Leniency for rapist? Come on...

This makes my stomach turn! Rape is rape. How can there be exceptional circumstances? These idiots could have said 'NO!' and refused to participate, it would have been 2 against one. What's wrong with them? They did it... they can't squirm out of it now. The girl is left with the nightmares, drugs, and the shattered ruins of her life. How about leniency for her?

Rapist deserves leniency in exceptional case: lawyer - National - smh.com.au:

THE victim of a gang rape has had nightmares for seven months, turned to drugs and had to quit her job because she could not forget the attack.

But the lawyer for one of her attackers, Chrisovalantis Papadopoulos, said yesterday the rape in July 2004 was only brief and "at the very bottom of the scale of seriousness".

Papadopoulos and Bulent Topcu said they had been forced by another man, Canan Eken, to have sex with the woman, but were found guilty of gang rape last month. Both had apologised to the victim, who was allegedly being punched and kicked by Eken in his Rosebery flat.

The woman, who was 17 at the time, told the District Court yesterday she became afraid of the dark, and slept next to her mother for seven months after the attack.

"I would have nightmares every night about the rape … Even when I was not asleep, every time I shut my eyes I could see what went on that night. I couldn't get their faces out of my head," she said.

She turned to drugs to take away her pain and no longer trusted people, she said. "Every time I walk out my front door I feel unsafe."

The case was exceptional because the men were not the instigators of the rape, said Papadopoulos's barrister, Barry Cross. His client deserved less than the standard minimum period of 10 years in jail, he argued.

William Brewer, Topcu's barrister, said his client also deserved less than the minimum 15 years sentence for his offence because the oral sex had stopped as soon as Eken left the room.

The men will be sentenced next month.