The Legal Ringer
It’s all I can do to keep up with all the reporting about the Supreme Court that John Roberts’ nomination has unleashed. It’s like water gushing from an uncapped fire hydrant.
The detailed coverage keeps reminding me that the law doesn’t work like people think it does. The law is not about guilt versus innocence, or even justice. No wonder so many of us are baffled by court decisions. Lawyers and judges are talking law whereas we want to sort what we believe is right from wrong. We operate on a gut feeling; we want to assign blame and make the guilty pay. But law is all about precedence. That’s what the law is: precedence – a technical roadmap.
Journalism can be confusing like that, too. Recently, a story I was writing about incest ran smack up against a legal paradox. The story was about a woman who said her husband won custody of their two daughters six years after he molested the older one. It happened because of a law that slaps the hands of people who molest children in the household with therapy instead of jail time then expunges the molestation charges from their record after a time.
Ironically, after she had been through the ringer trying to keep her daughters away from him, she wasn’t looking like a great parent in the court’s eyes. She’s high-strung and angry, but it was trying to keep her daughters safe that molded her. In contrast, her husband’s record was clean. So the girls now live with him and she is allowed supervised visits only. That irony was the point of my story.
I got started on the story while working on a separate piece about sex offenders. It sounded like a good one, and the editor of a paper I sometimes write for gave me the green light. Dropping everything, I whipped out of the driveway in our white Dodge Caravan toward East Oakland where she lives. East Oakland is an intersection of middle-class and poor residents, industrial zone and war zone of drugs, violence and poverty.
What I thought would be a short interview turned into a three-hour therapy session for her. It was okay because I have personal experience with molestation after a series of step-fathers and deranged cousins.
There is nothing worse for a reporter than being taken for a ride. So I looked over the documents she brought of court decisions and child protective services. I quizzed her over and over. She held nothing back about her own contribution to the outcome. Still, I made some calls to people involved in the case. Also, after talking to acquaintances, I learned that her case was not exceptional. Happens all the time, as the saying goes.
It was one of those stories that recharge my batteries. But not so fast, Nellie Bly. The paper wouldn’t print the story for the very reason I had written it: a law that made no sense, to me anyways. I was stuck. It felt like being trapped inside the recycling symbol of two arrows chasing each other. The paper wouldn’t print it because there were no charges against him even though an ample paper trail still existed supporting the allegation and recommending he be prevented from having unsupervised visits let alone custody. There were no charges because the law mandated they be erased. His name wasn’t mentioned in the story, but he probably could have sued for libel, so the paper wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. Even an unsuccessful libel suit can be expensive and damaging to a paper, so many are timid.
No one wants to believe that parents or other household members could molest their children. Stepfathers are a little more palatable. But if it wasn’t happening, why would a law exist protecting them from harsh sentencing? Why would there be so many people behind a bill to change that (the bill, Senate Bill 33, cleared the California legislature and landed on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk last week)? Family members, caregivers and friends are responsible for some 90 percent of sexual abuse, according to the Department of Justice and sexual abuse reports and experts.
The woman sounded so deflated when I told her the story was probably unprintable without charges to back up the allegation. She had been put through the legal ringer again. If I could argue with the editor I would ask what she asked me about the current law during an interview:
“You’re trying to break the cycle of violence and they’re putting you back in it. Whose bright idea was that? How could they possibly think that would work?”
The detailed coverage keeps reminding me that the law doesn’t work like people think it does. The law is not about guilt versus innocence, or even justice. No wonder so many of us are baffled by court decisions. Lawyers and judges are talking law whereas we want to sort what we believe is right from wrong. We operate on a gut feeling; we want to assign blame and make the guilty pay. But law is all about precedence. That’s what the law is: precedence – a technical roadmap.
Journalism can be confusing like that, too. Recently, a story I was writing about incest ran smack up against a legal paradox. The story was about a woman who said her husband won custody of their two daughters six years after he molested the older one. It happened because of a law that slaps the hands of people who molest children in the household with therapy instead of jail time then expunges the molestation charges from their record after a time.
Ironically, after she had been through the ringer trying to keep her daughters away from him, she wasn’t looking like a great parent in the court’s eyes. She’s high-strung and angry, but it was trying to keep her daughters safe that molded her. In contrast, her husband’s record was clean. So the girls now live with him and she is allowed supervised visits only. That irony was the point of my story.
I got started on the story while working on a separate piece about sex offenders. It sounded like a good one, and the editor of a paper I sometimes write for gave me the green light. Dropping everything, I whipped out of the driveway in our white Dodge Caravan toward East Oakland where she lives. East Oakland is an intersection of middle-class and poor residents, industrial zone and war zone of drugs, violence and poverty.
What I thought would be a short interview turned into a three-hour therapy session for her. It was okay because I have personal experience with molestation after a series of step-fathers and deranged cousins.
There is nothing worse for a reporter than being taken for a ride. So I looked over the documents she brought of court decisions and child protective services. I quizzed her over and over. She held nothing back about her own contribution to the outcome. Still, I made some calls to people involved in the case. Also, after talking to acquaintances, I learned that her case was not exceptional. Happens all the time, as the saying goes.
It was one of those stories that recharge my batteries. But not so fast, Nellie Bly. The paper wouldn’t print the story for the very reason I had written it: a law that made no sense, to me anyways. I was stuck. It felt like being trapped inside the recycling symbol of two arrows chasing each other. The paper wouldn’t print it because there were no charges against him even though an ample paper trail still existed supporting the allegation and recommending he be prevented from having unsupervised visits let alone custody. There were no charges because the law mandated they be erased. His name wasn’t mentioned in the story, but he probably could have sued for libel, so the paper wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. Even an unsuccessful libel suit can be expensive and damaging to a paper, so many are timid.
No one wants to believe that parents or other household members could molest their children. Stepfathers are a little more palatable. But if it wasn’t happening, why would a law exist protecting them from harsh sentencing? Why would there be so many people behind a bill to change that (the bill, Senate Bill 33, cleared the California legislature and landed on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk last week)? Family members, caregivers and friends are responsible for some 90 percent of sexual abuse, according to the Department of Justice and sexual abuse reports and experts.
The woman sounded so deflated when I told her the story was probably unprintable without charges to back up the allegation. She had been put through the legal ringer again. If I could argue with the editor I would ask what she asked me about the current law during an interview:
“You’re trying to break the cycle of violence and they’re putting you back in it. Whose bright idea was that? How could they possibly think that would work?”
posted by A.W. Woodall at 11:26 AM
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