Archive for the ‘West Virginia’ Category

There will be no sex within 2000 feet of an establishment of [fill in the blank].

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

In another story out of West Virginia, Kanawha county is refusing to permit the opening of an adult store because it violates an ordinance that bans such establishments within 2000 feet of a school or church.

Last I heard, churches weren’t entitled to any special rights or protections from the state and I don’t believe an ordinance that prohibits adult related businesses near churches would stand constitutional challenge, assuming someone had the money to challenge it up through the judicial system.

But, the prohibition around schools is another story.  Protecting children is commonly used as a justification to suppress otherwise completely legal adult oriented commercial activities.  With the media and politicians constantly scaring people about the safety of  their children, society has become paranoid to the point of hysteria.  They mindlessly swallow it up and any official who questions the validity of any law purporting to protect children is essentially committing political suicide.  It would be a bit like question the burning of witches back in the 16th century, so everyone goes along regardless of who gets hurt.

A 2000 foot radius encompasses an area of nearly half a square mile, essentially making most urban areas off limits.  And churches are everywhere even in rural areas.  Also, what makes it ok to locate an adult businesses in rural areas if they aren’t wanted in the cities?  Is it because rural folks aren’t as intolerant as those in the cities?

The war against sex targets everyone.  Nothing escapes the attention of those who see everything sex related as evil.  How long before the American public recognizes that freedom includes sexual activities between adults?

Thanks to reader MacGregory for the link to this story.

Posted in Paranoia, Sex Toys and Paraphernalia, West Virginia | 3 Comments »

Woman, 34, assaults boy, 15. Boy goes back for seconds.

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

The Charleston Daily Mail reports yet another story of a boy who was found to have been having consensual sex with an older woman, almost every boy’s dream.  Of course, the boy’s mother wants the woman charged with sexual assault.

The teen told deputies he first met Tetso three months ago and that he was a friend of her three children. He said he walked over to her home in the first week of June to ask her about a job babysitting her children. He told the deputy that he became attracted to her and that they decided to have sex in her bedroom. They were alone in the house.

He said they had sex twice more in July. He told deputies that he knew she was 34 years old. The teen described the woman’s bedroom and tattoos on her body as well.

Because the near complete vacuum of objectivity regarding teen sex, society tends to view any sexual activity between teens and adults (and often even between teens and other teens) as the worst kind of assault imaginable.  Indeed, even murder invokes less reaction and often less punishment than mutually consensual sex.

Assuming this woman is caught and convicted, this boy stands to live the rest of his life feeling as if activities he willingly engaged in helped to destroy someone he obviously had no desire to hurt.

Stories about women being prosecuted for sexual encounters with teen boys are becoming more and more common.  I’ve written about it before here and here.

One would hope that, sometime soon, Americans will emerge from the sexual dark ages and accept that the sex drive starts before some state-defined age of consent and that entertaining that drive is not a crime.

Thanks to reader MacGregory for the link to this story.

Posted in Consensual Sex, West Virginia, statutory rape | Comments Off

West Virgina Predator Watch website, a registry for nonconvicted sex offenders.

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

From the Charleston Gazette (Thanks to reader MacGregory):

West Virginia Predator Watch, a watchdog service operated by Warriors Actively Against Sexual Predators, hopes to raise community awareness about those accused but not yet convicted of sexual crimes with online postings of published news stories and public court documents.

That’s right.  Their website is essentially a data base of those who have  been accused of  a sex crime but have not yet completed the technicality of a trial and conviction.  While prosecution and conviction can take months, with Predator Watch’s one-stop shopping you can start hating them as soon as they’re arrested.  They are conveniently identified by county.

They have a disclaimer on their site stating that they “in no way implicate innocence or guilt” on their site. Of course, listing these links on a site called Predator Watch specifically for the purpose of identifying who they are for the public doesn’t imply anything, right?

Finally, they add a little boilerplate apparently plagiarized from the West Virginia Sex Offender Registry, despite the fact that it really isn’t applicable since the Predator Watch site targets people who are not registered sex offenders and may not have even committed a crime:

The information accessed through the use of this website may not be used to threaten, intimidate or harass registered sex offenders and violations of law will be investigated by the West Virginia State Police.

Regardless of their care in just linking to the stories rather than actually listing names and addresses, it’s pretty clear that their website serves the purpose of a sex offender registry for those who have merely been accused.

While the effectiveness of sex offender registries has come under fire repeatedly, they do at least require a conviction before a name is added.  Considering the highly punitive effect of being identified  as a sex criminal, to set up a data base specifically targeting those who have not been convicted and then maintaining the listing throughout the many months between arrest and trial is so close to vigilantism as to be indistinguishable.  In fact, the question arises as to whether being included on such a listing could prejudice a potential jury.

