In 2013, eighty-seven folks were exonerated of the crimes for which they were convicted. Twenty-seven of them were exonerated for convictions of murder, arson, and sex crimes that it was determined never happened (or weren’t crimes).

Making the rounds has been the story out of Montana of a judge who found himself in hot water:

A Montana judge has come under fire after handing down a 30-day sentence to a former high school teacher convicted of raping a 14-year-old student and for making statements in court that the victim was “older than her chronological age” and “as much in control of the situation” as her teacher.

Outrage is particularly sharp in Billings, where the crime took place, because the girl committed suicide in 2010, just shy of her 17th birthday, as the criminal case was pending. A protest was planned for Thursday, and organizers have called on Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh to resign.

The uproar began Monday when Baugh sentenced Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, to 15 years in prison on one count of sexual intercourse without consent, but then suspended all but 31 days and gave him credit for one day served. Prosecutors had asked for 20 years in prison, with 10 years suspended.

Both Dr. Phi and Mike Hunt Rice have taken issue with the press’s reference to the crime as “rape” without a qualifier. Having followed the issue, it’s something that I have noticed more generally. I don’t tend to believe that dropping the qualifier is “intellectually dishonest” as MHR put it, but I do understand the objection.

Is this rape? I am inclined to believe that it’s not, except in the statutory sense. Whether we believe such behavior should be legal or not, the differences between this and holding down a woman while forcing himself on her are manifest. Likewise, this doesn’t compare to a having sex with a woman who is drugged or drunk and unconscious or something close to it. On the other hand, I recently linked to a story in Louisiana about a guard and an inmate having sex, and I have very little difficulty calling that rape regardless of how much she (superficially) consented. There are circumstances in which I would consider consent to be impossible. I draw the line between Montana and Louisiana. Some draw it on the other side of Montana, while others draw it on the other side of Louisiana.

When “Nathan J.” was fifteen, he was legally raped. When the child of the rape was born, he was successfully sued for child support. The court ruled ‘The law should not except Nathaniel J. from this responsibility because he is not an innocent victim of Jones’s criminal acts.’

The Washington Post is calling for the judge’s resignation:

“I’m not sure just what I was attempting to say, but it did not come out correct,” the judge said in a mea culpa issued to the Billings Gazette on Wednesday. He said he would file an addendum to the court file to “hopefully better explain the sentence.” Actually, Montana residents, along with much of the nation, know all they need to know about this case and this judge. His parsing of the sexual exploitation of a troubled teenager by a teacher in a position of trust as not a “forcible, beat-up rape” — and his sentence of a mere 30 days — sent the message that this is a crime that is not to be taken all that seriously. Judge Baugh’s ignorant notions about rape and his insensitivity to victims are an absolute affront to justice, and he should immediately resign.

To their credit, though (both sides of the story and all that), they also ran this piece by Betsy Karasik, which argues that teacher-student sex shouldn’t be illegal and that it may have been the law, rather than the crime, that drove the victim to suicide:

I do think that teachers who engage in sex with students, no matter how consensual, should be removed from their jobs and barred from teaching unless they prove that they have completed rehabilitation. But the utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them. I don’t know what triggered Morales’s suicide, but I find it tragic and deeply troubling that this occurred as the case against Rambold wound its way through the criminal justice system. One has to wonder whether the extreme pressure she must have felt from those circumstances played a role.

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

Several years ago I read a book, the title of which I cannot recall (something about reading signs, there were signs on the cover), about early woman sexuality. It was mostly a descriptive book, the different approaches different young ladies take towards sex, though to the extent it had an “agenda” it tended towards being very supportive of girls taking control of their sexuality. It leaned considerably more towards the feminist direction than not. It had a chapter on young women and older men and was by and large supportive of the notion – or at least the right of women to explore the notion.

All of which drives at one of the complexities of the issue. Which is that it actually doesn’t fall strictly among ideological lines. There are liberal and feminist arguments in support of laws condemning this activity. Arguably, this may be where the framing of the issue as rape comes into play. Feminists would be hard-pressed to support anything that could be construed as supporting rape. At the same time, though, the counter-arguments are also quite feminist in nature. It involves young women taking ownership of their sexuality. Being allowed to decide not just to have sex, but who to have sex with. The notion that young women should be in control of their sexuality – including access to birth control and abortion – is mutually exclusive to the idea that they cannot consent to sex, or that they can only consent to sex with men (boys) roughly their own age.

