Music and Madness
This evening, I stopped by Borders on my way back to my room to pick up a cup of chamomile tea to go. As I walked into the cafe, I heard acoustic guitar music; a gentleman was sitting in the corner playing easy listening and light classical music. The first piece I heard was a Carpenters composition, “We’ve Only Just Begun”, which took me back to my very first album ever in junior high.
I love acoustic guitar – easy listening, classical, Spanish, bluegrass – so I sat down to drink my tea and listen for a few minutes. On the way out I wandered by to put money in the musician’s tip jar; he offered me a home-labeled CD for my tip, and I thanked him for both the happiness-inducing music and the CD and headed out.
On the way back to my room I was thinking — I need to get my guitar out again, and begin playing. I need to learn some pieces so well, that when I need therapeutic music I can simply pull out my guitar like an old friend.
I sat down and logged onto my computer. (Yes, I’m an email addict, especially when in Anchorage.) I thought, hey, I’ll google this guy… as a semipro musician, he may have a website.
Then came the madness… I did find a search result for the musician’s name, which I am not disclosing here, for a Wikipedia page. Drilling down to read it, I learned that if indeed this was the same guy – and it is an unusual name with age and skills that match – he was a music teacher who had been fired from a local high school a decade ago after being charged with seven counts of felony child sexual abuse of a minor who was a student. After pleading no contest to one charge, the other charges were dropped and he served five years in prison.
Ugh. It’s like peeking behind the scenes and finding a cesspool. As a disclaimer, it’s Wikipedia, which may or may not be entirely accurate. I’ve deleted the music from my iTunes – what the heck do I do with the CD? And I have to wonder, does Borders know the history — and if it is correct, is it my business to tell them?
I am very sad. So much talent, such beautiful music… utterly spoiled, at least for me.
March 13th, 2008
My stepfather went to jail for a year after plea bargaining his way out of a longer lock up. He had sexually molested my youngest sister (after I had already moved out and had children of my own), and I can assure you, my desire was to do much more than “throw away his CD.”
The weird part is that my mother decided not to leave him. He’s out of jail, and living at home now. My sister is now older and moved out (and was pregnant at 16, dropped out of high school, and is engaged to a loser). But my mom stays with him. I struggle with this immensely, as you can imagine.
The one thing it’s forced me to do, however, is to seriously consider whether or not such a person should be allowed to live a normal life again. He served (short) time in jail. He obeyed his probation rules perfectly. He avoids children at all costs, so as not even to raise suspicion. He got rid of the trampoline that was in their yard, so it didn’t seem he was trying to lure children to his house.
It’s been quite an experience for me trying to wrap my brain around the situation.
I have no real advice, apart from that if he’s living a wholesome life now, I think he deserves to make a living. That’s the hardest part of “innocent until proven guilty (again)” and “served his time.”
Sorry to pour our my heart on your blog, but yeah, things like this really hit home.
March 13th, 2008
Shawn, what a harrowing tale! Yes, I too would be pretty motivated to do a little more than ‘throw the CD away’ on that one. I hope your sister eventually rebuilds her psyche and her life.
In the final analysis, who this musician is and what he does isn’t really any of my business. He was doing nothing wrong. The only intersection of his life and mine was my decision to tip him/pick up his CD. I would not choose to buy music from a celebrity musician who had such a history – in fact, I wouldn’t let my eldest buy R. Kelly’s music back when he was selling millions.
You do have a really good point – when a criminal has paid their dues and served their time, what do they owe society, and what does society owe them? That’s an entirely separate issue from personal forgiveness and support, which is the terribly sad center of your family’s experience.
March 13th, 2008
Oh, Shawn. I’m so sorry. I hope your sister works through her troubles and finds some peace.
Jeri, I find I’m at a loss, for the reasons you’ve already commented on. How can we, as a society, continue to “punish” those who have followed the rules of their consequences? And yet, I have no desire to help support a pedophile, in any form.
A grey area, to be sure.
Have you seen “The Woodsman” with Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgewick? It does a good job of trying to address this issue.
March 13th, 2008
Shawn,
I’m very sorry. That’s a difficult thing to deal with.
My brother’s Boy Scout leader was convicted and went to prison for child molestation (of boys even) and my brother refuses to believe the guy did anything wrong. (Even though there was video evidence at the trial).
It’s a difficult thing.
And if you don’t already know, you can go here:
http://www.familywatchdog.us/ to search a fed sex offender list, or search for a registry by state.
For example, here’s the WV list: http://www.wvstatepolice.com/sexoff/
And… wow… I just discovered that a friend’s brother is on the WV list. “Victims-multiple male and female minors.”
Holy crap. I think I feel slightly ill.
