Deputy Ag Asks Prosecutors to Review Kavanaughs Past
Rachel Mitchell, head of the Special Victims Sectionalization of the Maricopa County Attorney's Role, is on leave equally she heads to Washington, D.C., to assistance the Senate Judiciary Committee with a hearing scheduled for Thursday. Maricopa County Attorney's Function hide caption
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Maricopa County Attorney'due south Office
Rachel Mitchell, caput of the Special Victims Division of the Maricopa Canton Attorney'southward Office, is on leave as she heads to Washington, D.C., to assist the Senate Judiciary Committee with a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Maricopa County Attorney'southward Office
The outside attorney who will be directing questions to Supreme Courtroom nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault, is a prosecutor from Arizona who has dedicated her career to prosecuting sex activity crimes — and pushed for best practices in investigations to protect and serve victims of assault.
Rachel Mitchell is head of the sex crimes unit at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and has decades of experience prosecuting criminal cases of sexual assault and abuse.
She'll exist asking questions during a hearing on Thursday earlier the Senate Judiciary Commission, which will middle on Ford'south allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were in high school.
Mitchell is a prosecutor, but in this situation, no criminal case has been opened — and the Senate is not a courtroom. Mitchell has been hired by the Senate Republicans who have staunchly defended Kavanaugh against allegations of wrongdoing.
Ford says that when she and Kavanaugh were in high school in suburban Maryland in the early on 1980s, he pinned her to a bed at a political party, covered her mouth when she tried to scream, groped her while grinding against her body and attempted to remove her dress as she resisted. Kavanaugh has denied the accusation.
A second woman has accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her in higher, which Kavanaugh also has denied.
A tertiary adult female has come up forward with further accusations from high schoolhouse, which Kavanaugh again denies. The tertiary woman says, among other things, that she saw an intoxicated Kavanaugh printing himself against girls without their consent and that she was raped at a party that he attended.
Kavanaugh has issued a blanket deprival that he ever sexually assaulted anyone. He besides denies drinking to the indicate of losing his memory.
Decades have passed since the alleged assault of Ford, the topic of the hearing scheduled for Th. This is a familiar situation for Mitchell, who has prosecuted several sexual practice crimes that reached the courtroom long afterwards the corruption occurred, including cases of the corruption of children past Catholic priests.
"She is experienced at training detectives, prosecutors ... and others who work with victims [on] the best methods for forensic interviews of sexual activity-crimes victims," the Arizona Commonwealth reports.
Information technology is unusual for the Senate Judiciary Commission to bring in outside counsel to acquit questioning at a hearing. Typically, senators enquire the questions themselves.
But all the Republican senators on the Judiciary Commission are male person; they risked alienating or infuriating some viewers if they sat as a console of powerful men and challenged a woman on her memories of a traumatic result. (This is, of form, not a new position for the commission to be in.)
For days, the senators had been weighing the idea of bringing in outside counsel — a woman — to handle the questioning. Ford'southward lawyer said that her customer preferred to be questioned by the senators instead.
(Ford has likewise requested a total investigation by the FBI, which would include seeking interviews with people besides Ford and Kavanaugh, including a homo Ford named as an eyewitness to her assault. The committee has denied that request.)
A career spent prosecuting assaults and abuses
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced Tuesday that Mitchell was the choice for an outside interviewer, saying she "has been recognized in the legal customs for her feel and objectivity."
Before, Senate Bulk Leader Mitch McConnell said a "female person banana" had been hired to "inquire these questions in a respectful and professional way."
Mitchell, who is in her early 50s, is not a legislative assistant. Every bit the managing director of the Special Victims Division of the Maricopa County Chaser'due south Office, she supervises a team of prosecutors who handle sex offense cases. She has worked every bit a prosecutor since 1993.
She is a graduate of Arizona State Academy's police force school. She became interested in prosecuting sex crimes while she was a law clerk, waiting on her bar examination results, and assisted on a instance that "involved a youth choir director every bit the offender," according to an interview she gave in 2011.
"It struck me how innocent and vulnerable the victims of these cases actually were," she said. "When I became an chaser with the part I prosecuted other kinds of cases, but I was fatigued back to this area."
In 2005, in a closely watched case, Mitchell led the prosecution of a priest who was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to 111 years in prison house. That priest, Paul LeBrun, was the eighth Phoenix-area member of the clergy to confront charges as role of a wave of abuse prosecutions, only his instance was the first to get to a jury trial.
Mitchell said at the time that the 111-twelvemonth sentence was "vindication for these victims, and they need that."
"It as well tells people who have been victimized past people in authority that someone is listening and will practise something most it," she added, according to a Reuters report.
In 2011, her office was criticized after it brokered a plea deal with a Jehovah's Witness elderberry who admitted to sexually abusing a teenage boy — the deal called for just half-dozen months in county jail. Mitchell said it would be difficult to testify that the victim, now an developed, had been 14 or younger at the time of the abuse.
