I received a suicide note today. Many emails come in from readers who are angry, outraged, at their treatment by the system and express their rage at one or more participants. This was completely different, and important enough that I take a few minutes from real work to write about it.
The writer doesn’t ask me for anything, other than the hope that I might eventually find time to tell his story. He writes that it’s difficult, but that he’s already dead.
He was charged with internet solicitation, for going to a gay chat room where he was nabbed by police who didn’t agree with his preference. Despite paying good money for a lawyer, it ran dry and eventually he was offered a plea that included 15 days in jail, a $500 fine, 20 hours of community service and 3 years probation. He was told that his felony would be reduced and expunged when he completed his probation. He was told to take the deal, so he did. Things didn’t work out the way he was told they would.
I wake up and cant believe whats happen . this has been going on now for 8 1/2 years i have no job i am broke i have nothing i am going to lose my home my parents pay for my bills but when you havnt been to a medical Doctor in 7 years or a dentist my teeth are rotting . I lost my medical insurance when i was fired from my job. my savings are gone.
i cant form a relationship because who wants to be with a felon and a registered sex offender ?? I have lost friends i had . Now they changed how you have to register so you have to pay for a drivers license every year and on top of that they charged $75 a year just for the privilege of being a registered sex offender which they raised to $ 125 which i don’t have the money to pay for i don’t have any money because i was fired from my job and am now unemployable I live off my parents who can not afford it. my life is a pure hell. i am 10 years older now and unemployed. all my savings which i had saved for retirement is GONE! but i want people to know …
He wants people to know that he didn’t do it. He never hurt anyone. He never would hurt anyone. He doesn’t ask for any help in fixing his life, but only that someone knows why he took his life.
All of us, myself included, talk about the law in a theoretical sense, disconnected from a hard recognition of the human consequences. No doubt there are people who can explain, inch by inch, line by line, how and why everything that happened here was grounded in good intentions, for the purpose of protecting people from harm. We know that harm is caused in the process, but we shrug it off as collateral damage in the war on crime. We are willing to suffer the damage to some in the name of protecting others. We know that some innocent people will be caught in the process, but we close our eyes and argue that it can’t be helped. It’s just the price we pay.
Except we don’t really pay it. The writer of this email paid it, after losing his job, his savings, his life. He served 12 days of a 15 day jail sentence, a trivial sentence in itself, but only the prelude to a nightmare.
Lawyers complain about the misery of their lives, having to go back to the trenches and suffer the indignities of fighting against the tide. Oh, how hard it is. But they go home at night and have dinner with their families.
To the judges, prosecutors, legislators and yes, defense lawyers, who support and enable the criminal justice system, this is your success story. You’ve achieved everything the criminal justice system exists to achieve. You got your conviction and exacted everything from him that you possibly could. In your zeal to make absolutely certain that no one can ever escape your control, this is what you’ve created. Are you happy? Is this what you hoped to accomplish?
If the writer of this email takes his life, you will have exceeded your goal. You will have imposed the death penalty, on top of the 12 days to which he was sentenced and the life of misery. You should be very proud of yourselves. Your system worked like a charm, and society has one less person to worry about. He will never harm anyone, even though he may never have harmed anyone before. It’s a success story.
I don’t know what’s become of the writer of the email. I have taken action with regard to it, but haven’t heard anything further as yet.
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There are many, many of us who recognize that this is what the system does to people. We are lucky to go home to our families at the end of the day, but as one criminal defense lawyer who was detained by the police on a faulty ID will tell you, it doesn’t mean we are immune from being victims of this same system.
My little world has been rocked by the middle of the night phone calls from friends “the FBI is at my house” and I’ve watched lives destroyed for no reason and been unable to do much to stop it. We do need to get ourselves up and keep fighting another day. It’s really a selfish profession. Don’t we do it so that someday we might be able to save ourselves?
And I pray for this man. The suffering is unending.
