How Junk Science and Anti-Lesbian Prejudice Got Four Women Sent to Prison for More Than a Decade
By Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
This Sunday, in central Texas, four women and their families sat down to a big lunch together. It would have been a wholly unremarkable scene, but for one thing: Three of the women were only recently released from prison for a crime they say they didn’t commit.
Elizabeth Ramirez, 39, Cassandra Rivera, 38, Kristie Mayhugh, 40, and Anna Vasquez, 38, are the San Antonio Four. In 1994, the women, all lesbians, were accused of aggravated sexual assault on a child; by 1998, they’d been convicted of the crime and were starting their prison sentences—15 years for Rivera, Mayhugh, and Vasquez; 37 and a half years for Ramirez, because she’d been the “ringleader.” But on Nov. 18, 2013, Ramirez, Mayhugh, and Rivera were released on bail after the testimony of an expert medical witness used to convict them was found to be faulty and a judge recommended that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacate their conviction. Vasquez, who had been out on parole for a year already, will no longer have to meet strict parole requirements.
Finally, justice prevails in a case that, one can only hope, is a relic of a weird, panicked time in recent American history, when the word gay or lesbian was too often conflated with pedophile.
The story of the San Antonio Four unfolded like this: In the summer of 1994, Ramirez’s two nieces, the 9- and 7-year-old daughters of her older sister, stayed for a week with Ramirez and Mayhugh, her roommate. Ramirez was 20 and pregnant at the time, Mayhugh was 21. Two months later, in September 1994, one of the girls told her grandmother that she and her sister had been sexually assaulted during their stay, not only by Ramirez and Mayhugh, but also by two of their friends: Rivera, a 19-year-old mother of two, and Vasquez, also 19. According to the older of the two girls, Ramirez and her friends forced them to participate in a bizarre, tequila-fueled orgy, holding them down by their wrists and ankles and raping them with various objects before letting them shower and return to their normal lives.
full article:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/12/04/san_antonio_four_junk_science_and_anti_lesbian_prejudice_sent_them_to_prison.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content
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