March 13th, 2008
OK, Now I’m not sure if it was actions or possession of porn.
Either way.
No wonder she’s always so mad at her brother.
March 13th, 2008
OK, I’m really conflicted on this subject.
1. Registries don’t always tell the whole story. I saw one case recently where essentially, you had a 12 year old boy and a 10 year old girl “playing doctor”. The boy is now a registered sex-offender.
2. In Miami Beach, offenders who are paroled, must remain in the jurisdiction to be available to their parole officer. The only place in the county that is far enough from schools, day-care centers, parks, etc. and therefore a legal place for them to live, is under a causeway bridge. (I’m not making that up.)
3. I realize that Sex offenders are thought, as a class to be the most susceptible to recidivism, but there also seems to be something fundamentally unfair about handing out 2, 5, 10-year sentences which become ipso-facto life sentences. (If you can’t live anywhere or work anywhere, what good is getting out of jail?)
The fact is, that some sex offenses should carry a life sentence to begin with. But there really are people on registries who don’t belong lumped in with the worst and there are some people who get convicted, do their time, and should be permitted to get on with their lives.
Like I said, I’m conflicted. And, re: your musician. I don’t know anything about him or his case, but its entirely possible that he might have been 20 years old at the time and having a consensual affair with a 17 year old, and he’d still be technically guilty of all the charges. Just saying.
If Eric stops in, I’d be interested in hearing a public defender’s take on all of this.
March 13th, 2008
No registries don’t tell you everything, but they tell you a lot.
For instance, the WV registry tells you the date of the conviction and the age category of the victim (i.e. female 6-12). So you can tell pretty easily if it was a bf/gf thing.
They also tell the relationship of the offender to the victim, i.e. family member, acquaintance, stranger. And they give the sentencing/
So you see a guy who was convicted in his late teens/early 20s and the victim was an acquaintance teenager, and he only got probation, or a couple months in jail, I’d guess that was a statutory rape.
But a guy in his 50s whose victims were 6-12 family members? Who went away for 10 years? That tells you an entirely different story.
So perhaps it depends upon the registry.
And I do agree that the Miami Beach restrictions are terrible and MUST be changed. If data such as in the WV database were available, you’d think you could tailor the restrictions to individuals who preyed on children as opposed to individuals whose victims were adults.
But I think sex registries are important, because individuals should be able to know if their new neighbor preys on young children, or was convicted of violent rape on a stranger. Or even if it was porn (which is listed as well.)
March 15th, 2008
Nathan sort of asked me to step in and say something, and I’ve tried to let it percolate so that I could say something smart, but I’m not sure I really do have anything especially wise or precious to add.
In no special order:
* * *
Registries really don’t tell you much of anything: they give you vague raw data on which you can try to base assumptions, but there’s no way to tell whether a fifty year old man who screwed his stepdaughter is a “predator” or just a really messed-up man who did something terrible and stupid that could never happen again. In the end, any conclusion you draw from a registry list is an assumption based on what you read into a line of unspecific data.
Your legislature didn’t really create a registry to protect the public. They created a registry to protect their jobs. They’re “doing something,” they’re “tough on crime.” Even then, it’s not so simple–there are quixotic crusaders in every witch hunt, people who really do believe there are witches or communists or satanists or pedophiles lurking in every doorway; I suppose their intentions are good, but you know what they say about the road to Hell. But the ugly little secret is that child molesters and drunk drivers have really bad lobbies, and are easy targets every time your elected officials want to score easy points, especially during election years.
* * *
I suppose I would like to believe in forgiveness and rehabilitation, and that’s a big part of why I do what I do. Some people can’t be rehabilitated and I don’t know if they should be forgiven. There, I admitted it.
The scientific data on sex offenders is pretty lousy and all the methodologies used to collect it were flawed. The data has still been used, nonetheless, to strip sex offenders of anything that might have resembled their Constitutional rights after trial and to erode their rights during trial. Rape-shield laws and relaxed hearsay limitations on rape victims’ statements, though well-meant, aren’t exactly compatible with due process and the right to face your accuser.
But anything to lock away perverts, right? It’s not like they’re human or anything. And why would an alleged victim lie about anything? Ever?
* * *
The court system is a horrible way to get at truth. It doesn’t work. Lawyers from both sides try to pick twelve people they think will be easily led and then drag them through a complicated process that very few of them (if any) understand. Most of them have seen John Stossel or somebody tell them that loopholes always result in suppressed evidence and guilty men going free. Innocent people who were falsely convicted have Frontline as a forum–Frontline being a documentary series that airs (at most) once a week on PBS, a network that’s watched by about 19 people at any given time. This is an example of what TV news people call “equal time.”
