Very astute concepts she is putting out. I agree with what she is saying, before someone gets into a tizzy about it, listen through the whole video, I can see some people getting angry at the first 2 minutes of it lol.

She says that if everyone who claims they are innocent was actually innocent then there is complete miscarriage of justice. I think some people here would rather believe in the innocence of offenders over the system correctly doling out justice (though some are factually innocent). I think this is the same reason people are trying to minimize the crimes by saying it is possible to get on the registry for index crimes that people do not see as registerable ie urinating in public, romeo and Juliet etc. This is to try and boost the image of sex offenders, when really most people are not on the registry for such offenses.

But she goes on to say that society's picture of sex offenders is warped that most sex offenders can correctly say, I am not the monster society thinks I am. I remember going through therapy and telling my therapist, I am not a rapist. I am not abducting children raping and murdering them. Why does society treat me the same way as they would treat someone who did that? How is that fair? And my therapist looked at me, laughed, and said well if that was the case you would be locked up not on probation. But the minimization of sex crimes by sex offenders and by people who love and support sex offenders is just a natural reaction to society's overreaction and maximization of the index crimes that landed us on the registry. Society says once a sex offender always a sex offender and there is no hope for change. Put in that context I am starting to see why the urinating in public and romeo and Juliet defense to the registry is used.

I think she correctly points out that reintegration is in the best interest of our society, and that it cannot happen if all are not complicit in it. She says that society not willing to accept and help sex offenders change is the same problem but in reverse that sex offenders have of not willing to own up to their crimes.

I think she is brilliant. I also think she gave in this clip an accurate, yet disturbing picture of how sex offenders are treated in society. She says everything I have been thinking for 6 months, but says it in such a more eloquent way than I ever could.

Thank you for posting this Echo!

Independent has pretty much summed up everything I was thinking but couldn't put it properly into words.

Thank you Echo!

Thank you Independent!

:)

The video is kinda painting with a broad brush both on the SO side and even regular citizen side... Either that or I am not like most folks... I earned every speeding ticket I ever got. In fact I am lucky I was able to keep my driver's license a few of those times as I was going fast enough for them to just yank them right then and there. I won't deny that at all..

But I KNOW I am a good person. I know this by the kind of karma that comes back to me. I know this because I think before I act and I think of other's most of the time, before myself because it is polite and the right thing to do. Especially since I know that I am probably luckier than many out there.

I don't blame the victims. I don't think any of the SOs I have met blame their victims either. I think there is more pity for their victims, even those that are falsely accused, as my husband was. I have no love for the now young woman that put my husband on a list for life because she wanted attention from her parents. Karma will come to level the playing field for them at some point. But I certainly don't blame her for what she did anymore, because it is a testament to how dysfunctional that family really was from my father-in-law and all his siblings, one of which was the mother of my husband's 'victim'. The more I learned about the family's past the more I realized that my husband was lucky to get out alive. We have little to no contact with anyone from his father's side of the family, except his grandmother, she is the only one we exchange Christmas cards with, which is the extent of the contact.

So my take away from that vid, Is everyone really that dishonest even with themselves? I am no PollyAnna but DANG... really? people are really just a bunch of liars?

That's her opinion. Unless she's convicted of a sex offense she'll never understand what's really going on.

I have been and I agree with what she is saying, I personally worked through similar feelings in my therapy.

I agree with the psychologist and she made some very good points.

As far as the guilt or innocence of offenders, I will say that there are definite miscarriages of justice in which stone cold offenders are convicted.

In prison I tutored during the day, and worked in the law library at night. Over the years I read several transcripts of trials which dealt with underage females and they were just a mess----just a terrible mess. I suspect that some of these defendants were innocent, but were convicted anyway because of two main reasons----1) the emotional aspect of the trial in which an underage person's teary testimony just kills the defendant in many cases. The jury begins to feel sorry for the child---especially if she can put on a good act--- and at that point, the evidence, or lack thereof, does not matter, and 2) many juries will convict because they do not want to take the chance of letting a potential child molester go free.

Some may have been guilty, but they were not convicted on any evidence as there was none----except the testimony of the young witness.

