Football sex charges in Ohio prompt website

JULIE CARR SMYTH

Asso­ci­ated Press

Author­i­ties inves­ti­gat­ing rape accu­sa­tions against two high school foot­ball play­ers in east­ern Ohio launched a web­site Sat­ur­day as inter­est in the case bal­loons, an extra­or­di­nary step designed to com­bat the mis­per­cep­tion “that the foot­ball team runs the city,” the city man­ager said.

Two 16-year-old boys are set for trial next month in juve­nile court in Steubenville, a town of about 18,000, on charges that they raped a 16-year-old girl in August. Their attor­neys have denied the charges in court.

Pub­lic inter­est in the case increased with cir­cu­la­tion online this week of an unver­i­fied video, more than 12 min­utes long, that pur­port­edly shows another young man jok­ing about the accuser. The video appar­ently was released by hack­ers who allege more peo­ple were involved and should be held accountable.

One aim of the web­site, City Man­ager Cathy Davi­son said, is to com­bat a com­mon per­cep­tion that Steubenville High School — home of the “Big Red” sports pro­gram — con­trols pol­i­tics in a small city where spe­cial pros­e­cu­tors and a vis­it­ing judge are han­dling the case because local author­i­ties knew peo­ple involved with the foot­ball team.

“When peo­ple are say­ing that our police depart­ment did not fol­low pro­ce­dure, that the foot­ball team runs the city, that is not the case,” Davi­son said. “They went by the book. Every­thing was han­dled in an above-board fash­ion to make sure that the case can ben­e­fit from the fullest extent of the law.”

Intended to sort fact from fic­tion, the web­site has the appear­ance of a legal brief­ing, with black type on a white back­ground, pro­vid­ing an inten­tional depar­ture from esca­lat­ing emo­tions over the case and how it’s been han­dled. It pro­vides a time­line of the case, sum­maries of Ohio laws that affect sex charges, online posts and reac­tion to them and a pledge of transparency.

“It looks very generic, but it was meant to be (that way), because it’s just the facts. There’s noth­ing flow­ery about it,” said Davison.

The site, spon­sored by Steubenville city and police offi­cials, explains that only a hand­ful of police offi­cers attended local schools and that the city man­ager her­self is not even from Ohio. Its launch fol­lowed the hir­ing of a con­sul­tant who’s help­ing the city han­dle a bar­rage of media atten­tion sparked by the case.

The site declares it “is not designed to be a forum for how the Juve­nile Court ought to rule in this matter.”

Steubenville sits in a region of the state that’s ben­e­fited eco­nom­i­cally from a recent shale gas drilling boom, and Steubenville got a boost when it was selected as the site of Gov. John Kasich’s 2012 State of the State address, the first held out­side the State­house in recent memory.

“Steubenville is a fan­tas­tic place to live, work and play,” said Davi­son. “We have warm and lov­ing peo­ple here, and this inci­dent could be any­where in Amer­ica or the coun­try or the world, and it’s really unfor­tu­nate that it’s tar­nish­ing the city’s reputation.”

As inves­ti­ga­tion con­tin­ues, it has spurred heated com­men­tary online. Some sup­port the defen­dants and ques­tion the char­ac­ter of the teenage girl, while oth­ers allege a cover-up or con­tend more peo­ple should be charged.

The lat­ter group includes hacker-activists asso­ci­at­ing under the Anony­mous and Knight­Sec labels who point to com­ments they say were posted around the time of the alleged attack on social media by peo­ple who are not charged.

At a sec­ond peace­ful protest at the local cour­t­house in as many weeks Sat­ur­day, pro­test­ers, some wear­ing masks, gave details of their own rapes or those of rel­a­tives. They lamented what they said was a lais­sez faire atti­tude to sex­ual crimes in the community.

Posted by AP News on Jan 7 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.