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CRIME: Anand Jon found guilty of rape

Thirty-four-year-old fashion designer Anand Jon, once among the most prominent Indians on the New York fashion and social scenes, was convicted of rape and other crimes today. From The Los Angeles Times:

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for seven days before finding Anand Jon Alexander guilty of one count of rape and 15 counts of sexual assault and other charges.

 

The designer, who goes by the professional name of Anand Jon, sat silently in court wearing a light gray suit and yellow tie as the court clerk announced the jury's verdicts. Behind him, his sister sobbed as she sat with friends and family in the crowded downtown Los Angeles courtroom.

"This jury today has sent a message that our communities will not tolerate serial rapists and child molesters like Anand Jon," deputy Dist. Atty. Frances Young said in a statement she read after the hearing. "They will be held accountable and the victims will get justice."

Prosecutors said Jon, 34, faces a sentence of life in prison when he is sentenced Jan. 13. He will be eligible for parole after 67 years.

More from Michel Potts, who's been covering the trial for India-West:

Speaking on behalf of Jon’s defense team of four lawyers during the press conference, Leonard Levin declared that they were “obviously disappointed” with the jury’s verdicts but vowed to file an appeal on Jon’s behalf.

“This case is not over by a long shot,” he said.

Levin earlier told India-West that the appeal will be based on the contention that “there were numerous pre-trial rulings, evidentiary rulings and so forth that are too numerous to go into at this time. It has to do with the evidence that was admitted and the evidence that was kept out.”

Asked how Jon is holding up after having been found guilty on so many counts, “he intends to continue fighting,” Donald Marks told India-West. “He realizes that on many of these counts, the testimony at best was not credible, inconsistent, and I think there was substantial impeachment of all the witnesses…We believe we have a very potent new trial motion, and we look forward to that as well as the appeal.”

And at LA Weekly:

When the first guilty verdict was pronounced on the very first charge read, the life went out of Jon’s supporters and attorneys, as though each knew what was coming – a near shutout of convictions involving a tight string of felonies and misdemeanors ranging from lewd acts upon a child to forcible rape. By the end of the clerk’s reading, some 15 minutes later, the damage to Jon’s life was evident: 16 guilty verdicts, four acquittals and three counts on which the jury had deadlocked. Jon now faces life in prison with parole possible only after 67 years, according to Young, who, in a later press conference, branded Jon as “a 34-year-old pedophile masquerading as a fashion designer.”

ANAND JON TRIAL: Q&A with Michel Potts of India-West

The defense rested in the Anand Jon trial this week, about five weeks after opening arguments (check out our earlier coverage). Next week, closing arguments will be made, after which the case will go to the jury. The trial has had some strange moments, involving Google and the Government of India. According to LA Weekly...

Judge David Wesley was ready to issue an arrest warrant for Google’s custodian of records, since the search-engine giant hadn’t responded to defense requests to cough up email records related to Amanda C, who alleges that fashion designer Anand Jon sexually assaulted her. During the Tuesday lunch recess, however, Google did fax over the records and so the warrant was quashed – and with it, much of the closing drama of the defense’s case, which rested this morning.

Last Saturday, October 18, the Government of India sent out this email, which was forwarded to us by supporters of Anand Jon:

The Government of India have noted media reports of judicial proceedings which indicate instances where exculpatory evidence was either destroyed or withheld from the defendant. While in no way wishing to interfere with the judicial process, the Government of India is concerned at the lack of adequate information and opportunity to an Indian citizen to defend himself.

Under instructions from the Government of India the Consul General of India in San Francisco called on the Attorney General of the State of California, Mr. Edmund G. Brown, Jr., on 16 October 2008, to express the concern of the Government of India at the publicly reported omissions and commissions in the due judicial process and to request the Attorney General to ensure that Anand Jon, an Indian citizen, is given every opportunity to defend himself to the fullest extent provided under the US laws.

