23 "Does One Punishment Fit All Crimes?"

Does One Punishment Fit All Crimes?

I realize there are going to be a lot of different opinions on this article. Then again, I could be wrong. I personally am somewhat torn with my opinion because I have a 2 daughters, 3 grand daughters and 3 great-grand daughters and the man I am going to talk about is someone very close to me. I can’t imagine any of this happening with any of the “daughters” of mine and if it did I can’t imagine how I would react.

I have heard of a case where one offender had an affair with one of his 13 year old students and spent only 9 months in county jail. Then there was an offender that molested kids in a day care center where he worked and he did no prison or jail time at all. These were state level crimes and punished as such. The case I am going to talk about ended up as a federal crime because it started on the Internet and actually crossed state lines. The federal government has harsher punishments as you will see.

As this story unfolds, it starts out as innocent as you reading this article on this hub. I will refer to the man as JD all through the story. I will explain how this all went down without getting graphic or going into excessive detail. I will leave some to your imagination. Then after reading this you can comment on whether you feel he should have had the punishment he received compared to the two offenders I mentioned in paragraph 2. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending JD, he did deserve a punishment, but so did the other two. As a matter of fact, my opinion, they deserved even more and I feel JD’s was maybe a little more harsh than needed considering it was his first time of anything on his record. No one should go un-punished for any kind of sexual assault, even with consent if they are under age.

This story starts innocently at the keyboard of JD’s computer. He had met the first girl on a website (which I won’t name) offering to teach anyone general meditation. Before their first meditation together she e-mailed him a picture of herself telling him it was from her senior prom from about a year earlier. He took her through some relaxation exercises and then tested her suggestibility by asking her if she could feel him holding her hand. She told him she could. He told her he was holding her left hand. Now, the strange thing is, this hand had no fingers, only a thumb and that was the cause of a birth defect. But she said she could feel him holding that hand. After the first meditation he invited her to join him on a psychic site (again, no name of the site) and she did.

For the record, I have a full version of this story, but I am going to keep this as short as possible for the hub.

At this time I need to point out a fact about something in JD’s past. JD actually got his start with the meditation idea a few years earlier. He had a bad case of “night terrors” and he was helped a lot through a meditation program. Just so you have an idea why he was on a site offering to help people with this meditation program. He believed he could really help people because someone was able to help him.

OK, now back to the story.

The girl’s family was a member of a respected religious sect, respected by most anyway. She had 5 mothers and 30 plus siblings and one dad. JD was intrigued by this different lifestyle and the two of them talked quite extensively about it.

She moved to another state to be with her boyfriend and JD didn’t hear from her for 4 months. She informed JD that she broke up with her boyfriend over two items and moved back home. 1. The boyfriend was talking about living the polygamist lifestyle, which she wanted no part of. 2. The boyfriend stopped having sex with her.

This is when the conversations on the Internet began having sexual content. The two of them would share past sexual encounters and only because he knew she wasn’t innocent and after all, she was over 18. She kept telling JD that she and the boyfriend weren’t having sex and that she was really missing it. She and JD came to a point where they were having a combination “Psychic/Cyber sex”

Through this girl JD met another girl in another state who I will tell about later. As time went by she confessed a couple of things to JD. 1. She let him know that she was really only 17 (and later JD found out she was really only 16). 2. She was raped by an adult family friend in the church conference room.

JD went to visit her and knowing she was uncomfortable because of the rape not too long before he was on his best behavior. Then after the visit, because of a misunderstanding, they drifted apart.

This is when JD got closer with girl number 2.

JD and this girl had several phone conversations that included sexual content and it actually became a regular topic between the two of them. For a long time everything was on the phone or the Internet e-mail. When they first came in contact through girl #1 she had informed him that she was 19 years of age. After they had become deep in their talks about sex and their activities over the phone and Internet she dropped it on him that she had lied about her age. She was actually only 16. He made the mistake of telling her that it was OK because he really liked her and didn’t want to lose her friendship and they continued as before. (Note: in my opinion, that’s where he should have called it quits. Actually, in his book too. He knows that’s where he made his mistake. But you know what they say about hindsight?)

She would share all of her life stories with JD and tell him everything that had happened to her and share things as they happened along the way. She told JD that she had been molested by her father. She didn’t tell him that until later. She would always say there was something she wanted to tell him and then she finally told him what had happened. She also told him about the times she was drugged by her boyfriend and he filmed his friends having their way with her. Then he showed her the video the next day. In other words, she was abused long before JD ever came along. Her abuse started even before she was 12.

To shorten the story, JD made a further mistake by traveling to her state & town and they got together for a sexual encounter. Then there was a second time and the girl’s mother found out. She called the police, they contacted the FBI and after a lengthy investigation they arrested JD.

JD’s punishment was 51 months in a federal prison and is now on 5 years strict probation. To me, that seems very harsh for what he did considering the circumstances of both girls. And then they were never forced to participate in anything. I know, it doesn’t make it right, but it totally ruined his life and then the other 2 that I mentioned got nothing.

Just in case you’re interested, I have the whole story of this case.

Greg