Our legal system has its obvious virtues. Five hundred years ago, the legal system involved tying people up and throwing them in lakes or forcing them to stick their hands in molten lead. God was supposed to protect the innocent. This would be the same God, mind you, who (if he exists) kills children and puppies. But I digress. The point I was getting at is that our legal system now has far fewer drownings and traumatic third-degree burns. So there has been progress.
Because our system is so progressive and advanced, I frequently have to tell clients that yes, we can go to trial and yes, I believe they’re innocent, and yes, there are all sorts of problems with the State’s case, but if a jury believes the State and doesn’t believe the client, my client will go to prison for decades instead of the months the State is offering in a plea agreement.
There’s this thing called an “Alford Plea.” The history of the Alford Plea is instructive and goes something like this: many years ago, a man named Alford was charged with killing somebody. The prosecutors came to him (or his lawyers, rather), and offered to reduce the charge if he’d plead guilty.
Alford said (this a re-enactment, I don’t know what he really said), “I sure as shit didn’t kill nobody, but I really don’t want to have no needle stuck in my arm if that jury doesn’t believe me.” That’s how we kill people in North Carolina, by the way, and this was a North Carolina case. Actually, I don’t know if that’s how we killed people then, it’s possible we baked them or gassed them, but it’s a re-enactment, remember?
Anyway, Alford decided to take the plea, but there was this big stink over whether you could plead guilty while protesting your innocence. And it went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Court said, “Well, we sure as hell can understand why someone wouldn’t want to put their lives in the hands of some dumb jury.” Again, that’s not actually what they said out loud, at least not in their opinion, but that’s the gist of it.
Now, one might think they would have said “In fact, that’s why capital punishment is a lousy idea,” and as a matter of fact Justice Brennan said exactly that. But Justice Brennan was kinda wacky that way. If it had been left up to Justice Brennan, we’d never get to kill anybody.
So it’s possible in these United States to enter a plea where you plead guilty without admitting that you are, in fact, guilty so long as you understand you’ll be treated as being guilty. Which sometimes seems like a pretty good idea in a case where a plea will get you probation or maybe a year or two in jail and a jury determination that that little girl was telling the truth will get you a life sentence in prison as a kiddie-fucker.
The rebuttal, naturally, is to ask why anyone would ever plead to something they didn’t do? Yeah. I guess that question wins.
* * *
It’s Saturday, and I’ve depressed myself. There are reasons I don’t often write about work, especially on weekends. But I hope this was, you know, “insightful” or something. If not… sorry. I did try.
March 15th, 2008
Wow – talk about some perceptive comments. It’s amazing how many people this kind of abuse touches. I know two people very close to me who have been molested… I’m not at liberty to share their stories.
In the case I mentioned, the perpetrator was in his late 40s; the victim was 14. There were seven charges against him related to her evidence; he plea-bargained down to no contest (same as an Alford plea?) on one of them. In addition, two other women came forward with their own stories of his abuse, but no charges were filed.
We have a couple of folks working at my company who are on the registry – believe me, that’s really something you don’t want to know about your colleagues! And another employee left his management job abruptly, and a week later showed up on the registry in status “incarcerated”.
Eric, I agree with your comments related to elected officials finding it an easy and publicity generating crime to attack. And, I agree with the comments on the limitations of a registry. No matter how informative, it can’t tell the whole story – which sometimes is not as clear cut as it seems (12 & 10 year old playing doctor), but other times is more horrific (seven charges plea bargained down to one).
I have a hard time with the insufficient sentences handed out to convicted sex offenders based on plea bargaining or state guidelines – like this local man, out and living a couple of towns over. It seems like burglars and drug possessors (IMHO possession is a victimless crime) are more harshly punished than these violent criminals.
While it is hard to justify a lifetime’s ostracism for a crime – when the criminal does his/her time in a few years – it’s also hard to justify a sentence of just a few years when the impact of the crime on the victims is lifelong.
March 16th, 2008
Okay, another long response, with apologies:
“No contest” isn’t quite the same as an Alford Plea, though they have similar results. In both instances, the defendant is agreeing to be treated as being guilty without admitting to actual guilt, but in an Alford Plea he’s actually entering a plea of guilty. The technical distinctions can play a role, for instance, in how probation violations are handled.
