Posted on 11/25/2011 4:12:47 PM PST by BfloGuy
Last week the parents of a Wisconsin boy sued Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker for charging their son with first-degree sexual assault, a Class B felony, after he played "butt doctor" with a 5-year-old girl. He was 6 at the time. When the boy's lawyer tried to have the charge dismissed, Riniker replied: "The legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute if it wanted to. The legislature did no such thing."
According to the complaint (PDF), the girl is "the daughter of a well-known political figure in Grant County," and her brother, who is the same age, also was involved in playing doctor but was not charged. In addition to Riniker, the lawsuit names as defendants retired Grant County Sheriff's Sgt. James Kopp and Jan Moravits, an investigator with Grant County Social Services "whose regional supervisor...is the political figure's wife's sister-in-law"—i.e., the aunt of the alleged victim.
Although the boy, now 7, is too young to be prosecuted or named in a juvenile delinquency petitition, Madison.com reports, county officials are using the felony charge to force his parents into accepting "protection or services" for him. The lawsuit says that once he turns 18, he will be listed as a sex offender.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Play hardball.
However in this case I hope this family wins and wins big. I hope the prosecutor is forced to drop all charges and ends up putting the kid through Harvard on her dime.
What's more, I hope the family's lawyer hires a darned good PI who researches this prosecutor's life from the time she could walk, and digs up every possible "wrongdoing" she ever committed and drags them out publicly.
After all, based on her own standards, nothing she has done in her life can be considered "innocent," either.
Maybe if enough of these nitwits get publicly humiliated themselves, the idiocy will stop.
I totally agree with you. You can be a twenty year old marine home from the front and not responsible enough to legally drink but a 6 year old is old enough to be charged as a sex offender.
This DA should be hung out to dry.
I played doctor when I was 6 and continued to play for many years and decades.
A 12-year-old commits murder, and we dare not charge him as an adult and ruin his life. But, a six-year-old playing doctor? Wait until you’re 18, son, and then you’re branded for life.
Can you imagine the phase where he has to walk the neighborhood to explain his status to his neighbors? “I’m a registered sex offender. I played doctor with a little girl when I was six and she was five.” Monster!
Now, if we could only get Federal DAs to use immigation laws this way......
Used to be that a child under the age of 8 was deemed not capable of forming criminal intent, between 8 and 12 was left up to the court to decide and over 12 was deemed capable of forming criminal intent.
Back in my day, when you were caught playing "doctor" you either got a talking to or ass whipping, sometimes both from your parents but calling the law was never even thought about.
When I was a kid no one called the cops, especially for crap like this. If we had, the cops would have arrested the caller for being stupid without a permit.
The neighbor would have simply told my parents of my wrongdoing, and my parents would have handled it.
Idiocy Bookmark
This country is so effed up I don’t know if it’s even worth saving.
This appears to be a particularly revolting case of political influence peddling with the absurd twist that the politician throwing his weight around cannot be named because his underage kids would be identified if he was!
So he and his wife hide behind their 5 year old son and daughter, and persecutes a 6 year old from behind the bushes. And they get a young and dumb DA to do their dirty work for them. What a pathetic bunch of bozos.
This will backfire, because now it’s going viral. The gross injustice will cause national pressure to be applied, and no small time county politico will be able to withstand the onslaught.
He will be named and shamed.
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