You would see the state's witnesses who just lied and could not keep their stories at trial straight from their story at the preliminary hearing. It was obvious that the witnesses and the complaining witness---the victim---were coached to say certain phrases----"I just don't know" or "I am so scared" or "I forgot"--- whenever the defense attorney brought up something that they could not explain.

I cannot count how many times my defense attorney, when their story was totally different at trial than it had been at the preliminary hearing, asked them, "Are you lying now or were you lying then at the preliminary hearing?" He never got a good answer.

What I found amazing is that the victims told a great story to the detectives in the beginning to get the charges filed, but they completely lost their memory during the trial. Strange. If something so traumatic happened, you would think they would remember at least SOMETHING.

And the sad thing is the kids are not usually to blame. It is usually an adult pushing the charges and the kid gets so far into the process that he cannot back out in order to save face. Then we have a shaky conviction.

But most defendants who go to trial or who are accused of sex crimes are guilty. The criminal justice system does get the conviction right most of the time, but there are definitely times when an innocent man is convicted.

rewdiazepam

When I said the witnesses completely lost their memories at trial, I did not mean that they did not have a story. They did, but their memory was faulty, as their story did not even come close to the story at preliminary hearing or the one they gave the detectives when they filled out the affidavit for the arrest warrant.

They did not just sit on the stand and say nothing. I did not mean to imply that.

rewdaizepam

Because of all the media & public sensationalism you can no longer get a fair trial... Period.

I don't know anyone who is actually gotten a trial, it's all stack up the charges and plead down to what the DA wants the charge to be in the first place.

I spent a good deal of time reading the testimony given to the Senate judicial sub committee on over-criminalization. It was extremely interesting about the different faction of the judicial system being eliminated with people not knowing the penalty for the crime before committing it and how so many are taking a plea bargain based on the threat of a possible much greater sentence if they exercise their judicial rights. It was an incredible eye opener for me. Wish I thought it would be for the judicial sub committee or Congress as well.

Another aspect that I thought was interesting was the only people that supported mandatory minimums were drug agents that said it was the only way to get people to turn other people in by threatening them with the long mandatory minimums.

Independent is right, they charge you with everything, tell you that you'll get 40 years unless you take this plea. That is why in pa it's the court of common pleas!

When I was working on inmates' cases in the law library in prison, I did find one thing interesting about inmates with sex crimes.

The ones who I thought were probably guilty would never talk about their case. They would give the law clerks only a minimal amount of information. But the ones I thought were innocent were mad as hell and their case is all they could talk about. Their anger often almost consumed them and it became almost an obsession, which of course, it not really healthy.

I often wondered if it was better to be guilty and accept your crime or be innocent and be so bitter that it was difficult to go on with your life.

That was my experience working with inmates with sex crimes.

rewdiazepam

Yeah it makes sense for people guilty of sex crimes to keep their head down and shut up in prison. In your experience Rew, obviously non-scientific and anecdotal, what percent of the prisoners in your estimation were innocent?

*prisoners convicted of a sex crime

By looking at transcripts over the years, I would say one out of 20 are stone cold innocent. Now that is only a guess. That would be about 5%. I am pretty damn close on that estimate, I believe.

I have been thinking back at the inmates over the years I helped with the sex crime cases and that is the figure I come up with. One out of ten is too high. Ten percent of the inmates in prison for sex crimes were not innocent, at least in my experience.

Just because a child could not tell the jury a good summarization of what happened did not necessarily mean an inmate was innocent, but there were cases in which her story was just incoherent PLUS there was no evidence. These cases make up the 5%.

Now please remember there were no child pornography or child solicitation charges back then, as there was no real internet until the latter part of my sentence and those two crimes were not prosecuted; at least I never saw a case of either charge, but I did do legal work on an inmate charged with "obscene material."

But there were a bigger percentage that were charged, went to trial and convicted of more counts or of more serious crimes than they actually committed. I don't know the percentage, but from reading the transcript and talking to the inmate, that is the impression I got.

Most people in prison are guilty. It might not be exactly what the state convicted them of, but they were complicit in the crime in some way. But there are definite miscarriages of justice and innocent men in prison.

Five percent may not sound like a lot, but most prisons in Oklahoma had a capacity of 1,000 inmates. That is still 50 innocent men serving time for a crime they did not commit.

rewdiazepam