{"id":4792,"date":"2008-09-12T14:22:03","date_gmt":"2008-09-12T21:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/09\/12\/policy-of-gouging-rape-victims-began-under-palins-administration\/"},"modified":"2008-09-12T14:22:03","modified_gmt":"2008-09-12T21:41:51","slug":"policy-of-gouging-rape-victims-began-under-palins-administration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4792","title":{"rendered":"Policy of Gouging Rape Victims Began Under Palin's Administration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jacob Alperon Sherrif at the Huffington Post<\/a>, after examining Wasilla’s budget records and talking to the pre-Palin police chief, reports:<\/p>\n

Under Sarah Palin’s administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees. Although Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella wrote USA Today earlier this week that the GOP vice presidential nominee “does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test…To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice,” Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin’s knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city’s victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It wasn’t until Sarah Palin and her hand-picked police chief were in power that the city decided that it couldn’t afford to pay for ordinary police procedure for rape victims — even while Palin was spending millions on a new sports complex.<\/p>\n

Sherrif’s proof that Palin was aware of the change from the start is that Palin signed off on the budget. I don’t think that’s conclusive; Palin could claim that she just signed the forms, and others in government were the ones that actually knew what was going on. (We are, after all, talking about one line item in a report of over 100 pages).<\/p>\n

But that shouldn’t get Palin off the hook.<\/p>\n

1) Palin fired the previous police chief so she could install her close political ally Charlie Fannon in the job. Choosing the right people is a major part of being an executive; ignorance is no excuse. As Mayor, Palin was responsible for choosing good people — and if she instead chose a close ally who instituted a policy of gouging rape victims, and then defended that to the press, that’s Palin’s responsibility too.<\/p>\n

2) Whether or not Palin knew of the policy before it was implemented, she certainly found out about it at some point. Former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles has said that when Alaska outlawed charging victims for rape exams, they were doing so in response to Wasilla’s policy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill — signed into law by Knowles — that banned the practice statewide.<\/p>\n

“There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla,” Knowles said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The USA Today story<\/a> gives the impression that Wasilla may not have been the “one town in Alaska” doing this, but stopping Wasilla’s gouging of rape victims was a important motivation — and maybe the primary motivation — for the Alaska legislature to take action.<\/p>\n

It is not known how many rape victims in Wasilla were required to pay for some or all of the medical exams, but a legislative staffer who worked on the bill for Croft said it happened. “It was more than a couple of cases, and it was standard practice in Wasilla,” Peggy Wilcox said, who now works for the Alaska Public Employees Association. “If you were raped in Wasilla, this was going to happen to you.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s impossible that things could have gotten as far along as the state legislature passing a statewide law to change Wasilla’s practice, without the mayor of Wasilla ever being aware of the policy. Yet in public, Palin never criticized the policy and never proposed a new policy. On the contrary, she apparently gave Fannon permission<\/a> to speak to the press and defend the policy of gouging rape victims.<\/p>\n

Either Sarah Palin was the most incompetent mayor in the world, or she knew her administration had instituted a policy of charging rape victims for their own rape exams, which caused so much stir that it led to a statewide law. Why did it take the Alaska legislature to reverse the policy? Shouldn’t Palin had done it herself, without the state having to step in?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s worth mentioning again that Wasilla’s form of gouging rape victims is now pretty much illegal nationwide, thanks to VAWA legislation, which was primarily authored by Joe Biden. John McCain, in case you’re wondering, voted against VAWA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(And a big curtsy to Charles for links provided.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacob Alperon Sherrif at the Huffington Post, after examining Wasilla’s budget records and talking to the pre-Palin police chief, reports: Under Sarah Palin’s administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}