Posted on 07/05/2007 9:29:25 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Mother whose son is serving time sees inequality in priest's sentencing.
Patricia Jones can't believe it. Although the Rev. Daniel McCormack pleaded guilty to molesting five Catholic school boys, a judge handed down a 5-year sentence -- essentially one year for every boy McCormack confessed to molesting. Her own son got six years when he pleaded guilty to having sexual contact with a 12-year-old girl who allegedly was on the street selling sexual favors at 4 in the morning.
"I am very bitter and very angry," Jones told me during a telephone interview on Tuesday.
Five years ago, her son Denard Watson went on a binge to celebrate his 22nd birthday.
"He was out riding up and down the street and picked up two girls who were walking the street at 4 a.m.," Jones said. "One of the girls performed oral sex and afterwards she told my son she wanted money. He told her he didn't have any money, and she told him if he didn't pay, she would call the police and accuse him of rape."
Obviously, Watson knew where to go looking for trouble. There's no question that he brought what follows upon himself. Still, bear with me.
According to Jones' mother, when her son refused to pay for the sex, the girls jumped out of his car -- taking his leather jacket with them.
'I am not proud of what he did' Watson was a couple of blocks away when he realized that the jacket was gone. When he returned to look for it, a squad car was on the scene. That's when he learned that the girl who performed oral sex was only 12 years old. "I am not proud of what he did," Jones said. "It happened. He wound up being charged with sexual assault, and I didn't have no money to hire a private attorney. So we had to deal with a public defender. He didn't get a jury trial. He took a plea deal."
Her son wanted a jury trial, but Jones said she talked him out of it after he saw how the 12-year-old would be presented in court. "They brought her to court dressed like a little girl with barrettes in her hair," Jones said. "I knew if a jury of 12 people saw her like that, they could have sent my son away for 90 to 100 years."
Under the plea agreement, Watson was sentenced to six years in state prison and had to serve 85 percent of the time. He also has to register as a sex offender when he gets out.
You can understand why. There is a special place in hell for authority figures who sexually violate children.
"This man knew how young these kids were. I'm not glorifying what my son did. All I'm saying it's not right," Jones said. "But it showed me something that my older son has been telling me all along. We have a black-and-white justice system."
Of course, no matter how many times I point out this inequity, a lot of people don't see it.
Scooter gets off, young blacks get life Maybe President's Bush's commutation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 30-month jail sentence -- a punishment he deserved for obstructing justice and lying to the grand jury -- will open their eyes. Since taking office, Bush has used his power to discourage federal judges from challenging the draconian drug sentencing laws -- laws that have put an unthinkable number of young black men in prison to serve sentences that might as well be life terms.
Talk about harsh, these mandatory minimum sentences have resulted in grandparents and great-grandparents being left behind to raise young children, and children being so filled with anger that they have no empathy for others and no love for themselves.
But Bush didn't do a thing to address this inequity.
Now he justifies rescuing a friend and loyal staff member from a prison cell by arguing that 30 months in jail is too harsh. That's insulting and outrageous, but it also explains why a lot of people in distressed neighborhoods have nothing but contempt for the law and law enforcement.
Quite often, in the case of ordinary people, the punishment really doesn't fit the crime.
Jones, who lives in Section 8 housing, is now worried about where her son will live when he gets out of prison because, as a convicted sex offender, he cannot live with her.
"The priest case grabbed me," Jones said. "McCormack will get out in 2½ years and then the archdiocese will take care of him. My son might as well move to the Himalayas and live in a cave."
mailto:marym@suntimes.com
Nothing like trying to work in a fake, very weak parallel between Scooter Libby’s situation and Denard Watson’s.
She must hate Sandy Burger.
The article is so poorly written that’s its hard to understand what happened.
The young man knew the girls were underage or he didn’t?
What does committing a crime have to do with being the victim of a partisan witch-hunt?
I agree, but the priest needs to go too.
I say the priest was undersentenced. And if the mother’s story is entirely true, then Watson was over-sentenced. But there is the matter of prior record.
Mrs VS
There is a big difference between putting a 17 year old in jail for ten years for having consentual oral sex with a 15 year old, and a 22 year old man taking advantage of a 12 year old girl. If Mitchell expects to get any sympathy for this man, she is greatly mistaken.
Race is a two way street. There are racist black cops out there routinely harassing white people and getting away with it.
There is even a case where a black cop was FILMED shooting an unarmed white boy who was laying on the ground trying to calm him down. He told the kid to get up and then shot him repeatedly.
He later lied and said that the kid lunged at him - the video is dark, but you can clearly see that this kid did not lunge at anything, he was terrified. The cop was a maniac and shot him in cold blood. He knows that he will get a black jury to let him go.
The kid happened to also have been a military policeman.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=547_1183537759
Do you honestly think this mother’s story is true? I doubt that the 12 year old was ever a ‘streetwalker’. It sounds like something this mother would make up to make her son look good. How could this guy not know she was underage?
You are also supposed to believe that he picked up two strange girls off the street, immediately had oral sex with one of them, and then was shocked to discover that they wanted payment? He knew what he was doing, and I bet he knew, or did not care, that the girl was underage.
Clearly, the politically correct line these days is the one in the article posted here--i.e., the line that black boys are being treated unfairly when their only offense is having sex with willing girls. It seems to me that anyone who accepts that line must also agree that the "virtue" of the girls in question is not worthy of legal protection. Of course, Al Sharpton and Company would never put that very un-PC notion into words (just mentioning it seems to have gotten my last post zapped), but it is what their crusades actually promote.
I'd like to see just a tiny fraction of the misguided outrage over these sentences devoted to outrage over the fact that so many young black men seem to think it appropriate to treat young black women like the hip-hop ho's in rap ditties.
I hate getting sand in my burgers, too! Hot dogs are so much easier to get the sand off of.
People who live in public housing don’t always have a good grasp of the nuances of language.
The point about Genarlow Wilson is that he’s carrying a sentence far beyond what today’s convicts would receive. Getting Lewinskied by another teenage isn’t exactly moral behavoir, but it’s not sex-offender material.
As to the “virtue” of his “victim” - everyone involved in the case (including the convicting jury) agrees that the girl initiated the oral sex. The Georgia legislature has seen fit to keep teenage oral sex a crime, but to reduce its sentence. What’s really wrong about Wilson’s case is that the prosecutor refuses to reduce the charges and wants the kid to stay locked up beyond today’s sentencing guidelines, seemingly because he can and it would besmirch his prosecutorial image to exhibit some discretion.
He argues that he wasn’t specifically included in the updated law, but that’s no answer.
When a judge ordered Wilson released, the attorney general decided to make the case a separation-of-powers political football. Wrong case to do it on.
Wilson got a raw deal from a crappy law. If he’s screwed the girl straight he would have gotten a lot less time. That’s just out of balance.
I guess you think “whatever he did was bad enough” and he deserves the 10 years.
To reply more directly to your post - I don’t dispute Wilson’s conviction. I dispute his sentence, and he should be released since the updated law’s sentence has already been served.
And he shouldn’t have sex-offender status. Another batch of lawyers screwin’ the People.
He’s guilty of being stupid and sleazy but in this case I can see mitigating circumstances....
She’s out walking the streets at 4:00 AM....
draw your own conclusions
The young black men who treat young women poorly do it because they can get away with it. Yes, they have bad role models but the women in their lives obviously put up with it.
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