Ultimately, though, I disagree with Karasik that I don’t think it should be legal, for a teacher, to sleep with a student who is fourteen. Or a non-teacher, for that matter, who is forty-something. I don’t believe in the unqualified sexual autonomy of children, which I consider a fourteen year old to be. Though I support a general loosening of our teenage sex regime, that’s a bridge further than I can go. And on top of that, I think that the power dynamics of teachers and students are, while not comparable to prisoner and guard, cause for potential criminal action in itself. But I don’t think it should live in the same tent as someone who holds a woman down and forces himself on her.

To open this book, and explore this issue, we would need a greater review of how we view teenage sexuality. The two things that shut down the debate are our cultural discomfort with the possibility of two people having sex, and a strong desire never to make excuses for anything that can be called rape. I am not holding by breath for reform.

As Detroit scales back its police operations, its citizenry is picking up the slack:

Volunteers given radios and matching T-shirts help officers protect neighborhoods where burglaries, thefts and thugs drive away people who can’t rely on a police force that lost a quarter of its strength since 2009. With 25 patrols on the streets, the city hopes to add three each year. Meanwhile, the homicide rate continues rising.

Kevyn Orr, the Detroit emergency manager appointed by the state to supersede the mayor and city council, has called public safety crucial as he reorganizes a city running a $380 million deficit, teetering on a record municipal bankruptcy and struggling to provide services. Orr has said Detroit’s turnaround depends on reversing a population loss of more than 25 percent since 2000.

“Nobody’s going to move back to Detroit as long as people don’t have a sense of security,” said volunteer Lorenzo Blount during his morning rounds in the west-side Grandmont area. “That’s what we’re trying to add in our neighborhood in our little way.”

Will any of them have carry permits?

I actually look at situations like this and wonder about the viability of increased reliance on reserve officers. Which is to say, officers who are actually trained and certified, volunteering their time?

Back in Colosse, one of the departments relied heavily on that. The deputies even had to afford their own trip to the police academy. But it was something that a surprising number of people wanted to do whether they were getting paid or not.

Fire services in the United States are a blend of volunteer and professional. The City of Colosse has a professional fire force, though most of the surrounding cities (including one with over 100,000 people in it!) rely mostly on a volunteer force. Colosse mixes fire service with EMT and the latter turns off a lot of people who are interested in being a firefighter but don’t want to do the EMT stuff. Those people end up volunteering in the suburbs.

It’s conceptually pretty cool to me that there are places that can so rely on volunteerism to take care of basic civic services. Of course, that sort of thing doesn’t really help those that want to make a career out of it. It seems to me that Detroit might not be an ideal place to set up such a program for police. The danger would be off-putting to some, and it might attract the sort of people you don’t want. Beyond that, though, as cops are being laid off, I’d imagine that the paid police force would go ballistic. Which would be understandable from a standpoint of self-interest.

So, Friday night I went to go see Man of Steel. After the movie let out, it was around midnight. I wanted to smoke a few cigarettes before returning home. Due to the heat and the lack of air conditioning at our house, the windows are open and it bothers Clancy if I am smoking near the building. So I went to the local Motor Court and had, bought some hot chocolate, and went behind the building.

I’d been there about ten minutes when a cop car rolled up. It’s never a good thing when you’re hanging out and a cop car rolls up. I’ve been through the drill before. They get out, shine a bright light in your eye (if it’s night), and start asking you a bunch of questions. What are you doing here? Do you have somewhere else you should be? Are you waiting for someone? What are you waiting for someone for? Do you live in town? Could we see your driver’s license? Is this driver’s license current? How long have you lived at this address? Where did you live before you lived at this address? Did you drive here? Where is your car? Would you mind if we searched it (okay, I’ve only been asked this twice)? And about a hundred thousand ways of asking why I am acting so suspicious-like.

When it’s all said and done, no ticket is issued. It’s mostly just a nuisance and a notice that I need to find some other place to go in the future. If I’m not from whatever town this happens in, they suggest that I leave and maybe next time I find some other place to stop. If I do live in town, they suggest that I just go mosey on home.

I had my answers in a row by the time it stopped in front of me. I just got out of a movie and am smoking a couple cigarettes before I go home. I’m smoking here because it bothers my wife and I have an infant at home. I was a tad irritated because, seriously, they were going to quiz me when there are three fellows over there sleeping in that drainage ditch and a family of six that has parked for the night in that van over there? I’m the person of interest here?

They never got out of the car, though. They just parked there for about three minutes. Then they drove, did a Uey, and then parked behind the aforementioned family van and stayed there for about five minutes. Then they pulled out and went back on the street and left.

