- Fifteen-year-old Alabama boy hangs himself after getting into trouble for streaking at a high school football game.
- Iowa city councilman kills himself when he comes under investigation for possession of child pornography.
- Michigan father of five kills himself when he comes under investigation for possession of child pornography.
- Two charged with child porn and two under investigation (all from Tennessee) die in a murder-suicide pact.
- Ohio man accused of having child porn and plead not guilty to pandering commits suicide. (via eAdvocate)
Churches should put their teachings about mercy and redemption into action by welcoming sex offenders. City councils should decrease the residency restrictions for sex offenders. State legislators should stop using sex offenders as the easy way to prove they are tough on crime. We should stop using the phrase "sex offender" to label a huge variety of offenses as if they are all equally bad.
I'd like to see people fight back when comments like this are made:
adios pervert .. now america dont have to pay for your prison life ..I'd like to see a flood of responses to those comments, defending sex offenders. Yes, defending sex offenders.
When the law encourages hatred and vigilantism, that law is wrong.
Laws that deliberately make life difficult for sex offenders are wrong.
When a law pretending to protect children results in fatherless children and a child dead of suicide, that law is wrong.
Abolish the sex offender registry.
6 comments:
We've reached a point where the people have NO rational thoughts on this topic.
If you say anything but kill em' all, you're a pedo enabler.
If you say the laws are bad and need fixing, you must be a pedophile yourself.
People see murder as a lesser crime.
It is no small wonder why these charges lead to despair.
In terms of gathering popular support, I think you might separate out some cases. The public thinks of "sex offenders" as men raping lots of different children. You could cover all these cases you mention by referring to sex offenses that don't involve touching a child. Just an idea. It may be that nonviolent contact offenders are also treated too harshly, but there's a distinction to be made.
Let me share with you one example of why suicide happens. Two very close friends, one over 18 and one just under 18 are on a trip together. The age of consent where we live is 16. There was consensual sex while on the trip and a few nude pictures taken of each other. Thats all that took place. Two years later the older friend was arrested and accused of being part of a world wide child pornography ring, taking a "child" to another state and sexually assaulting him, producing child pornography, interstate transportation of child pornography, and possessing child pornography. Thats what the prosecutor originally said. The local TV station grabbed on to the public information and of course sensationalized it and made it the lead story on the noon, 6 and 11 pm news. They even set up and did live coverage from our community. Now, if you are a local citizen, well known and respected in the area by everyone how would you feel? Of course the humiliation is beyond belief. How can you ever face anyone again after what they heard. All you can think of is killing yourself. Those were my thoughts every single day for awhile but luckily I never went that far.
In reality there was no connection to a world wide child pornography ring at all. Just a few conversations with someone on the internet who was a member of an on-line community I was also a member of. A group that had nothing to do with pornography or children. But that person was apparently trading child pornography and once he was caught everyone he had conversations with was investigated. There was no sexual assault of any "child" and the judge later told the prosecutor he couldn't say that because any sex that might have taken place was legal and consensual. But to late, he already did. The interstate transportation accusation …. coming home from a trip with some pictures on your camera. And of course once you get home you are possessing the so called child pornography. Simply putting it, two close friends, well past the age of consent, made a mistake and took a few inappropriate pictures of each other. Something thousands of teens do every day with their cell phones. And look what it was turned into by the prosecutor, who's only goal is to prosecute someone and get a conviction, and the local TV station, who's goal is sensational news stories to sell advertising time. And we wonder why so many people end up killing themselves.
I made it through the nightmare and in the end no one in our community turned against me. They knew me better than that. But usually that isn't how the story ends. It ends in suicide.
In terms of gathering popular support, I think you might separate out some cases. The public thinks of "sex offenders" as men raping lots of different children. You could cover all these cases you mention by referring to sex offenses that don't involve touching a child. Just an idea. It may be that nonviolent contact offenders are also treated too harshly, but there's a distinction to be made.
You are right, Ethan. If I wanted to gather as much public support as possible, I could make a distinction between violent and non-violent sex crimes. To get even more support, I could narrow it further to the Romeo and Juliet cases because most people support the idea that those kids don't need to be on the registry.
There are already groups out there who will be satisfied when the registry laws change just enough to remove them or their loved one from the registry, organizations who support an "intelligent registry."
I don't support an inteligent registry because there is no such thing. Once there is a registry, we end up right back where we are. The registry has been a too-tempting way for legislators to prove that they are tough on crime.
If we scaled back to putting only the violent offenders on the registry, it wouldn't be long before another category of offense was added, and then another.
If we go back to keeping the registry off the internet, it wouldn't be long before someone suggested putting it online for ease of access.
By saying that any category of sex offender belongs on a publicly available registry, I would be saying that those families deserve to have their addresses on the registry, that those families deserve to be exposed to public humiliation and to be made a target of vigilantes.
Once the convict has served his/her sentence, he or she ought to be able to return to private life without legislated harassment.
I'm with you all the way on getting rid of the registry. I was responding more to the suicide cases you cited (which weren't directly related to the registry).
Read the second-to-last paragraph in the "But....it's okay to bully sex offenders, isn't it?" post at With Justice For All. Then tell me those suicides aren't directly related to the registry.
That is what the registry does: it tells the public that these are people you can target.
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