Recognizing from a distance, from the safety of our homes and law offices, even from a few hours wrongly handcuffed in a police cruiser, isn’t the same as having your world destroyed. We do our jobs for many reasons, some good and some less than good, but we should never have the hubris to believe we suffer along with our clients.
Addendum: While I know that you’ve had some personal experiences that allow you to have a deeper understanding, let’s distinguish between what you’ve been through personally from what criminal defense lawyers go through generally. Individuals may get it. As a group, CDLs give ourselves too much credit.
Thanks for posting this.
Getting someone on the sex-offender registry seems to be the preferred means of ruining someone’s life for law-enforcement for what is in most cases a temporary infraction. This is even better than having them convicted for a low-level drug crime. For conviction for a sex offense usually entails lifetime public notice on a sex-offender registry; which the public is learning more and more about and which law-enforcement agencies are refining and publlicizing. In the eyes of many in law-enforcement, this is about as good as it gets. It’s the most efficient, in most cases permanent, stigmitization of individuals they regard as undesirable with a one-time arrest.
People are not arrested and tagged as sex offenders for simply visiting a gay chat room – he was soliciting an underage sex partner. When he says that prosecutors disagreed with his “preference,” what he isn’t saying is that his “preference” is a fancy for underage boys.
I have no doubt that the guy’s life has been no picnic, and I sympathize with his plight. Mandatory sex offender registration has undoubtedly ruined many lives, extending their sentences to a de facto life term. But the fact that this guy still refers to his desire to have sex with children as a “preference” makes me think that the registration requirement was appropriate.
He didn’t. That was my synthesis, yet you’re sufficiently certain of your assumption to justify his life and death. The 15 day sentence aspect of the plea, by the prosecutor who knew the case, doesn’t dissuade your being able to slough off his suicide as an unfortunate outcome. How special of you. Don’t let his death bother you too much.
SHG, I don’t see how my comment attempts to justify his death. If anything, it was focused entirely on justifying the registration requirement. If someone is sentenced to 90 days for meth possession, and that person chooses to commit suicide, arguments directed to the validity of the 90 day sentence are not arguments justifying the self-inflicted suicide.
I hope he doesn’t/hasn’t followed through with his suicide plan. But I’m not going to treat this as the great miscarriage of justice that you’re making it out to be. You talk about prosecutorial discretion with regard to the 15 day sentence but fail to include that part of that sentence was that he register as a sex offender. In other words, the prosecutor “who knew the case” agreed to let him serve just 15 days *only if* he agreed to register as a sex offender. Don’t you think it’s a bit dishonest to leave that part out?
I guess I’m a bit unclear as to the focus of this article. Originally I thought it was an indictment of the sex offender registry requirement as punishing people beyond their sentence. But judging by your response to my comment, that can’t be it. Is your point that if a person chooses to commit suicide then his sentence was unfair or unjust?
I suspect James’s thinking is the norm and the reaction not surprising at all.
Aside from your continuing to inject your assumptions (“the prosecutor “who knew the case” agreed to let him serve just 15 days *only if* he agreed to register as a sex offender”), you’ve just fundamentally missed the point that registration as a sex offender, which is not a punishment (so sayeth every court everywhere) makes the return to a normal life an impossibility for most “sex offenders,” which includes a laundry list of offenses that have little or nothing to do with sex and more often than not involve no threat to any person.
Is this a new concept to you? Do you seriously shrug off the aspect of making it institutionally impossible for an entire “class” of offenders to ever return to a normal life as just an unfortunate part of the deal?
This is truly a sad circumstance. I have no words.
I thought I was being clear in stating my belief that mandatory sex offender registration is often unjust. Obviously not. Either that or you’re not reading all of what I write.
You’re right, I am assuming facts. It’s because you’re not being entirely forthright with your knowledge of the case. Worse, you’re going as far as to intentionally obscure the details. And that’s fine, if you think that that the details are unimportant to your argument. But I have to tell you, unless you’re someone who believes that sex offender registration is always wrong, in every case, then the details do matter. You’d do better to pick an “18 year old has consensual sex with a 15 year old” case to illustrate your point.
