[Vision2020] Sentence Appropriate?

[Garrett Clevenger]

The dude pled guilty to the charge.  

Whether he thought she was 13 or fantasazing doing a 13 year old doesn't matter. He's a pedophile in either case, someone sexually attracted to young children.

He wasn't arrested by what he thought but what he did: he enticed someone posing as a 13 year old.

I don't buy the Larry Craig defense as Paul seems to imply, that he may be guilty of something but not the charge.  If you're not guilty then face the court, don't plead guilty.

Hopefully the guy is not another Duncan, but that's the reality of creeps out there. If I hurt his feelings, it's nothing personal, just a distrust in the justice system.

It's not a witch hunt, either, but an intolerance to pedophilia.

Maybe Paul is being the rational one and I'm over reacting. Honestly, I hope that's the case.

I'm sure the guy is going to be stigmatized regardless of if he's a dupe or not.


Garrett



Jun 21, 2010 12:12:43 PM, godshatter at yahoo.com wrote:

===========================================


>We know absolutely nothing about this particular case ("jack shit" 
>is, I 
>believe, the technical term).  Yet we're willing to judge the leniency 
>of his sentence and to call him a pedophile and a creep on a public 
>mailing list.
>
>Here's a hypothetical situation:
>
>Maybe this guy went to an adult chatroom, where adults talk with other 
>adults about sex.  This guy strikes up a conversation with a person who 
>later claims that they are 13.  Since he's on an adult chatroom, he 
>figure that this person is role-playing, so he goes along with it.  The 
>conversations continue, and he make some remark about how they should 
>both get together and have sex, never intending to actually go through 
>with it.  He was just role-playing, not making an actual date.  A couple 
>of days later, he's in jail and scared for his life.  He's sees how 
>many 
>people out there assume he rapes babies on a daily basis, and he 
>desperately doesn't want to go to prison for 15 years labeled as a sex 
>offender because he knows that could very well happen if the prosecutor 
>plays the "think of the children!" card and the jury is not very 
>sophisticated about this whole online thing.  So he cops a plea and gets 
>off with a reduced sentence and carries the "sex offender" brand on 
>his 
>forehead for the world to see and gets to read about how it's a crime 
>that he was let out so soon and that he should be made to suffer more on 
>a local mailing list.
>
>I don't know that it went down that way, but I don't know that it didn't 
>
>go down that way.  I, personally, would rather have more facts before I 
>condemn this guy and rage about his lenient sentence.
>
>Paul
>
>Garrett Clevenger wrote:
>> Paul writes:
>>
>> "this law as it stands sounds to me like thought crime."
>>
>>
>> It's one thing to have fantasies about whatever, quite another to try 
>to sexually engage with someone you think is 13.
>>
>> This isn't a thought crime cause the guy actually went out of his mind 
>and out into the real world (even if it's a virtual computer world)
>>
>> This guy's a pedophile and should be locked up.
>>
>> I'm not a big supporter of entrapment mostly because it's probably 
>a waste of resources but at the same time this guy pled guilty to enticing a 13 
>year old.
>>
>> That's dangerous and unacceptable in our wired world.
>>
>> When I read this story in the paper I too thought the sentence was way 
>to light for this creep.
>>
>>
>> I'll hesitatingly give you a Stegner story that may give you an idea 
>of Stegner:
>>
>> 3 years ago, we brought our baby to a restaurant after he was born. He 
>was sitting in his car seat in the restaurant when up walked a guy who asked if 
>he could hold him. I said sure while my wife had a horrified look on her face.  
>I guess I wasn't as cautious as I should have been letting a stranger pick up 
>our baby.
>>
>> The guy walked outside with our baby. My wife ran after him and asked for 
>her baby back.
>>
>> It turned out the guy was Stegner.  His wife came up later to apologize 
>for him and said he really likes kids.
>>
>> It was one thing to want to hold a baby, quite another to leave the restaurant 
>with him.  We were all taken back by this and wondered why a judge, someone who 
>probably sees all kinds of creepy things, would be so thoughtless as to think leaving 
>the restaurant with someone else's baby wouldn't freak the parents out.
>>
>> I don't know Stegner, but that incident left me wondering about his 
>judging capabilities.  Seeing his sentencing reaffirms that.
>>
>> Garrett Clevenger
>>
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