Open thread for night owls: Rape victim speaks attackers' names, faces jail for it

From the Louisville Courier-Journal

Frustrated by what she felt was a lenient plea bargain for two teens who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her and circulating pictures of the incident, a Louisville 17-year-old lashed out on Twitter.

'There you go, lock me up,' Savannah Dietrich tweeted, as she named the boys who she said sexually assaulted her. 'I'm not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell.'

Now, Dietrich is facing a potential jail sentence, as the attorneys for the boys have asked a Jefferson District Court judge to hold her in contempt because they say that in naming her attackers, she violated the confidentiality of a juvenile hearing and the court's order not to speak of it.

A contempt charge carries a potential sentence of up to 180 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Eugene Volokh writes:

An order barring a victim from revealing the names of her assailants is, I think, clearly unconstitutional, even when the assailants are juveniles. Oklahoma Publishing Co. v. District Court (1977) expressly rejected the notion that courts or legislatures may bar the publication of the names of juvenile offenders; that case involved a newspaper's publishing the name of the juvenile offender, which it learned from a court hearing, but the rationale applies at least as strongly to a person's publishing a name that she learned from the attack itself. Likewise, even when it comes to grand jury proceedings ' probably the most historically secret part of the criminal justice system ' Butterworth v. Smith (1990) held that, while a grand jury witness could be barred from revealing what he learned as part of the grand jury proceedings, the witness could not be generally barred from revealing information that he had learned on his own (even if that was the subject of his testimony).

The victim, Savannah Dietrich told the newspaper:

'So many of my rights have been taken away by these boys,' said Dietrich, who waived confidentiality in her case to speak to The Courier-Journal. Her parents also gave their written permission for her to speak with the newspaper.

'I'm at the point, that if I have to go to jail for my rights, I will do it,' she said. 'If they really feel it's necessary to throw me in jail for talking about what happened to me ... as opposed to throwing these boys in jail for what they did to me, then I don't understand justice.'

Such incidents of violating court orders not to speak are on the rise as a consequence of the spread of social media:

'In the past, people would complain to anyone who would listen, but they didn't have a way to publish their comments where there would be a permanent record, like on Facebook and Twitter, for people to see worldwide,' said Gregg Leslie, interim executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va.

'It's just going to happen more and more.'

^{Hey338Too has a post on this subject and a petition you can sign.}

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