We put a few questions to Michel Potts, who's been covering the trial for India-West (check out their site redesign). Michel's latest article was "Defense Focuses on police errors in Anand Jon Case":

SAJAforum: What is the atmosphere like in the courtroom, given the interest from members of the celebrity press and tabloids as well as the Indian community?

Michel Potts: Other than me representing India-West and another writer from LA Weekly, there has been no interest from the ethnic or mainstream media in this case, other than on the first day, when opening arguments by the prosecution and the defense were given. At the beginning of the trail, some television networks want to tape the proceedings, but judge David Wesley barred them from the courtroom. As for the Indian community, no one except closed friends of the Jon family has bothered to attend.

CONTROVERSY: British Doctor Admits Plagiarism

Another Kaavya Viswanathan-ish scandal here - but this time, it's not a student. It is a professor/doctor.

One of England's top psychiatrists, Raj Persaud, has admitted that he plagiarized materials for four of the articles published in his 2003 book - "From the Edge of the Couch." He has also admitted lifting passages for his four 2005 articles from from an article and book by Thomas Blass, of the University of Maryland.

Read the full article on the Guardian. Here's the Times Online version.

Persaud (who was voted one of the top ten psychiatrists in the UK in 2002 by the Institute of Psychiatry and the Royal College of Psychiatrists) published his articles in leading publications including the British Medical Journal, Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry, and the Guardian and the Independent newspapers.

He was also a longtime presenter of "Travels of a Mind" for BBC World Service and "All in the Mind" for BBC Radio 4.

Read Persaud's bio on Gresham College's website (where he is a professor).

Any thoughts? Please post your comments below.

DESI SPOTTING: Sudhir Venkatesh research as part of Spitzer scandal coverage

Here I was, thinking there wouldn't any South Asian angle to the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. But the Desi Spotter in me was excited to find something, after all. Turns out Sudhir Venkatesh, the Columbia University sociologist and expert on Chicago gangs (and author of "Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets") has done research with "Freakonomics" co-author Steven Levitt on prostitution, too. From Emily Bazelon's piece in Slate, "Why is Prositution Illegal?":

Shouldn't prostitution laws come down to working conditions—and the laws that would lead to better ones for sex workers? According to a recent working paper (PDF) by economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, despite all the fighting and all the preaching, we apparently don't know that much about the specifics of the structure of the sex market—how much prostitutes make on average, how many tricks they turn a year, how frequently they and their pimps and johns actually get arrested.

To start filling in the gap, Levitt and Venkatesh looked at data from the Chicago Police Department. They found that women working the streets were making $27 an hour but less than $20,000 a year (they don't log a lot of hours). The risks of the trade were serious: "an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex." There was also a "surprisingly high prevalence of police officers demanding sex from prostitutes in return for avoiding arrest." That looks like another argument against the bans on prostitution—presumably women wouldn't be caught in this particular trap if they weren't worried about going to jail in the first place. Levitt and Venkatesh also offer up this statistic: Prostitutes get arrested about once per 450 tricks, and johns even less frequently. Two lessons here: 1) A law that isn't being enforced much may not be worth having; and 2) Eliot Spitzer looks really, really unlucky.
[Listen to Bazelon discuss the story on NPR.]

Download a PDF copy of the Levitt/Venkatesh study: "An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution" ("September 2007; Extremely Preliminary and Incomplete; Comments Greatly Appreciated").

Venkatesh has written a Slate piece himself, that asks a counter-intuitive question: "Did Spitzer get caught because he didn't spend ENOUGH on prostitutes?" From Skinflint:

The first thing that grabs your attention about the sex scandal involving New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is, of course, the client. But, there's another aspect to the story that should raise eyebrows: $4,300. That's the bill Spitzer incurred for his dangerous liaison at the Mayflower hotel. Who would pay that much, and could you ever really get your money's worth?

In fact, $4,300 is not an altogether alarming sum of money in the high-end sex market. Spitzer got a bargain—and that may have been his downfall.

Read the rest of his argument here.

Listen to a SAJA webcast interview with Venkatesh about his book, gangs, life as an academic and more. The prostitute research, somehow, never came up.

Post your comments below.