I guess they’re a little on high alert due to the fact that it’s Hippie Week and they have people spending the night in vans in parking lots and drainage ditches. Having thought about it, this hasn’t happened in Arapaho at all. Either because I am a local and people recognize me, or the community trust quotient is high enough that a guy standing there smoking doesn’t raise alarm bells like it does in other places I’ve lived. The only time I have been hassled in the last three years has been when we took a trip back home to Deltona. In that case, the cop was actually pretty cool about it and made it clear from early on that he was just needing to collect enough information to fill out a “Suspicious Person Contact Form.”

So, a weird story out of Texas:

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days. The trial began May 17 but had a long hiatus after a juror unexpectedly had to leave town for a funeral.
During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert’s defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn’t to kill. Gilbert’s actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.

Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago’s escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee. But instead, Frago walked around his apartment and after about 20 minutes left, saying she had to give the money to her driver, he said.

Apparently, the law in question did not specify that the defense does not apply to transactions that were illegal in the first place?

I consider Obama’s presidency to be a mixed bag. There are things he has done that I support (Ending DADT, credit card reform) and things that I oppose (PPACA, Cash For Clunkers, GM Bailout, increasing CAFE Standards, offshore drilling moratorium). A lot of the things that really inflame fellow Leaguers (drone attacks) don’t particularly inflame me. There is at least one thing he has done that has sent me through the roof, however. Not because it’s of tantamount importance in the greater scheme of things, but because of how unnecessary it was and how I simply cannot put a positive spin on it.

I speak of the Administration going from “As a general matter, [we] should not focus federal resources individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” and “We limit our enforcement efforts to those individuals, organizations that are acting out of conformity…with state laws.” to “The intertwined subjects of medical marijuana, Montana law and medical necessity have no relevance to determining whether the government has proven the crimes charged in the indictment … Marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law … and can’t be dispensed under a prescription.”

I don’t expect much from Democrats when it comes to pot legalization. I expect less from Republicans not named Gary Johnson. The most that can be said is that McCain would have raided more dispensaries than Obama did. Yet, even if this is true, it’s not the raids themselves that have me up in arms about this. It’s the announcement that encouraged the businesses to form in the first place only to have the founders arrested later on. Enforce the law (which is legally right) or don’t enforce the law (which is morally right), but it’s very important that everybody is clear on which route you’re going to go.

If there is any confusion as to the relationship between the Ogden Memo, which suggested that enforcement would not occur, and the proliferation of the dispensaries that garnered exceptional legal liability, this is from the Great Falls Tribune:

Many people in the medical marijuana community believed the Ogden memo demonstrated that President Barack Obama had fulfilled his 2007 campaign promise to “not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users.” {…}

In the span of just two years, the number of medical marijuana patients skyrocketed from 3,921 in September 2009 to more than 28,000 by the time the Legislature convened in January 2011. During that same period, the number of Montana caregivers authorized to grow marijuana for patients jumped from 1,403 to 4,833.

The problems that were occurring under Montana’s Medical Marijuana law shouldn’t be understated. They were significant and well known throughout the Mountain West region. So much so that the debate within Montana – a state in which MedMar passed a public vote by a substantial margin – was whether it should be mended or ended. The raids occurred while this debate was happening – literally, while a state senate panel was voting, the DEA was arming up.

Montana’s first registered dispenser died in prison about six weeks ago. His son is serving a five year sentence, his wife is serving two (for bookkeeping).

Being the federalist that I am, my view is that even if Montana law was spinning out of control it should have been allowed to remain a Montana issue. If the federal government was unwilling to allow it to continue, however, I would have understood that to if an announcement had been made to that effect. But whatever should have happened, this should not have happened. Maybe we should have a completely black and white view of the law and if it’s illegal it should be illegal. Maybe there’s room for gray. But the rules, official or unofficial, should not be changed after legitimate business licenses are allowed to be issued.

A little bit back I commented on teacher sex with students and suggested that, in the case of inverse genders the man would not get off as lightly as many of the women. Well, here is a counterexample:

A former North Texas high school teacher was convicted Friday and sentenced to five years in prison for having sex with five 18-year-old students at her home.

The Tarrant County jury decided on the sentence for Brittni Nicole Colleps, 28, of Arlington after nearly three hours of deliberation. It took jurors less than an hour to find her guilty earlier in the day of 16 counts of having an inappropriate relationship between a student and teacher. The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison per count.

The former Kennedale High School English teacher had sex with the students at her home over two months in 2011, authorities said.

Colleps is married and has three children. She turned herself in after a cellphone video of one encounter that involved multiple students emerged. That video was shown a trial.

Which I guess just goes to show, we might take women having sex more lightly than men, or maybe not, but definitely not freaky sex. Probably best not to have five partners, but if you do, not all at once. Eighteen or no.

