient, her sister.
Why would a woman falsely report being raped? There are many reasons, especially in the current climate when there is bizarrely a certain celebrity status to claiming victimhood. That may have been what the police in Lynnwood, Washington were thinking when in August 2008, a troubled teenager reported being raped at knifepoint in her apartment. In spite of forensic evidence including bruising, they were not impressed with her demeanour, and under pressure she claimed she'd made it up. She was prosecuted, receiving a $500 fine, but her story doesn't end there.
It was perhaps understandable that detectives would be suspicious because faux rape victims are not averse to faking forensic evidence, as was reported here recently, but this girl really had been raped; she was a victim of Marc O'Leary, who was arrested in 2011, and was eventually sentenced to over three hundred years for a series of rapes. The teenager was awarded $150,000 damages and became the subject of a Netflix dramatisation. Her case is far from unique, but there have been many cases in which men have pleaded guilty to rapes that never happened. The most high profile such case since the turn of the Millennium is that of Brian Banks (pictured above with his mother).
In 2002, Banks was a 16 year old living in sunny California and looking forward to a promising career as a football player. He also had an interest in a fellow student. Wanetta Gibson was a year younger, and in his words the two were "making out", in reality, canoodling when, for some unfathomable reason, Gibson accused him of rape. Banks was arrested. There was no forensic evidence because there had been no sex, consensual or otherwise, but he was still charged, and as the case was about to go to trial, the prosecutor offered him a deal: plead guilty, because if you don't I will ask for a sentence of 41 years to life when you are convicted.
Banks was told by his own lawyer he had better take the deal because all the jury would see was a 6 foot 4 black thug who had brutalised an innocent young girl. He had literally minutes to decide, and with great reluctance pleaded no contest - which is as good as an admission of guilt. He was sentenced to five years in prison followed by five years of probation.
His life in ruins, he served his time, then went back to live with his mother. He also joined Facebook, and was astounded to receive a message ostensibly from Wanetta Gibson asking if they could take up where they left off. His skepticism soon evaporated when he realised this message really was from the young woman who had not only landed him on the sex offender registry but stolen his future. Gibson is clearly a bit simple, but she retracted, and his honour was restored along with a delayed footballing career.
© AFP 2020 / Chris KleponisMichael Flynn
Flynn was charged with lying to FBI agents, and after defending himself initially, threw in the towel with a guilty plea. Take a gander at this indictment then consider the context. To begin with, Flynn was not obliged to answer any questions, and the suggestion that anything he said materially affected this (totally contrived) investigation does not hold water. We know now that the purpose of this so-called interview was to entrap Flynn, if not by catching him lying then to misrepresent his answers to make it appear he had lied, as his lawyer Sidney Powell points out in the above Dershowitz video. Clearly the entire system of using three o two's instead of properly taped questions and answers needs to be reformed. As Donald Trump has said many times, if people like General Flynn can be treated so shabbily, what can they do to ordinary people? What have they done to them?
It is clear also that the Deep State conspirators pressurised Flynn in other ways, including by threatening to go after his son. Anyone who is the least bit skeptical about these claims should compare the heavy-handed way the people close to Trump have been treated with the free pass given to Hillary Clinton and her gang. While Trump allies have been hounded and prosecuted vindictively for process crimes, it is a matter of record that Mrs Clinton used a private server to circumvent freedom of information laws, that she or her underlings destroyed documents under subpoena, that she used a Blackberry after being repeatedly warned not to do so, and that somehow she found a way to transfer top secret information from SCIFs onto the regular Internet. To date, she, Joe Biden, and many others have been given a free pass for their real crimes while the President's allies have been witch-hunted for imaginary ones, but that will soon be changing, as Donald Trump has himself pointed out.
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