It is noteworthy that the story about the Predator Watch website makes the following assertion:

According to the West Virginia Division of Corrections, 13.4 percent of sex offenders who were released back into the population in 2004 and 2005 committed the same kind of crime again.

Looking at the table from which that figure comes (page 4), child abuse and sexual offenses have the two lowest recidivism rates of the fourteen crime categories listed.   Why do we have a registry for  sex offenders (13.4% recidivism), but no registry for those who commit homicide (16.3%) or assault (23.6%), or robbery (38.4%)?

Posted in Persecution, Sex Offender Registries, West Virginia | Comments Off

Cop who harrassed mall photographer cleared

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Remember the story of the cop who arrested the award winning journalist for taking pictures of kids visiting Santa at a West Virginia mall?  He was cleared by an internal investigation.

“There were eight to 10 witnesses that saw the incident or part of the incident and saw the way he approached the officer or saw the way [the officer] handled himself and they just did not support what [Rensberger] said,” Webster said.

But then there’s this which seems a bit curious:

Attempts to reach the man playing Santa Claus and the other witnesses on Monday were unsuccessful.

Of course, one has to wonder why a cop would think taking pictures of kids constituted enough reason to stop someone to begin with?  I originally posted about the incident here and then elaborated on who was to blame here.

Thanks to reader MacGregory for alerting me to the update.

Posted in Paranoia, West Virginia | Comments Off

Sexting isn’t so bad when cops do it

Friday, February 12th, 2010

From theagitator:

Just so we’re clear, minors who send explicit photos of themselves to other minors get hit with child porn charges. Cops who send explicit photos of themselves to minors get probation.

Posted in Sexting, West Virginia | Comments Off

Rape victim denied opportunity to recant

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Katie Haught, 19, the daughter of a Hurricane, West Virginia man, Joseph Lavigne Jr., who is serving a 17-45 year sentence for raping her fifteen years ago was denied the opportunity to testify in his favor at a hearing to determine whether he should receive a new trial.  The judge worried about the accuracy of her memory and said she should save her testimony for a retrial, if there is one.

It’s an oddity of American justice that actual innocence is less a factor on appeal than whether all the rules have been followed during conviction, so the numerous claims that the father’s constitutional rights had been violated in the original 1996 trial took center stage.  Against the recommendation of a psychologist that she was not competent to testify, the daughter, six years old at the time of the original trial, took the stand, but never clearly testified that her father had raped her.

Child sex abuse cases almost invariably elicit the most emotional and horrified reactions on the part of a jury, so it’s not unusual for a jury to convict even when the  evidence is less than solid.  Prosecutors and law enforcement are known to grandstand and react to public pressure.  When the child is the only eye witness, the prosecution often has to rely heavily on circumstantial evidence which is often subject to inaccuracies due to careless investigation and prosecutorial or law enforcement misconduct.  From what I’ve read, that very well might be what happened in this case.  In fact, there seems to be ample reason to suspect the case was flawed from the very beginning and plenty of support for the father.

In any case, if the judicial process is going to be credible in any sense of the word, it must assign as much weight to the potential of actual innocence as it does to the potential for a violation of due process.

Thanks to reader MacGregory for the heads up on this one.

Posted in Child Rape, Rights of the Accused, United States, West Virginia | Comments Off

Mason County, WV: Stuck in the Dark Ages (and proud of it!).

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Mason County West Virginia commissioners have discovered there is a private club in their county that might be catering to swingers.  For those of you who don’t know what swingers are, allow me to enlighten you.  Basically, swingers are couples who openly and honestly believe that sexual pleasures can be enjoyed with others besides their own spouse.  The key words here are openly and honestly.  While having an affair with someone not your spouse is certainly common in America, it’s the fact that people, rather than flaunting it, have the decency to do so secretively and deceitfully, with loads of guilt, that makes it tolerable to the self-righteous busy bodies obsessed with other people’s private lives.

Essentially, the commissioners want to find a way to shut the club down, but according to wsaz.com, “The only law about sex or nudity on the books in Mason County prohibits nude dancing” (by itself an indicator of an irrational obsession with nudity and sex).  Nevertheless, the commissioners plan to do what ever is necessary to suppress the freedom of the owner and members of The Riverside Club to socialize with each other any way they want on private property behind closed doors.  Commissioner Rick Handley says,  “We surely don’t endorse a business like that coming into our rural community”, as if only businesses they personally endorse are permitted to operate in their private kingdom.