Before I start with this story, a personality tick of the Redstone Gazette: The Gazette has a tendency to mention the salaries of public officials in articles where the public official is important. I’ve never really seen that before, but the paper does it with such regularity that I think it is part of some policy (or something one of their main writers or editors simply wants done). It would be an interesting angle for a conservative paper in a conservative place, but Redstone is pretty heavily blue and the newspaper’s editorial staff is, as near as I can tell, no different. An interesting thing about this policy is that it can be oddly helpful at times. Knowing that the county executive gets paid more than the mayor, but that the city councilmen get paid half of what the county commissioners do, helps put things in perspective when it comes to who is running for what. But it’s a little weird to read, in the middle of an article about the schools, “Superintendent Davis, who gets paid $75,343 a year, announced…”

Anyhow, today there was an article about the city courts being so backlogged that they are on the verge of running up against “speedy trial” requirements and will start having to dismiss charges. This goes back to a previous story involving former Judge Mike Balasevic. Balasevic, who I was informed made $63,455 a year, resigned very suddenly last year. I was also informed that he had a part-time job with the school district as a janitor, making $11,575 a year (okay, I’m making the specifics up, but those are the ballparks). He was resigning as judge, but not janitor. This was an unbelievably weird article to read, because I’d never heard of a city judge working as a janitor, and quitting one job while holding on to the other… what the hell?

I should have seen the next part coming: Federal indictment. Bribery, of a pretty crass nature. They had him having taken roughly $14,000 a couple of years back (making more from corruption than cleaning). He’d later to at least ten bribes at a few hundred dollars a piece (and a few requests that the defendant put up a yard sign for his re-election). He plead guilty to a single count and received probation and $5k restitution. Anyhow, everything apparently screeched to a halt while this was going on until they found a replacement. Hence, defendants about to go free.

As far as I know, he still has that janitor job. I’ve never actually seen him at the schools. A teacher that I have substituted for more than once is named Mrs. Balasevic. I assume a relation of some sort, but I’m not going to ask (Mrs. B has actually offered to write me a letter of recommendation if I shift to subbing down here in Callie).

Oops:

Inmates at the Milner Ridge jail were able to watch clear-as-day commercials on an explicit channel that was otherwise blocked by their satellite TV service, Justice Minister Andrew Swan said Thursday.

“Apparently, on that blocked channel, there were periodic advertisements running from 30 to 90 seconds,” Swan said.

“And immediately on becoming aware of this, the officials at Milner Ridge called the service provider and made immediate arrangements to make sure that didn’t recur.”

The jail officials only became aware of the problem during a Jan. 9 tour of the facility by Tory justice critic Kelvin Goertzen. About 10 inmates were watching hardcore programming in a common area, Goertzen said, and when a jail guard turned off the TV, they managed to turn it back on again briefly with a remote control.

A few things jumped out at me about this: First, were the inmates unaware that there were visitors? I realize that we’re not dealing with the most future-time-oriented people, but you’d think that this sort of thing might cause problems.

More broadly, though, is this really any sort of outrage? I mean, I get it that they are in prison you don’t want to make things too comfortable for them. But the sexual frustration of prison famously manifests itself in very unfortunate ways. It really seems to me that there are worse things than pornography. There are suggestions that pornography reduces rape, but even if we disbelieve that there is not much to suggest that it encourages it. It may not make much of a difference, it may alleviate the tension that causes all sorts of bad things, but humans are sexual beings and I think there have to be larger concerns than this.
One more thing. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It appears a technical glitch is to blame for a display of explicit sex in a Manitoba jail that aroused concerns by the Opposition Progressive Conservatives.

There were probably a lot of grins and groans in the newsroom over that one.

It’s a bit weird to be writing a post about lawsuits that occurred and were resolved years ago, especially since I am not the lawyer that Burt is. But the cases I am writing about had a lasting effect on my view of politics and its followers. And rather than try to stuff everything into a single post, I am going to write about the cases here, and then later why these cases were significant to me.

Conflict:

Around the turn of the century, there was a push towards cleaning up movies. The push did not come from studios in Hollywood, but rather entrepreneurs in (mostly) Utah (one of which, I should add, was named Huntsman). The two highest profile companies were ClearPlay and CleanFlicks. Both of these companies, as well as a third and fourth, were based out of the Beehive State, so I will occasionally refer to them as “the Utah companies.”