My initial comment was only “IF he solicited children for sex, then I think that the registration requirement was justified IN THIS CASE, and in this case alone.” You may disagree with me, but don’t treat my clearly directed statement as a blanket statement. I’m not trying to craft a policy here.
I didn’t miss your point that sex offender registration makes return to a normal life impossible. In fact, I think it’s an injustice, which is why I commented in the first place. I’m all for “pay your debt to society and let that be the end of it.”
Except — and this is where I think you disagree — I think that the high likelihood of recidivism in child sex cases, biological considerations, the rights of the public to know about potential dangers to their children, and other factors, make sex offender registration appropriate in child sex cases. Even in solicitation-with-no-action cases. I realize that it amounts to a punishment to the offender. But that’s not the intent of the law. I know, I know, you’re going to say that you hope I’m happy with these grotesque “unintended consequences.” Believe it or not, I’m not. It’s a very sad situation. There are no good answers. But at the same time, it was situation created when the offender chose to solicit a child for sex. Society didn’t create the situation, but it has to deal with it. As with all things in life and law, it’s a balancing act. In some cases, the balance swings to the public.
More of these multi-part comments. First, the post isn’t for someone to second guess the severity of the offense, which is why I don’t parse the details. It is more than sufficient to state that the writer never harmed anyone and the plea was a sentence to 15 days in jail. That’s more than sufficient for anyone, unless their inclined to knee-jerk condemnation, to realize that this wasn’t a case where anyone was touched, raped, harmed, molested, anything.
Your assumption to the contrary reflects nothing other than your rush to justify SORA. From this we’re to understand that you really believe it to be unjust? Doesn’t wash.
You then hedge your unjust but just argument with the old recidivism argument, except if there was no first time, there’s no recidivism. Your response, there had to be fire because there was smoke, is nonsense. No, there doesn’t have to be, and no, it’s not a fair assumption to make. The assumption belies only your rush to justify the “unjust” registration.
And finally, yes, there is a good answer. The sentence imposed by a judge is the only sentence a defendant should serve. Once served, a defendant has paid his debt to society, end of story. No, there is nothing to balance, no ongoing right of society to be protected in perpetuity from inchoate crimes that justifies the creation of the underclass of sex offenders.
My heart just aches for this person and his family and loved ones. I pray he did not go through with ending his life.
I’ve never been personally involved with the criminal justice system, but I did spend more than a year in litigation when a social worker with a bias against GLBT parents decided to try to stop my spouse and I from adopting our foster daughter.
We were lucky in many ways. I am a paralegal, with more knowledge of and comfort working in the legal system than most people have, and with significant professional experience working in the juvenile dependency system. We had the resources to retain a good attorney. We had the full support and backing of our family and friends. We had a judge who, in the end, realized that the case was about bias and prejudice and not about our fitness as parents. Our daughter had a lawyer who really CARED about her welfare and who stepped up when it counted to advocate on our behalf. And despite that, the year we spent fighting was absolutely the most difficult, painful, traumatic experience I have ever endured.
I can’t begin to imagine how much worse it must be when the sanctions about to descend upon you are criminal, when you don’t have the resources and knowledge to make truly informed decisions, when you don’t have a community of support behind you.
Don’t get me wrong. I am an absolute believer in the justice system in which I work. But as cases like this one show, the system isn’t perfect. Though I’d like to think that the guilty pay a just price for their misdeeds and the innocent are in the end vindicated, as my spouse and I were, I recognize that this is not always so. Sometimes the system does fail people, and when it does, the results can be deeply tragic.
Please keep us posted on this story. In the meanwhile, this man and his loved ones will be in my thoughts and prayers.
One positive outcome doesn’t make for a good system. Most of us here are lawyers. The system sucks. If you believe in it, maybe you aren’t as knowledgeable about it as you think.
We don’t publish the sex offenders’ register over here, or allow members of the public to inquire whether individuals are on it or not.
Also, the registration period is relatively short in minor cases, the determination of which is simply related to the length of any sentence passed.
