Rape

The Japanese prime minister has described the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl by an American Marine as "unforgivable." The foreign minister declared that Japan has "had enough" of such incidents. And the government's most senior Cabinet official promised that Japan would raise the issue of misconduct with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she visits next week.

Redlands police on Monday announced the arrest of four teenage boys on suspicion of sexually assaulting two high school girls. The girls said they had been repeatedly attacked after being invited into a home for a drink. One of the girls told police she thought she had been drugged before the incident, which occurred Friday in the 1400 block of East Brockton Avenue. Police spokesman Carl Baker said the girls, ages 14 and 15, were walking home about 5 p.m.

A narrowly divided Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child is unconstitutional. In a 5-4 decision, the court overturned a Louisiana law that called for the death penalty for raping a child under 12, and it removed from death row a man convicted of attacking his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the opinion, saying, in essence, that the crime, awful as it is, does not merit capital punishment.

Los Angeles County prosecutors filed murder charges Friday against a 51-year-old prison inmate, alleging that he raped and killed four area women between 1986 and 1993. The charges mark the latest effort by police to close dozens of cases of women slain in South Los Angeles and the vicinity during the 1980s and 1990s, killings that went unsolved for years.

Convicted child rapist and murderer Mark Dean Schwab was put to death Tuesday at Florida State Prison, the state's first execution since a botched lethal injection 18 months ago raised concern that a condemned man had endured a "cruel and unusual" ordeal. Schwab, 39, was executed for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez of Cocoa. He killed the boy in April 1991, just a month after early release from a previous prison term for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy.

In the summer of 1993, everything seemed to be going the Gits' way. Bypassed in the initial wave of interest in Seattle's grunge bands, the punk quartet was close to signing with a major label and had begun recording its second album. But on July 7, after leaving friends at a local bar, the Gits' singer, Mia Zapata, was raped and murdered, her body dumped on the street. Within days, the Gits were national news for the worst imaginable reason. Zapata was famous, not as a singer, but as a victim.

Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican national convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of two Texas girls, was executed Tuesday night in Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a reprieve. "I'm sorry my actions caused you pain. I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate," Medellin, 33, told those gathered to watch him die. He was pronounced dead at 9:57 p.m. local time. Demonstrations had been held in Mexico in anticipation of the execution.

A judge freed a man Monday who had spent nearly 18 years in prison on a charge of raping a 10-year-old girl after a lab reexamining cases across Ohio showed that his DNA profile didn't match evidence from the crime scene. Robert McClendon, 52, was released by Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Charles Schneider, who cited the DNA test. "You know, you go through times where you feel it might not happen, but you never, ever give up hope," McClendon said after his release.

The young girl stood at the podium in a cavernous federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, 8,000 miles and a world away from her native Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A prosecutor offered her a wooden footstool to stand on so she could better see the judge, but the girl declined. She eyed the defendant, who had done unspeakable things to her and six other girls. He was seated just a few feet away with a smirk on his face.

The 20-year-old aspiring model looked rattled as she choked back tears. She had told a downtown Los Angeles jury that fashion designer Anand Jon had raped her, but now a defense attorney was confronting her with a stack of records that cast doubt on her testimony. As she struggled to explain herself, she told the court dozens of times that she did not recall some of the details surrounding the alleged assault and afterward. The defense lawyer posed a simple question.