ClearPlay sold DVD players that would (with programming) skip over the more unsavory parts of movies. They would have editors go through, clean up the dirty parts, while being sure not to interfere with the telling of the story. They originally boasted 150 movies with a couple dozen being added each month. Concerned parents would buy the DVD through a regular outlet, download the filters, and then be able to watch movies with their kids (or just by themselves) without fear of seeing something they would rather not see. CleanFlicks was slightly different, having opened up VHS/DVD stores and sold the clean versions directly. There was a third company, whose name I cannot find but will call ATC, wherein you would send in the VHS or DVD you bought, which they would destroy, and send you back a clean version.

Thsi created a lot of consternation in Hollywood, and before long, lawsuits were filed by both the Directors Guild Association (DGA) and a little bit later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Both rested their initial claim on Freedom of Speech. They were being censored. Their artistic vision was being tampered with. There were various op-eds suggesting that there was a danger in allowing people to automatically avoid exposure to things they found unsettling because there is artistic power in being unsettled.

The counterargument to this was rather simple: People should be allowed not to watch movies that they don’t want to watch. Third parties should be allowed to assist them in circumventing this process. To suggest that people should not have the right to skip over parts of a movie they dislike is to argue that a FFW button is a censorious device. That they skip over a scene because it contains elements that they do not prefer to watch rather than that it is a portion of the movie that they find boring is immaterial. In addition, ClearPlay and ATC could argue that there was no likelihood of confusion of the edited product with the original product since both mechanisms had to be affirmatively sought. This was a bit more difficult an argument for CleanFlicks, because somebody could walk in to one of their stores without realizing that they were being sold a different product.

It became apparent rather early on that the latter argument was winning. Whatever this was, directors were not being silenced. The MPAA and DGA arguments then shifted towards copyright infringement. Namely, these companies were making a profit off the studios’ product, without the studios’ permission. The MPAA argued that these companies would make it unfairly difficult for the studios, who actually created the material, to offer any like service.

Resolution:

It was primarily on the copyright argument that they made some headway and won their suit against CleanFlicks. Because CleanFlicks had pre-emptively sued, their case was further along. However, before a decision could ultimately be made with ClearPlay, congress clarified the copyright rules expressly to allow what ClearPlay was doing. ClearPlay is still around. CleanFlicks lost their business model and went under. Trilogy Studios, who had initially tried to sell their ClearPlay-like product directly to the studios, never tried to sell their product directly to consumers. If I recall correctly, ATC folded early under the pressure of the lawsuits and never got a ruling one way or another.

My Thoughts

In the abstract, I actually sided with the Utah companies on this. Which is to say, I believe that they were providing a service and a separate product from the studios (namely, a player). The only one I hesitated to that about is CleanFlicks (which I will get to in a minute). While it was the case that ClearPlay was making money around the studios’ works, the same can be said for the makers of DVD players in general. DVD player producers have to pay all sorts of patents to make their product, but as far as I know they do not have to pay the studios themselves. It is considered mutually beneficial. I doubt that there is even a contract involved. There is, however, an argument that they waived any right to money when they produced a product specifically to be played in a DVD player. I am not sure why that waver would not also apply to a ClearPlay DVD player, however.

With CleanFlicks it is a bit different. They were selling a product with someone else’s trademark on it, that was mostly full of someone else’s material. And they were making a profit by doing so without any sort of contract with the studio. What I don’t fully know is the extent to which you have to have a contract with a studio in order to sell their product, so long as you paid full retail price for the original. I know this applies to individuals (they can’t prevent me from selling my old DVDs) and I’m not sure how it is different for corporations.

CleanFlicks’s major liability, however, should be the original artistic integrity argument. Since ClearPlay and ATC both required an affirmative step and both involve possessing or having possessed the original product, it can be safely assumed that the person who purchases CP’s or ATC’s services are aware that they are not getting the original product. Meanwhile, someone can stumble into CleanFlicks without really knowing what they’re getting. I’m not sure the degree of disclosure required, but that we even have to talk about it makes me understand where the studios are coming from. So I could go either way on this one.

I would support, I suppose, a disclosure requirement for ClearPlay and (if they still existed) ATC, not only to remind people that they are getting an altered product but also so that the clean-up editor gets appropriate credit for his work. As that is an artistic enterprise, I do believe such disclosure should be appropriate. But, as they often do, I felt that the studios simply went too far. Not only failing to offer a service that people clearly wanted, but preventing anyone else from doing so. And as far as the copyright argument goes, while yes ClearPlay gets money off the deal, not a penny is denied to the studios that is owed to the studios for the product they provided. Their argument, to me, has the stench of their common argument that they have a right to control what someone does with a product after they purchase it. I believe this is true insofar as preventing people from copying-and-distributing, but that’s about the extent of it.

While with ClearPlay and ATC, you had to affirmatively send