One of the issues that hasn’t been brought up is mental illness. The legal system is designed to deal with bad people, not defective ones. That is, the legal system presumes a criminal who has knowingly and deliberately done a bad thing that he knew better than to do. The legal system ends up at a loss when it comes to people who, let’s say, sexually assault someone because “God” told them to or who became intimate with a child 20 years younger because mentally and emotionally (and even clinically) they were dating someone the same age. This is something else that doesn’t go into the registry and rarely makes it into a two-paragraph news item. I’m not saying that the man you referred to is, in fact, suffering from a diagnosable illness like schizophrenia–only that it’s possible, and if he is you can feel confident that some 90% of reporters and news editors wouldn’t get around to mentioning it (yes, I pulled that number out of thin air; I also suspect I’m being generous with it).
A lot of folks outside the legal system fault plea bargains. I’m not sure they’ve thought through how the system works (even in an ideal sense, much less a practical sense)–I hope that doesn’t sound critical, Jeri, because it’s not meant to be.
Here’s what happens when a sex offense goes to trial: first of all, you have one or more prosecutors, DA investigators and police officers building the case. This costs taxpayer money and keeps the above-mentioned folks from working on other cases which may be just as important–other sex offenses, murders, robberies, assaults, etc. If the accused has appointed counsel, the taxpayer also pays for that and that’s also time that the appointed lawyer and his investigators and staff aren’t working on other important matters.
When the case gets called for trial, several dozen (or more) people are called in to miss work for jury service. Of these, ultimately 12-14 (one or two alternate jurors will be selected) will spend between a few days and a few weeks hearing the case.
The State must prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. This means witnesses. This will almost always include police officers who will spend their time sitting in a courtroom instead of out on the street fighting crime or whatever. A sex offense case will also frequently involve doctors, who have to take time out of their practice to come to court. It may also include psychologists, social workers, forensics experts from the state bureau of investigation, and others–not to mention “civilian” witnesses like neighbors and family members.
But the chief witness, the one that almost always gets overlooked, is the victim. Almost everything the alleged victim said to those cops, doctors and shrinks is hearsay–it’s inadmissable unless covered by some exception (in some jurisdictions, there have been attempts to relax rules for out-of-court statements in sex-offense cases; those laws are on questionable ground since Crawford, a SCOTUS confrontation clause case from a few years ago). The victim (or victims) will all have to get up in front of the public and recite what the defendant allegedly did. And then they’ll be cross-examined. Having publicly relived whatever happened, if anything did, they will have a lawyer do his damnedest to make them look dishonest, foolish, forgetful, promiscuous, manipulated, manipulative, jealous, or whatever else suits the defense theory of the case.
After all the witnesses have done their bit, the jury takes the case. And sometimes the jury acquits the defendant, and sometimes it doesn’t.
So here’s the thing with plea bargains: a prosecutor can spend months preparing and trying a case, taking up his witnesses’ time and exposing the victim to a public humiliation, all at the taxpayers’ expense, and when he’s done probably he’ll have a conviction but maybe he won’t. A plea bargain, on the other hand, is a sure thing and takes minutes, and the victim doesn’t have to say anything unless they want to and they won’t be questioned about it.
Okay, maybe the defendant gets probation instead of prison, or maybe he gets out in two years instead of twenty–you need to offer a defendant something, “plead straight up, discretion of the judge” isn’t a plea offer, it’s a “screw you.”
Do you know what would happen if plea bargains were eliminated, or even limited?
The system would break.
You wouldn’t get more bad people in jail or on probation, you’d get less. Because the state can’t try everybody. They don’t have enough courtrooms. It’s not an idle boast to say that every public defender’s office in every medium-sized or larger jurisdiction could shut the legal system down if we said every case was for trial. Let’s say a fairly typical assistant public defender has four-hundred cases (in some places, this would be a very low number). Let’s say one hundred are felonies. Let’s say the average felony takes a week to try in front of a jury. That’s one public defender tying up a courtroom for two years straight if he doesn’t get any new cases in the meantime.
Sentencing charts are a hugely controversial thing and one could write a book about the pros and cons–I’m sure books have been written. I guess all that needs to be said in this discussion is that without some kind of structured or mandated sentence, you take the risk that a judge will decide that that 12-year-old “was asking for it, and where was her momma the whole time?” and give some sick bum probation. Or that some judge will look at the 16-year-old with the 15-year-old girlfriend and decide the young man in question is too black to be dating a girl as white as that, and should be an example for anyone else who doesn’t understand the way God intended the world to work. Actually, the sentencing charts were largely the product of a public perception that judges were too lenient on defendants; now they foster that perception. Go figure.
Alright, that’s two days I’ve written about work! Now I’m off to write about vampires or something cool!
March 16th, 2008
Thanks, Eric, so much for your passionate and informed opinions here!
The smug husband is also an attorney, but has spent his career practicing civil and contract law and is now a corporate counsel. While his work is challenging and absorbing, it doesn’t seem to be as overwhelming and emotionally tough as public defense.
Again, thanks.