This is just one more example of government thinking it has the right to invade people’s private lives and control their most intimate relationships.  What is really stunning is the fact that they freely boast about it, oblivious to the fact it identifies them as being artifacts of the Dark Ages no less than if they publicly advocated the burning of witches at the stake.  Then we have WSAZ.com proudly taking credit for reporting the den of iniquity to Commissioner Handley, as if objectively reporting the news is too dull an activity when there’s an opportunity to help create it.

Wsaz also quotes one of the residents, Tammy Camden, as saying, “We’re a small town.  A lot of the people go to church. Can you imagine what this going to do? What people do at home is their own business. When you put it on the streets, then it becomes our business.”

On the streets?  Apparently Tammy is a bit confused about the difference between private property and public streets.

All that’s missing from this picture is a torch-wielding mob standing outside the club waving garden implements and tossing a rope up over a stout low hanging tree limb.  But then, why should they get their hands dirty when they have county commissioners to do it for them?

Remember, it’s never called persecution by those actually doing it.

Thanks to reader MacGregory for the heads up on this one!

Posted in Consensual Sex, Persecution, Relgious Zealotry, West Virginia | Comments Off

That Mall Photoggrapher: Who’s To Blame?

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

After further thought on that story about the photographer arrested after taking pictures of Christmas activities inside a shopping mall, it’s fairly easy to see how things progressed from a nonevent to man being arrested.

The problem started with a parent who was so pumped up on government-generated and media-propagated fear mongering that reporting a “suspicious” character was an end unto itself. Where most people wouldn’t have given the picture taking a second thought, this guy saw it as an opportunity to be heroic and powerful. I don’t think for a minute he actually thought his kid was in any real danger.

Next comes the cop who, rather than questioning whether the parent had a legitimate concern, simply saw it as an opportunity to satisfy the craving that made him become a cop to begin with. He couldn’t pass on the chance to confront someone once given the carte blanche that comes with protecting children.

Finally, we have a naive photographer who was quickly angered that an accusation of such little substance could be taken seriously by a “law enforcement professional”. He was probably also surprised to find that, in terms of people skills, modern cops skip right over persuasion and go immediately to the use of violence. And he will soon discover how much the justice system is stacked against him. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that he will come out on the winning side of this. Just as an army with god on its side must prevail, a cop protecting a child can’t loose.

I don’t believe a citizen complaint is necessarily a legitimate reason for a cop to stop and question someone. I think a cop has to exercise some judgment as to whether the complaint actually constitutes enough of a threat to warrant action.

So, what legitimate danger does someone subject a child to by taking his or her picture in a public setting? Repugnant as most people may find it, the fact that someone is sexually aroused by pictures of children does not, of itself, victimize a single living soul on the planet. And, like it or not, taking a picture is not probable cause to believe a kidnapping is imminent.

Posted in Child Molestation, Paranoia, West Virginia | 2 Comments »

Watch where you point that camera, you pervert!

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Meet award winning photographer, Scott Rensberger.  Rensberger made the mistake of taking pictures inside a shopping mall when children were present which alarmed one parent who asked why he was doing that.  Not satisfied after Rensberger voluntarily deleted the pictures, the parent reported him to the police who approached Rensberger and interrogated him about why he was taking the pictures.    When Rensberger then attempted to take a picture of the cop, the cop made a grab for the camera and the situation deteriorated from there, with the cop taking him down, cuffing, and arresting him.

The real issue here is that a parent would actually feel threatened by someone taking pictures of holiday activities inside a mall and that a cop would take a complaint of such a benign activity as cause to stop and question someone.  Of course, the attitude is that, when it comes to children, there is no such thing as too much caution.  For busybodies who see evil all around them, protecting children is basically a blank check that justifies intervention in almost anything.

Simply taking a picture of a child in a public place, an act that is completely legal, does not victimize a single living soul.  Most rational people would not have given it a second thought.  But, only one concerned citizen is all it takes, when children are involved.  Rationality be damned.

Supposing the guy does get his cookies off over pictures of kid visiting Santa Claus (or almost any other activity you can imagine happening in public).  Does that really constitute a crime against someone?  Is the child injured because of it?  Did these people  actually think some guy walking around a mall taking pictures constituted a credible threat of an imminent kidnapping?  We live in a society where fear mongering has become big business and parents are a prime target.

I chalk this up to the same over-reaction and paranoia that you see every Halloween when parents worry about razor blades buried in apples (which apparently has yet to actually happen).  I feel sorry for the photographer because he probably didn’t take the complaint seriously.   Clearly, someone taking pictures in public where children are present has a lot more to be paranoid about that people who worry about their children being molested.

Posted in Child Molestation, Paranoia, West Virginia | Comments Off