mymanswoman,

I am very sorry that you are going through this mess. Hopefully, things will be more stable once he signs a plea.

You said, " The prosecutor wanted to add 24 more counts and was going to do so if my husband didn't take the plea and went to trial."

This situation is called "judicial blackmail," where a prosecutor basically tells the defendant, "My plea might not be very good, but you either take the 10 years or go to trial and receive 50 or 60 years.

On the surface it seems as if the prosecutor is offering a plea, but he's not---not really. His "plea" is in the form of an ultimatum, which he knows your husband cannot afford not to accept. The advantage is still on the DAs side.

If your husband exercised his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial before his peers, he would be severely punished by the jury when they found him guilty. You can bet your life savings that somehow the DA would get a few of the more raunchy images of children in front of a jury to see. Once they saw a few of the images, the emotion would take over, they would be angry as hell at your husband, and he might never see the free world again.

Your husband could exercise his right to go to trial, but if he did he might well be punished and lose his freedom until the day he died.

Prosecutors know what they are doing. In these cases, they play on emotions as much as evidence, especially in a backward state such as Arkansas----or Oklahoma. Remember you are in the Bible Belt, where conservative nut cases rule.

Threatening to add 24 more counts is just another method the DA uses to enhance and strengthen his position so the defendant will accept the plea on his---the DAs---terms.

You said, " Finkenbinder, when he was hired, wanted all of the drug cases, all of the sex offender cases and any other case against children."

He is what defense attorneys call a "hired gun," much like the gunfighter in the Wild West who is brought in to kill someone. Like the hired gun in the movies, this DA has no soul, little character, and his job is to do one thing----garner a conviction at all costs.

The hired gun in the Wild West was paid with cash; these DAs are paid with the assurance that they will get re-elected.

You said, " It is utterly disgusting and I wish enough people in this state would pull their heads out of their asses and wake up and realize what is happening and speak up."

Well, they won't. Arkansas is a very conservative state and unfortunately, the majority of citizens agree with the manner in with the prosecutor is conducting himself.

You said, " Ellington and Finkenbinder are obviously getting their marching orders from the Attorney General who happens to be a right wing nut job woman who ran and got elected on the platform of targeting internet predators and locking them away for life-including my husband."

Unfortunately, there are many "right wing nut jobs" in the Bible Belt states. Prosecutors are politicians first and fair-mindedness is the last thing on their minds. Most of them are really a bunch of repugnant individuals.

Of course, 10 years is excessive. Giving out a sentence of 10 years in prison for looking at some naughty pictures of underage children is the height of ignorance. This is all about politics and nothing else.

Politics has put our criminal justice system on life support.

Most people rarely think about sex offenders or the registry until them or one of their loved ones is snared up in this quicksand of nonsense; then they see the light and understand fully the rotten justice system we have.

God Bless America---Land of the fee.

rewdiazepam

I'd like to know if any other's in this forum have experienced " Judicial Blackmail" by prosecutors and what their experiences were like. I also found out this last week that the Detectives on this case suspected me and tried to get my husband to roll on me. The only law that I've ever broken was smoking weed. That's non existent now. The reason they suspected me was because of some video that my husband took of me when we were experimenting with an open marriage and I was with another man. He deleted that video, but somehow they retrieved it and suspected that I was complicit in the crimes that my husband did.

Arkansas is full of hate filled, intolerant, repressed bible thumper hypocrites.

The concept of "judicial blackmail" has been going on for a very long time now, but it has worsened in the past twenty years or so because some of the possible punishments for sex crimes have become so ridiculous and draconian. These harsh punishments have given the DA more room to work with in this area.

I was offered a plea for five years and I said "no thanks." The possible penalty for first degree rape was a life sentence, but I knew the jury would not give me a life sentence. When I was convicted, juries were much less likely to hand out sentences in the hundreds of years.

I went to trial, lost, and received 20 years. My situation is a lot different than one in which the DA says, "Take his plea for five years or go to trial and possibly get 60 years." I only had one count and many of the sex crime situations today involve multiple counts, which again, works in favor of this "judicial blackmail" theory I have.

Prosecutors have always been people without a soul, but years ago, they did not try to "stick it" to a defendant as they do now.

I had a friend in prison who was charged with masturbating in front of his two children. It was in a divorce and custody dispute and I have no doubt that he was innocent, but the DA told him if he went to trial on the four counts he would ask for 80 years; but he could plea for five years. He ran out of money and did not want to rely on a PD, so he was "blackmailed" and accepted the plea.

Nowadays, it is too much a roll of the dice to go to trial on most sex charges, especially CP charges or charges against a minor child. Going to trial is how defendants receive these 100 year sentences as they stack the charges and run them consecutively.

It does not surprise me at all what the detectives did to you. Most detectives are morally bankrupt and will do things like that. The detectives in my case tried to tell the DA that I had molested my children repeatedly. When my daughter spoke with them and told them that was untrue, they came back with, "Well, he probably plied you with drugs and you would not remember it." It is things like this that make me hate detectives with a passion that you would not believe.

Too often, the upper echelons of law enforcement try to create crimes rather than investigate the ones they already have. No doubt, the detective was licking his chops in an attempt to make a big deal out of your video, which was nothing. But he certainly tried to make it into a crime.

You said, " Arkansas is full of hate filled, intolerant, repressed bible thumper hypocrites."

Truer words were never spoken, but it is not just confined to Arkansas. Most of the southern Bible Belt states---states with conservative principles--- have their share of the religious nut cases and fanatics also.

rewdiazepam

My son signed a "plea deal" here in Western New York State, he got 10 years federal, with no talk of early release. He was told by both the DA and his PD that going to trial would be a big mistake, the jury would be shown all the images he had and he would never see the outside world again. He was pretty much told the same thing in Montana, sign the deal because trial would be a huge mistake. That a jury would lock him up and throw away the key.

While I certainly agree with Rew there have been brought spots here and there. There have been a few recent cases with statutory rape involved that have come back with jury nullification but those are few and far between. There have also been some recent cases of sr where a guilty verdict came back but the sentencing judge ordered only probation and no prison time. Of course all these cases were statutory and not CP so I'm sure that played into them as well.

My husband was also subject to "judicial blackmail" when his case went federal after the state of MO couldn't come up with enough to bring forth charges. He was using limewire to find music that wasn't easily available (he would purchase his music if he could find them on iTunes or amazon, limewire was his last choice). Well one of his downloads wasn't what he thought it was; and eventually the cops were at the door and took away all of the computers and digital storage in the house. Fast-forward a couple of years: MO dismissed their case; but the Feds picked it up. The offer to my husband was to plea guilty to a class C felony of possession of CP or go to trial and the charge of distribution would be tacked on among others; which carries a 5-year mandatory minimum. It was a very difficult decision, but he decided to peal out. He's been in custody for almost 2 years. The one thing that really pissed me off at the plea hearing was when the judge asked my husband if he was coerced into his decision to plea guilty (the plea bargain didn't count as coercion though).