Thursday, November 27, 2008

Teen girl sentenced to life of misery for blow job.

Wendy Whitaker is listed as a dangerous sex offender. She has lost control of her own life as politicians in Georgia created a series of laws meant to harass her for the rest of her life.

Under state law she is required to register as a sex offender. As such she is forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of any place where children may congregate. But the problem is that this requirement makes it almost impossible to find a home.

Police officials have told Whitaker that they intend to forcibly remove her from her home by Thanksgiving. Land of the free? Sure, right! Happy Thanksgiving. She and her husband bought the home not realizing that a church ran an unadvertised day care center within the l,000 foot limit.

Let us clarify what makes Whitaker this dangerous sex offender so that she is under constant state harassment. Her “offense” took place twelve years ago. She was in high school, a sophomore to be precise. She had oral sex with a boy from her own class and a teacher caught them. He was just a few days short of 16-years-of-age and she had just turned 17 a few days before herself. In the Theocratic State of Georgia that made her a pedophile and him a victim. Worse, she was guilty, according to state law, of sodomy. The boy, who instigated the act had no charges as he was defined as the “victim”.

Like most high school students Wendy saw her classmate as being her own age and she had no idea that sex was illegal. In the world of politically determined morality she was an adult and he was a mere child. So she was guilty of sodomy with a child. For that high school sex she will be harassed and face potential execution by a vigilante (her photo and address is posted on-line by the sex gestapo) for the rest of life.

Whitaker and her husband had scrupulously researched the area before purchasing the house to make sure it fit with the zealous zoning regulations imposed by the state on all “sex offenders”. While her “crime” had nothing to do with small children the state doesn’t give a damn. The purpose of the law is to inflict pain on people for having sex in ways that the moral Christian politicians find offensive. (There are 3,500 children in Washington state alone who have been forced to register a sex offenders for life.)

The God-fearing Republicans who are destroying Georgia with their big government solutions have a new law in the works. House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, a Republican of course and the former leader of “Christian Coalition”, wants to expand the zoning requirements to 10,000 feet. That would supposedly make the entire state off-limits to most registered sex offenders. And sex offenders can, as this case once again proves, be nothing more than randy teenagers violating the moral laws imposed by religious-inspired, power-hungry third-rate politicians like Keen.

One Georgia legislator admitted that the law he voted for is causing problems without solving any. But he confessed that he doesn’t care: “Sex offenders are the most reviled people in society. They’re one step above terrorists, there’s no political downside to cracking down on these folks.” That includes folk like Wendy Whitaker. Give the man credit, he admitted that his only concern is whether his vote helps his political career or not, not whether it is right or decent, just whether it is politically expedient.

Sheriff Thomas Brown of DeKalb County says these laws make it harder for him to protect the public. His office mapped the locations in the county which are pinpoints for the center of the new zoning restrictions. He says that he found that there is not a single location in his entire county where RSO’s can live. He says this law “will force people to go underground, and not because they’re dangerous sexual predators but because they have no place else to go. Thousands of these “offenders” in Georgia alone are described as “having consensual sex when they were teenagers, or for lesser crimes such as flashing, peeping through windows and sexual battery, which often translates into inappropriate touching.” One such individual was a college student who, when drunk, groped a woman at a party.

Consider also that the such “offenders” are often ordered to remain within a specific area and then equally forbidden to live anywhere within that area. The law thus restricts people to a geographic location where they are forbidden to have a residence by other laws. In some cities people are relegated to walking the streets at night since if they sleep in a location after dark that is considered a residence. So they sleep at home during the day and wander the darkened streets at night. In California 20% of the “offenders” registered under a new law have been forced to wander as “transients” because of restrictions on their living space.

In Miami “sex offenders” were forced to live under a bridge. It was the only place they could find that met local zoning restrictions for them. CNN reported: “The Florida Department of Corrections says there are fewer and fewer places in Miami-Dade Country where sex offenders can live because the county has some of the strongest restrictions against this kind of criminal in the country. Florida’s solution: house the convicted felons under a bridge that forms one part of the causeway.”

One expert on treating sex offenders, Dr. Gene Abel, is baffled by the laws. He says “It’s rather common knowledge that you want to reduce the stress on sex offenders because the greater the stress, the greater the risk.” Contrary to the claims of the sex hysterics, offenders can have very low recidivism rates especially when in treatment and in a stress free environment. What these laws do is deny them the very sort of environment they need to avoid reoffending. In other words, the Christianist politicians are actually increasing the likelihood of reoffending. Of course, these morons are doing it for the sake of the children.

You may remember the case of teacher Julie Amero, which we have blogged about. She was the teacher who opened a computer at the school where she was a substitute teacher only to find pop-up windows for porn sites filling the screen. She tried to shut them down but the more she tried the more that opened until she finally pulled the plug. Because some students caught glimpses of the screen she was being prosecuted as a potential sex offender.

Experts proved that the computer at the school was infected and that Amero had no control over the problem. Prosecutors didn’t care and continued to pursue felony charges against the woman, wanting to incarcerate her for her “offense”. In court the prosecutors only agreed to drop the felony charges if she submitted to their legal blackmail and pled guilty to a charge of “disorderly conduct”. Her disorderly conduct opening the computer the school provided her. She was also forced to surrender her teaching license. Even though it was later found that the computer was infected “local officials, police and state prosecutors were unwilling to admit that a mistake may have been made...” The New London County State’s Attorney, Michael Regan, says “I have no regrets.” He also says that he is still ready to try her again if he could. As for his poor victim, Julie Amero “has been hospitalized for stress and heart problems since her conviction.”

Amero was another victim of the same sort of hysteria pushed by Right-wing fundamentalists that almost destroyed the life of teenager Matt Bandy. Born-again Republican prosecutor Andrew Thomas, in Maricopa County, Arizona, is a crazed fanatic on morals issues. He tried to send the teen to prison for life because illegal images were found to have infected his family’s computer. Experts testified that the boy did not seek out the images or place them there but that they were stored their remotely via infections on the computer. Thomas didn’t care and only lost the case because the boy’s parents spent a vast sum of money protecting their son from the maniacal prosecutor. In the end Thomas vainly tried to force the boy to become a registered sex offender for the “crime” of having looked at a Playboy magazine with a schoolmate.

Then, after Thomas and his crew of religious fanatics, were unable to actually convict the boy for anything one of their crew, a disgusting woman named Rachel Alexander, went out of her way to publicly smear the boy by insinuating he was a pedophile. Alexander, who is associated with theocratic fundamentalist extremists, wrote a long, vicious, and deceitful attack on this boy which she published at Fox News. This disgusting woman says the only reason she and her boss lost the case was because of a “media disinformation campaign. In her article she lied about the facts of the case. For a full discussion of how Rachel Alexander dishonestly smeared this boy go here. But she is one of the most disgusting conservatives infesting the legal system today.

UPDATE: A local judge has put a halt to efforts to evict Wendy Whitaker from her home, at least for the time being. So when do the big government conservatives start bitching about "activist judges"? I suspect they think any judge who protects people from violation of their rights are "activist judges".

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