The repeated rape of an unconscious 16-year-old girl in the small football-loving town of Steubenville, Ohio, in August is making national headlines thanks to the diligence of Alexandria Goddard, a crime blogger, and the internet vigilanteism of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Yet, in spite of all the new attention focused on this horrific act, the media is still getting it wrong.

Rather than acknowledge the context in which the crime took place (rape culture), the media is treating this as an exceptional incident, an anomaly isolated to Steubenville. The perpetrators are portrayed as sociopaths rather than products of their environment. But to pretend that Steubenville is the exception rather than the rule is to deny that rape culture exists.

The uncomfortable truth is that prioritizing the interests of rapists when they are in positions of power is the norm in America. Which brings me to the case of Terry Williams, a former death row inmate in Pennsylvania who I wrote about back in September.

The state of Pennsylvania was scheduled to execute Williams in September for the 1984 murder of 56-year-old Amos Norwood, a Philadelphia church leader. Williams was just four months past his 18th birthday at the time of the 1984 murder, the minimum age required for the death penalty.

As I wrote in September:

With the help of 18-year-old Marc Draper, the son of a police officer, Williams smashed Norwood’s skull with a tire iron, set fire to his body and dumped him in a cemetery. Just five months earlier, Williams was convicted of third-degree murder for killing 50-year-old Herbert Hamilton, who was found naked on his kitchen floor with a knife in his throat.

But there’s a twist. Norwood and Hamilton had been sexually abusing Williams for years which was the motivating factor behind the killings. Even worse, the prosecution knew this but deliberately hid it from the jury at the original trial. Five of those jurors later testified that they would have never sentenced Williams to death had they known he was being sexually abused.  In fact, Norwood had violently raped Williams the night before his murder.

Not only did the prosecution knowingly hide this evidence, they lured Williams’ co-defendant, Marc Draper, into testifying that the motive was robbery in exchange for a lighter sentence. Draper later recanted his testimony and revealed that he repeatedly told homicide detectives and the prosecutor, Andrea Foulkes (now a federal prosecutor) that sexual abuse, not robbery, was behind the murder.

As I wrote in September, Terry Williams’ was sexually abused almost his entire life:

The sexual abuse Williams suffered began at the age of six, when he was raped by an older boy in his neighborhood. “He came home in tears, bleeding from his rectum. Terry reported the assault to his mother, who saw the blood on his backside but never even sought medical attention for her son, let alone counseling or mental health treatment,” states the clemency petition. Later, Williams was raped by his middle school teacher, Timothy Johnson, and at 16, he was gang raped by two older men in juvenile detention.

Hamilton and Amos, the men Williams ultimately killed, are described in the petition as “middle-aged sexual predators who preyed on teenage boys.” Hamilton, a prescription drug dealer, abused many teenage boys, one of whom testified in the petition. According to Williams’ defense, his attempted abuse of Williams resulted in a knife fight that ended with Hamilton’s death.

The adults around him had suspected abuse was taking place, but none ever thought to intervene. Ironically, Williams was a star quarterback and quite popular. Had he been the perpetrator, rather than the victim of rape, he might have fared better in the American legal system.

Even in the face of all this new evidence, Pennsylvania authorities were still determined to execute Williams and continued to blame him for his predicament:

Despite declarations of sympathy for child victims of sex abuse by Pennsylvania’s politicians and bureaucrats, the prosecution has elected to blame Williams for failing to raise the issue of sexual abuse at his trial. “Instead,” says deputy district attorney Ronald Eisenberg, “[Williams] chose to present false testimony that he wasn’t there.” However, Williams lawyers explain that the reason it took Williams so long to reveal his abused history is because he was frightened and ashamed, as are most child victims of rape.

On another occasion, Eisenberg called Williams’ plea for clemency a “massive public relations campaign.” Eisenberg’s remarks echo the prosecution’s belief that Williams’ alleged abuse is unimportant in deciding whether he lives or dies. In a statement following the rejection of clemency, district attorney Seth Williams accused Terry Williams “of manipulative and malevolent behavior,” calling his claims of sexual abuse “a last ditch effort to escape punishment for his crime.”

In the end, the prosecution failed, thanks to the support of child abuse experts, the public and even the international community. Of course, this was the same state whose largest institutions (the church and Penn State) had just been exposed for turning a blind eye to child sex abuse. Nevertheless, authorities in Pennsylvania (and Steubenville are not alone in shielding rapists from punishment. They are just examples of the consequences of a patriarchal culture that devalues, objectifies and silences women (and even children!) and then wonders why powerful men and boys rape.