Press enter after choosing selection

Book Review -- The Rape of Inez Garcia

Book Review -- The Rape of Inez Garcia image Book Review -- The Rape of Inez Garcia image
Parent Issue
Day
8
Month
April
Year
1976
OCR Text

BOOKS

The Rape of Inez Garcia

By Jim Wood (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $7.95)

I'm not ashamed of what I have done. I would like other people to know about my case. I think they can identify with me. And if they have the same thing happen to them they will know how I felt. Maybe it will stop more rapes.

Inez Garcia's poignant warning spurns the stereotype of female passivity to cut deep into the heart of male chauvinism. Victimized by two rapists. Garcia might have sunk into the bottomless pit of unreported or wrongly prosecuted cases but tor her choice of response: she exercised the basic right of self-defense, culminating in the death of one of her assailants.

Tried and originally convicted for murder in the state of California, Garcia has continued to fight back in court, recently winning the right to a retrial. This book, written by San Francisco Examiner reporter Jim Wood, details the story of Inez Garcia and the charges against her, countering with the account of Inez herself and the political analysis offered by her defiant feminist supporters.

At the crux of the Garcia case lies the central question: to what extent are a woman's rights protected by a sexually-biased legal system when she has been violated by a male, and to what extent is she justified in taking extreme measures such as armed self-defense -- in order to maintain the inviolability of her person? The victory of Joann Little in North Carolina went a long way toward answering that question, and The Rape of Inez Garcia takes the issue one step further.

Inez Garcia's entanglement in the wheels of legal machinery began March 19, 1974, in Soledad, California, where she had moved from Florida to be near her imprisoned husband. As the hotbed of prison unrest, Soledad had caught the eye of the nation with the mysterious death of radical black writer George Jackson. Until lnez's violent collision with sexism, nothing of the rage boiling at Soledad Prison against an unfair legal system had yet touched her life.

On the date in question two men, Louis Castillo and Miguel Jiminez, were asked to leave Garcia's house after an altercation with her house-mate, a man named Fred Medrano. Garcia followed the men outside, where they grabbed her, tore off her clothes, and raped her, igniting a bizarre series of events. Within half an hour Inez had sought out her assailants and fired on them with her .22 rifle, killing Jiminez and missing Castillo, who had been her main target. Although Wood's description of the case offers conflicting testimony concerning Inez's motivations, there is no dispute of the fact that she made a willful attempt to defend herself.

With Charles Garry as legal gladiator and a defense committee made up of militant women, Garcia's case was injected with a heavy dose of politics. Emphasizing the frequency of rape, Wood points out that "a rape is reported every eleven minutes in the United States. And in cities the incidence is three times higher than in the suburbs, four times higher than in a rural area. This may mean simply that urban rapes are more

Continued on page 23

Inez Garcia

continued from page 17

likely to be reported, but it also, undeniably, means that rape is almost commonplace in urban American culture."

Yet the conviction record of rape offenders is depressingly dismal. According to the FBI's annual report tor 1972 on crime in America, "Arrests wore made in only 57% of the forcible rapes reported; of these only 73% of adults were prosecuted, and of these only 32% were found guilty."

Given these unfortunate statistics it's no wonder that, as Wood explains, "If a woman was raped she may be avenged. In the past, this avenging was done by the husband or father, and the man was generally regarded as virtuous, a person of honor. But in Inez's case the unwritten law has been taken one step further. The victim herself has avenged her honor."

Jim Wood vividly chronicles the development of the legal proceedings and introduces an array of individuals with conflicting viewpoints on social justice. Even though the radical elements have eked out a limited victory in Ms. Garcia's case, the ultimate disposition is not yet in. As the words of Inez Garcia echo throughout America and we begin to heed them, maybe they can help stop more rapes.

-- TOOTIE