Justice (triggering)

[delphyne]

Graham Coutts, a poster boy for the UK BDSM set has been found guilty (after his first conviction was overturned on a technicality) of murdering Jane Longhurst in a horrific killing that copied the sadistic pornography he used. The BDSMers have been arguing that what he did to her was consensual (that word again) and that his killing her was just an unfortunate result of taking part in BDSM. On the other hand the UK government has decided to make possession of violent pornography a criminal offence following this case:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article ... 17,00.html

"Musician guilty of murdering teacher

Wednesday July 4, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

A musician who trawled the internet for snuff movies and necrophilia websites was today found guilty of murdering a special needs teacher to fulfil a perverted fantasy.
Graham Coutts, 39, was convicted at the Old Bailey of strangling Jane Longhurst with a pair of tights after forcing her into sex.

The court was told how he had hidden her body in a storage depot before taking it to secluded woodland and setting it alight.


The jury found Coutts guilty by an 11-to-one majority after hearing that the part-time musician had killed Miss Longhurst to satisfy a "longstanding and perverted sexual interest" in strangling women to death.
Coutts, of Waterloo Street, Hove, East Sussex, repeatedly visited her body, which he kept in a storage unit and regarded as his "trophy", for a "sexual thrill", the court heard.

Philip Katz QC, prosecuting, told the court that Coutts had been looking at "horrific" images on pornographic websites the day before he committed the murder in March 2003.

The jury heard that he carried out web searches on terms such as "strangled women", "dead women", "asphyxia", "rape", "murder", "necro" and "snuff".

A former partner told the court that Coutts had confessed: "I get the most awful feeling that I'm going to strangle and kill a woman."

Coutts later told a psychiatrist that he had fantasised about murdering women since he was 15 and feared it might lead him to commit crime.

"His sexual turn-on was in serious violence to women, killing women by strangulation and sex with dead women," Mr Katz said.

The victim's mother, Liz Longhurst, led a campaign to outlaw violent pornographic websites in the wake of the murder.

Measures prohibiting extreme and violent pornography were published in the criminal justice and immigration bill last month, and are expected to become law later this year or in early 2008. Possession of such images, which are not covered by current obscenity laws, will be punishable by up to three years in jail.

Jurors were not shown photographs of Coutts' ex-girlfriend Nicola Stainforth and other women over which he had drawn nooses around their necks.

They were also not told that in 1997 Customs officers intercepted a package addressed to Coutts containing videos called Psycho Sisters and Murder Times Two.

The tapes featured simulated violence against women who were "restrained and hanging from things". At the time Coutts was given a warning about future conduct.

Coutts, a part-time salesman and a guitarist with a Who tribute band, was first found guilty of Miss Longhurst's murder in 2004. But a retrial was ordered after law lords ruled that his conviction was unsafe because jurors were not offered the alternative count of manslaughter.

The judge, Richard Hone, adjourned sentencing until tomorrow so that emotion could be set aside. He told the jury: "This case has been one of the most testing ones that, in my experience, a jury has had to try."

Coutts faces a life sentence."

Nobody say that pornography and sexual violence against women aren't linked.

Rest in peace, Jane.

[laurelin]

I was unaware that this has happened, but coincidentally I just wrote a post about the 'consent' bullshit argument:

We have heard of court cases in which a rape survivor, who has been beaten up by her assailant, nevertheless does not receive justice because her rapist claims that she ‘consented’ to the violence, because she ‘liked rough sex’, or whatever. Aside from the ludicrousness of the assumption that she would have wanted to be brutalised, why is it implicitly accepted that if person A consents to a certain act, that person B is therefore not guilty of having committed it? The fact that rapists have been able to use this defence in court shows that i) juries and judges believe that women desire violence, and ii) that a person may do without condemnation whatever another may ask them to do.

This would not be accepted in other circumstances. ‘He asked me to shoot him’ would not be taken as a legitimate defence for a murderer, even if the murderer could prove that his victim had, indeed, asked to be shot and killed. Consent does not imply that the performer of the act is morally justified. If someone asks you to beat them up, should you do it? Even if they say they like it, does that mean you bear no responsibility for performing an act of violence upon them? You still did it. You still brutalised a person. You didn’t make the moral decision.

My point in bringing this up is to note that the very logic involved in the ’she liked sexual violence’ defence is fundamentally flawed, as it ignores the fact that the purveyor of violence still bears responsibility for his actions even if his violence was specifically requested. Clearly, it is a trope used by rapists which relies on the supposed masochism of women to keep them out of gaol, and it is a revolting insult to a survivor. But even if the claim were true, I cannot see how consent to violence can be used by the perpetrator as an excuse for the violence.

‘Befehl ist Befehl’ was the famous excuse given by Nazis at their trials after World War Two, and still heard in documentaries about the war today: Orders are orders. The assumption is, if someone else ‘orders’ you to do it, it is not therefore your crime, and you cannot even consider disobeying. This was not accepted at the Nuremburg trials as a defence; its cousin, ’she wanted it’, used in trials conducted in the war on women, should not be accepted either.

‘If someone asked you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?’

If someone asked you to harm them, would you do it? If someone said they would like you to harm them, would you do it? I hope that the answer is no, as I cannot see how the person who obeys their conscience would be able to say anything else.