Monday, October 31, 2011

Case against convicted molester Leibovits crumbles

Forward

One of the most high-profile convictions of an ultra-Orthodox rabbi for sexual abuse in recent times may be in danger of reversal, according to new disclosures in court records obtained by the Forward.

When Baruch Lebovits was sentenced last year to up to 32 years in jail, victims’ rights advocates hailed it as a turning point in the battle against sexual abuse in the insular Orthodox community. [...]
But Lebovits’s 2010 conviction is now unraveling amid allegations of perjury, conspiracy and extortion.

21 comments :

  1. Let all the Chareidi-haters now eat their words. They tried to make this innocent man into an example.

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  2. But does this eliminate the probability of his being guilty? Or are we looking at some "do gooder" who thinks the wily Jews can only manipulate the system, but not sully themselves by actually participating in and trusting it? And will we ever know?

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  3. This case will forever serve as an example and a reminder to our community that not only can false accusations of abuse and molestation be hurled at the truly innocent -- but that even a conviction in (secular) court can be obtained based upon false testimony that is nothing more than plain old fashioned extortion.

    We will now always have evidence that we should never trust or take at face value accusations, prosecutions, and even convictions.

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  4. "probability of his being guilty", Micha? You want to send a man to jail for 30 years based upon a "probability"? -- which even you question whether exists!

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  6. What a reckless jump you are making. This isn't about the innocence of Leibowitz. This is about the messed up fraudulent methods of handling disputes in an "above the law" way.

    As Engelman said, "the claims and counterclaims are indicative of an insular community where insider dealing is the most common method of resolving disputes. Financial payoffs or threats...are often used to coerce people into settling disputes within the community.

    If this whole thing was a total lie, which I very much doubt, then it still reflects horribly on the charedim.

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  7. MO Spokesman: Yes, had I said something remotely like that, it would have been terrible.

    But what I did write was a lament that we as a community went from ignring the law enforcement system to manipulsting it. Because we are "brilliant Jews" with a "gemara kup" and trust out own opinions of guilt and innocence more than the civil legal system. And so we have people who think of themselves as shtadlanim and baalei chesed, who work the system to get the answer they -- through their amazing powers of rechilus -- know must be true.

    And so, I lamented, we will never know the truth and justice will never be served.

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  8. The fact that all the evidence against the defendant turned out to be fraudulent, makes me wonder how many other cases suffer from the same fatal issues.

    And the fact that he is being exonerated only after having been convicted, leaves my trust in the proprietorial and judicial system, regarding molestation cases, as discredited. I feel entrusting the lives of members of our community in the hands of these career prosecutors and corrupt judges is very troublesome.

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  9. RHS,

    I reached the opposite conclusion... A bunch of frum Jews refused to work with the system and instead gamed it. Thus proving that we lack the communal maturity to handle these things, and if we tried to do so ourselves we would be even more dysfunctional.

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  10. Reb Micha,

    The fact that the system could be gamed to literally convict someone on concocted evidence indicates it could be done again and was done in the past. Whether in our communities or outside. "The system" is manipulative, untrustworthy, and punishes innocent men with 30+ year sentences.

    Don't make the assumption of assuming this is the only such case or that it is rare. What may be rare is the fact that the false conviction was caught and rectified. In most cases the innocent men languish in prison without exoneration after a false conviction.

    And lets also not forger Ray Donovan's comment upon acquittal of "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?"

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  11. So you would leave the gamers in charge, without the system there to keep them somewhat in check?

    We need some method of keeping the danger away from our kids. If we don't use the court system, we are instead giving MORE control to the people who hide information about the guilty, and invent information about the innocent.

    In this situation, one person with the right rav's ear could accomplish the same effect, if we tried operating outside the legal system. They wouldn't need to invest the effort and money to bribe false witnesses to get their way. And there would be no outsider to appeal to, so the subterfuge would never be found.

    However often this crud happens, it would be worse without actually working with the system.

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  12. No doubt this will be used as an opportunity for charedim to 'prove' that we can't trust the secular judicial system. But in fact, it only proves that certain charedim will sabotoge all efforts at justice.

    Perhaps Kellner bribed the boys solely to witness tamper and thus destroy the case...I am just supposing, but if you think about it, maybe someone offered kellner a bribe to set this whole thing up after L's conviction.

    For sure, jumping to the conclusion that this is a case of an innocent man being unjustly convicted is just joining the cover up.

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  13. The ones who sabotaged all efforts at justice in this particular case, where the so-called advocates whose agenda is to see molestation and abuse everywhere they look.

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  14. VELV, if you would look around at my old neighborhood, you would see molested boys everywhere you look. In my building of 14 families, every family that had boys, except one, had been molested. In just the last year, there were two arrests of pedophile gamors (with numerous victims) and two separate cases of perpetrating teen boys. This, btw, is a small insular charedi neighbor. And some of those boys got exposed to more than one perp, and now many boys are acting out on each other. Even the rabbaim are at a loss as to what to do now. But those same rabbaim continue the cover up for the pedophiles, minimizing the whole issue to get lite or no sentences, and trying scare tactics on the boys to get them to stop acting out. No problem? Of course, it's just us parents overreacting.

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  15. Rocky is 100% correct. It is a proven fact that over 99% of Chareidim are child rapists while significantly less than 1% of the MO population has this issue.

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  16. Thanx Stanley for your useless sarcasm. This thread isn't about charedi vs MO. You can take that argument back to Harry Maryles' site.

    But I can't resist to say, even though pedophiles are everywhere, they enjoy a utopia in charedi society.

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  17. Oh no, Rocky, I sincerely mean to fully agree with you. Like you said, Chareidim arethe world's worst pedophiles. Almost all of them. (Granted, there are some rare exceptions of non-pedophiles among them.)

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  18. Stanley, your gross generalization is gross. Those comments are best kept on Failed Messiah. If you are going to charedi-bash, at least make it interesting, and don't misquote me.

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  19. Psst, Rocky, I'm trying to help you here. We're both anti-Chareidi. Anyways, you just wrote "If you are going to charedi-bash, at least make it interesting", so please help me out. How can I best Chareidi-bash and make it interesting all-the-while, as you've suggested I do?

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  20. I am encouraging critical thinking and I am challenging mindlessness and brainwashing and dysfunctional cover-upping in the charedi world. But it's coming from ahavas yisroel, and its for the sake of the children.

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  21. Encouraging critical thinking and discouraging uncritical acceptance of maximalist positions are two different things. Using ridicule to do the discouraging actually discourages critical thought, as ridicule, leitzanus, makes an emotional appeal that does an end-run around thought. Which is why the very first pasuq of Tehillim and several mishnayos in avos speak so ill of leitzanus.

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