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SABRMatt,
I don't want to go back and forth on this all day, but I sense a fundamental disconnect between how you want to view this case and how the facts view it. Most importantly, you seem to want us to treat Josh Lueke as being on equal footing with his victim. He is not. He is the person who accepted guilt in this case. She was the victim. They are not equal in the eyes of the law. They are not "equally responsible" for what happened that night. I am not about to get involved in blaming the victim here. If an NFL player goes to a Vegas casino, flashes money around, then gets beaten and robbed and left unconscious on the street outside, he does not share equal responsibility with his aggressors. Our law recognized this last year when that very thing happened to an Oakland Raiders player. His attackers are doing hard time.
You can question a victim's judgment about situations. But I am not about to blame the victim for a crime committed against them. That's a whole different story.
You have to understand that Lueke accepted responsibility for this crime. As such, he is no longer on a level playing field with his victim.
Your presentation of the case itself just isn't consistent with the facts. The prosecution had ample DNA evidence. Whether Lueke could have countered that with a consensual sex claim would have been up to a jury to decide. But there was evidence. To suggest otherwise is just not supported by fact. If there was no evidence, the case would have been thrown out at the preliminary hearing. You say the victim was not reliable. Again, not supported by fact. The prosecution said her story never changed from Day 1. Lueke's story did and we gave you his reasons why. But her story never changed. The reason her testimony would have had less impact at a trial was because she was said to be unconscious at the time of the crime. That doesn't make her "unreliable" it makes her unconscious. You said she had "regrets" about sex the next day. There is no evidence anywhere in the court files to support this.
You cited something about blood alcohol content being through the roof. But if you read the case itself, you'll see the BAC readings were taken too late to determine how much alcohol anyone had consumed at the time the crime took place. Instead, it was eye-witness testimony being relied on. Again, no facts to support anything about blood-alcohol readings.
So, when refering to cases like this, you have to be very careful about dealing with the facts and reading any conjecture into it. You say the prosecutor offered Lueke a plea deal because he had no case. The prosecutor says it was to spare the victim any more hardship and will point to the no contest plea as proof he did indeed have a case. When there's no case, people often walk. We're not mind readers and don't know why Lueke owned up to responsibility in this matter. Only that he did. You can throw in conjecture if you want, but I can't do that in a fact-based story. Because your conjecture can be twisted in the other direction too easily.
All we know is, Lueke accepted criminal responsibility in this matter. As such, he is the perpetrator of the crime and she is the victim. You may think you know differently, but you don't. All we have to go off is what the outcome of the case says.
And that is why I am not about to turn any story about this case into a PR piece about how well Lueke is doing after the fact. It's been less than 10 months since he was sentenced and really isn't relevent when it comes to relaying the severity of his crime to readers. Of course, he probably regrets the whole thing and is on his best behavior. Anything less would be a crazy move by him. But relaying that information does nothing to tell readers about what happened that night.
Had I gone and written 400 words about how much his victim suffered and how her life fell apart, you could try to claim I was jaded. But I haven't done that. In fact, Lueke had more say about being "a good person" in my story than his victim did about anything.
But again, Lueke and his victim are not equal. Lueke is the one who took blame for the crime. It is not my job to go out of my way to portray him in an overly sensitive light, no matter how much baseball fans like his fastball. Not my job to portray him in an overly negative light either. I'm sticking to what the case says. That's how you remain on solid ground and avoid conjecture that may be fantasy-based. If the Mariners want to do PR for him to smooth his transition to Seattle, that's their perogative. But I am not about to do their PR work for them. Sorry.