There is much media support for ‘Sarah’s Law’ over here, which would allow parents to be aware of those who are registered in their area. This is an example of why the balance should remain at least where it is.
Thanks Scott, as always.
From across the pond.
Scott, please let me clarify: I didn’t say it was a good and perfect system, by any means. Like most systems, the American legal system is flawed and imperfect. I’m not a Pollyannaish little Ms. Merry Sunshine. But what system would you suggest as a better alternative?
I’m not trying to be glib here, I’m really not. What would be a better system, on a macro level, than the justice system we have?
Also, please note, that I view this as a separate question from the one of whether sex offender registration laws are a good idea. I happen to think they’re not, for the same reason I don’t really think mandated child abuse reporting laws work: the really important stuff gets lost in the noise. The real child abuse reports vanish in the sea of spurious bull**** that gets reported because the law criminalizes failure to report true instances of abuse and provides no disincentive for false or unclear ones. Likewise, sex offender registries are, in my view, of minimal value considering how few cases of child molestation are committed by strangers. (I was a volunteer rape crisis advocate for 7 years, and am a survivor of a childhood sexual assault, so I know this from firsthand experience.) No sex offender registry is going to prevent nice old Uncle Nick from molesting his granddaughter, or whatever.
Bully for us. The system is designed to destroy lives and it does. America, once known as the land of second chances, now offers them only to select members of the honored classes.
Eliot Spitzer can come back. So, it seems, can Tiger Woods. Roman Polanski’s a closer call. Clinton managed it, but he defined himself as the Comeback Kid.
But they’re the powerful and the exceptions. Even among the rich and powerful, it’s no sure thing (viz John Edwards). For the ordinary person, it’s hopeless. And of course it’s not just sex offenses and not just registration. Nor is it limited to the factually innocent.
We destroy to show how powerful we are. And that we’re better. We’re not. Shame on us.
It’s a large part of what gets me up in the morning. And why I (we, all of us in this business) should look in the mirror every day and thank whoever or whatever deity or fate or chance we thank that it’s not our necks in the dock.
Kinda makes your chest swell with pride to know you’re an American.
AAP, you ask the wrong question when ask what a better system would be. Our system would be pretty good, if it happened the way we pretend it does. The problem is that we’re long on platitudes and short on principles. Courts say all the right things as they do the opposite. When the facts don’t support the decision, they disappear. When the black letter law doesn’t give the right answer, create an exception. When the case isn’t all that important, use some rhetorical trick to eke out the outcome of choice. Just saying “denied” in a loud and clear voice is usually enough to do the trick.
For a site that implores users to keep it “civil and respectful” you sure spend a lot of time attacking your commenters. Sorry that my comments are “multi-part.” In the future I will try to limit my musings to witty one-liners and zingers.
Again, the judge sentenced the man to 15 days plus sex offender registration, not just 15 days. Had the sex offender registry option not been available, the judge may have imposed a longer sentence. You may not like SORA, but you can’t deny that its existence plays a role in pleas, in sentencing, and in parole. And this guy accepted the sentence, complete with registration requirement, when he accepted the deal. I agree with you that once a sentence is served, the debt is paid. But you can’t pick and choose the parts of the sentence that you like while omitting those you don’t.
I don’t attack commenters, I attack ignorance. Where it appears is beyond my control. As for “civil and respectful,” that’s a message to guests, like you, on my blawg. You comment because I allow you to comment. I hope that’s clear.
As to your next point, no one is sentenced to being on the Sex Offender Registry. No one. Ever. There’s no picking or choosing. That’s just wholesale ignorance. Adding to it, he was sentenced about a decade ago, when SORA was new, no one understood what it entailed, no one was clear who would be subject to it and what would happen with it. As stated in the post, he understood that after the completion of his probation, his offense would be reduced to a misdemeanor and his felony expunged. The law changed in the interim. Did you completely miss that part while you were busy with your flight of fantasy persecution?
