A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has reversed the 2002 rape and kidnapping conviction of former Long Beach Poly football standout Brian Banks. Banks, now 26, was wrongly convicted of the charges based on the testimony of Wanetta Gibson, an acquaintance. Gibson testified that Banks raped her on the Poly campus. Banks said the encounter was consensual. Rather than face a prison term of from 41 years to life, Banks accepted a plea deal that destroyed his dream of playing college football. At Poly, he had been a star at linebacker. Gibson sued the Long Beach Unified School District, claiming the Poly campus was not a safe environment, and won a $1.5-million settlement. Nearly a decade later, Gibson contacted Banks on Facebook, met with him and admitted that she had fabricated the story. Banks spent more than five years in prison, was required to register as a sex offender and was still on probation wearing an electronic monitoring device. Source - http://www.latimes.com/sports/sports...,7941481.story ` This kind of situation wants to make me scream out in rage and also points out the failures of our criminal justice system. 1) The woman (who made the false accusation) and her mother (who sued the school district for 1.5 million dollars) both to need be arrested themselves and tried in court....hopefully to languish in prison equal to the time Brian Banks had to serve. False rape charges make it more difficult for the thousand of women who've had to suffer through that humiliating torture. "FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. The average rate of unfounded reports for Index crimes is 2%" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape ) 2) Kudo's to the Innocence Project ( http://www.innocenceproject.org/ ) for once more freeing and exonerating an unjustly convicted person.