"Careful" and "competent"
Mitchell became head of the sex activity crimes unit in 2005 as part of a milkshake-up in the Maricopa County Attorney's Part — the previous head of the unit, Cindi Nannetti, was unceremoniously demoted after the ballot of a new top prosecutor. Nannetti's demotion was a "huge surprise," Kimberly Yedowitz, the chairwoman of the Arizona Sexual Set on Network, told the Phoenix New Times.
While the department shuffle raised eyebrows, Mitchell was hardly a controversial choice.
"Neither Yedowitz nor anyone else contacted for this story had annihilation negative to say about Rachel Mitchell, Nannetti's replacement," the New Times wrote. "Mitchell worked closely with Nannetti in prosecuting numerous priests and other high-profile cases, and previously supervised the sexual activity-crimes unit'due south East Valley agency."
During her time running the sex crimes partition, Mitchell has commented to the press repeatedly nigh efforts to make criminal proceedings less harrowing for victims — including the improver of therapy dogs in court.
Mitchell spoke to NPR fellow member station KJZZ in Jan about the canton's new protocol manual for handling sexual assault cases. She said it was helpful to have training requirements and written best practices so people responsible for investigations and prosecutions can "do the best we can for victims," as she put it.
The protocol manual includes both technical processes for treatment evidence, also equally guidelines for how to treat and talk to victims. "Treat victims as man beings, not as pieces of evidence," it says at one signal.
In a argument Tuesday, the Maricopa County Chaser's Role described Mitchell every bit someone who is "professional, fair, objective" with "a caring heart for victims." County Attorney Pecker Montgomery called her a "careful prosecutor, trained to seek justice, protect victims and pursue truth."
Colleagues told the Arizona Republic that Mitchell is "conspicuously competent" and a "really proficient, solid prosecutor."
"Children often keep this surreptitious for years"
In 2011, Mitchell spoke to FrontLine, a Central Baptist magazine, about kid sexual abuse in religious organizations.
She identified a number of misconceptions on the topic, noting that the vast bulk of victims knows their abuser, that corruption often happens with other people nowadays and that sexual abusers "are very like to the general population. Economically, educationally, racially, religiously, they are demographically the aforementioned."
She also said one mutual misconception has to do with when abuse is disclosed.
"People recall that children would tell right away and that they would tell everything that happened to them," she said. "In reality, children oftentimes keep this hole-and-corner for years, sometimes into their adulthood, sometimes forever."
Mitchell was specifically discussing the sexual abuse of children. But the passage is attracting new attention because of echoes in the Kavanaugh allegations.
Ford, who was 15 at the time of the alleged assault, says she told no one at the time and only began discussing the incident equally an adult. Some defenders of Kavanaugh, including President Trump, have criticized her for coming frontwards now and non at the time, saying it undermines her credibility.
Other defenders have noted that Kavanaugh was young at the time of the alleged incident — 17 — and asked whether, even if it occurred, he should exist held responsible now.
Mitchell is familiar with that line of thinking, too. In 2006, she testified before the Arizona State Legislature — specifically, a commission on "youthful sexual practice offenders" — and explained there were many factors in determining the punishment for a minor who has committed sexual assail, including the number of victims and whether the human action was impulsive.
She as well noted that her part requests lifetime probation for most sex offenders because probation can be shortened but more often than not cannot be lengthened even if more offenses are discovered later.
The news of Mitchell's pick for Thursday's hearing has brought a flurry of politicized attending to a prosecutor who has, until now, maintained a depression profile.
The Washington Mail reports:
"Mitchell is a registered Republican and has donated to the campaign of Mark Brnovich, Arizona's Republican attorney general. But Nannetti, her predecessor and old supervisor, said that she has never known Mitchell to be influenced past politics.
" 'Rachel volition practise her chore as a professional person,' Nannetti told The Washington Postal service. 'And she will do it with the utmost respect to the committee. She does not play politics when information technology comes to anything involving her work.' "
Maricopa County is home to Phoenix and the sprawling metropolitan area that surrounds it. It'southward the fourth-virtually-populous county in the The states — and has more than Republican voters than any other U.S. county, according to the local GOP. In the 2016 presidential election, the county delivered more votes for Trump than any other county did, by a long shot.
The county is known for its notorious quondam sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who led a program of racial profiling and continues to button a baseless conspiracy theory about onetime President Barack Obama.
Arpaio was as well harshly criticized for failing to adequately investigate hundreds of sex crimes betwixt 2004 and 2007.
Mitchell was with the county attorney's role throughout that time and head of the sex activity crimes unit for some of that menstruation. A lengthy study by the Arizona Republic did not accuse the canton attorney's part of misconduct; the failures occurred before the cases were handed to the attorney'southward part for prosecution, according to the newspaper's clarification of events.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/26/651735137/sex-crimes-prosecutor-picked-for-kavanaugh-hearing-brings-decades-of-experience
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