The problem with your musings, James, is that you’ve got no idea what your talking about, yet you decided to take a post like this to display your ignorance. I pray you’re not a lawyer, and if you are, that you do real estate or some other work where you can’t hurt people.
Holy Christ. I kind of know how this guy feels, although – that I know of with any certainty – I’ve never been accused of anything like that. You’d think a person would know, wouldn’t you? However, just as SHG posted about vicious or untrue statements floating around the internet about him, vicious lies can float from mouth to ear, from phone to phone, from home to home with the subject never being the wiser.
This post jarred a memory. I recall going to a job – this was during the year between my two 1l years at different schools – and the homeowners’ came out to speak to me, both husband and wife, and they were grief stricken. I did not think that they chose to share this with me for any particular reason, I presumed that they told the story to everyone and anyone that would listen.
The story was that their 19 year old son had sex with his 16 year old girlfriend and her parents had made a criminal complaint. There was something in the story about how the girlfriend’s parents had waited until the son’s 19th birthday to file the complaint. The son was now in prison and was going to be labeled a sex offender. There was nothing I could say, no words of comfort that I could offer. I realized that there were no words anybody could say that would be a comfort; life was over for their son. Well, the girlfriend’s parents were successful.
About three years later something happened to me. The law was non-responsive. I attempted to gather some information from the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement [LCLE]; my initial inquiry was in the form of a letter. I received a telephone call from a female employee of the LCLE. All this woman wanted to talk about was men getting in knife fights and men having sex with 12 year old boys [she was quite specific about the age]. Try as I might I could not steer her away from these subjects.
It’s a hysteria and this hysteria has been going for more than 30 years. Perhaps its been longer – I’m counting from the ‘repressed memory’ fad of around or about the late 70’s.
It actually makes me sick that our country has gone from a justice system that actually sought out the truth, to, what I call, a “CRIMINAL SYSTEM OF JUST US”! It seems that conviction rates and votes are all that matter anymore.
A very close friend recently had a break-up and in the aftermath sent some angry text messages. Now he is facing a felony harassment charge, has lost his job, and is looking at a potential 2 year sentence if he can’t beat it. He has no savings so in addition to the danger of losing the home he bought last year, he can’t afford a (good) attorney and is going to have to play the PD lottery.
He has a boatload of evidence that should win in court, but my advice to him was to NOT go to trial without requesting a jury trial, and definitely get a PD. (He wanted to do it pro se, believing naively that the truth would be enough.) I still think the system is going to screw him into a felony conviction for a handful of angry text messages, and ruin his life. He works in the healthcare industry, so I’m pretty sure a felony on his record would raise the bar for a new job to unattainable heights.
I was arrested on a trumped up harassment charge based on a news release I sent out to someone’s neighbors and others–false statements by the one making the complaint and the police detective writing it up which I could prove false resulting in a dismissal before trial. My situation sounds similar in that I represented myself pro se with the counsel of a PD. One line of defense for me was there was no intention in committing a crime. This was relatively plain since I included my own phone number in the news release. Your case sounds more ambiguous–but this may be one line of defense for you. Relating to the dismissal, I had to agree to a statement that I would not do anything which might be construed as harassment relating to the individual making the complaint for one year. This was suggested by a sensible judge who realized that I was not intending to harass; but in my case to expose or act as a whistleblower. The PD said I should write up the statement I would then agree to and sign–which I did. A day or two after the year was up, I sent out another news release to professional organizations the individual belonged to. The individual did not file a second complaint. It sounds to me that whatever you did was momentary and impulsive, but not necessarily criminal. The main intent of the one making the complaint is probably to get you to back off–and if you can indicate that you will do this–really do this–there may be a way out for you.
I’m still unclear why your belief is so absolute in a system that you admit to be flawed. Kind of like saying “I’m 100% certain that this will probably happen.”
Stories that reach this level of tragedy are the kind that I’m ashamed to admit, I have to willfully ignore or forget about or I will not be able to do my job. The fear that I might allow this result for a client would cripple me.
Sarah’s Law rolled out throughout England and Wales today…
We’ll see what happens.