Posted on 09/04/2015 8:37:55 PM PDT by Auntie Mame
MILWAUKEE (CN) - Dollar General fired a man convicted of possessing graphic child pornography, only to have Wisconsin officials upbraid it for discrimination, the store claims in court.
The Vonnegutian tale appears in a petition filed Thursday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court by Dolgen, the parent company of a Dollar General on South 27th Street that hired Michael Ionetz as its manager in May 2010.
One month on the job, Ionetz was charged with 22 counts of child pornography, Dolgen says. The company's complaint gives a sickening account of the data that the state claimed to have found on Ionetz's hard drive.
Dolgen says Ionetz continued to work while appearing in court on the charges, even asking the judge not to restrict his computer access since he needed the Internet to perform his job duties.
Though the court barred Ionetz from having "contact with any person younger than eighteen years of age" as a special condition of his bond, "Ionetz continued to work and schedule himself as the only person working in the Milwaukee store, even though he was aware that children (under eighteen years of age) frequented the store and he would come into contact with them," Dolgen claims.
Ionetz never told his district manager about his bond conditions, and he pleaded no contest on Oct. 28 to five counts of "computer crime," according to the complaint.
Dolgen says the court read in one count of possession of child pornography.
As part of Ionetz's sentence of probation, the criminal court prohibited the man from entering locations where minors congregated - with a specific exclusion of working in a retail store where minors shopped, according to the complaint.
Dollar General says it suspended Ionetz's employment on Nov. 5 when he told a supervisor that his probation officer would be reaching out. That call with the officer was the first time the district manager "learned that Ionetz had any restrictions regarding his contact with minors or that he had been charged with 22 counts of child pornography," according to the complaint.
Since Ionetz's Dollar General job required him to sometimes work in the store alone and have contact with minors, the district manager told Ionetz's probation officer that the store could not accommodate the terms of his probation.
Dolgen fired Ionetz soon thereafter, and it notes that a judge later refused Ionetz's request to have the terms of his probation modified so that he could work a job that might leave him alone with minor customers.
Ionetz's restrictions continued to bar him from "unsupervised contact" with minors.
Though the Equal Rights Division of the state's Department of Workforce Development found that Dolgen did not discriminate in firing Ionetz, the Labor and Industry Review Commission recently overturned that decision.
Finding that Ionetz's conviction was not "substantially related to his job," the commission ordered Dolgen to pay the man's attorneys $27,000. It refused to award Ionetz backpay or reinstatement since the terms of his probation meant that he could not keep his Dollar General job. Nevertheless, store found that his firing discriminated on the basis of his conviction.
While the commission "was presumably in the process of penning its" reversal, "Ionetz was once again arrested - this time for possessing 3,083 graphic pictures of pubescent and prepubescent children engaged in sexual acts," Dolgen says.
Ionetz, who turns 45 in November, is charged with 14 felony counts of possession of child pornography, according to online court records.
Dolgen says it presented this to the commission, but that the appellate body refused to consider the information as evidence.
Dolgen wants the court to review the commission decision, issued on June 25 and confirmed on Aug. 6.
The commission had found Ionetz's likelihood of recidivism low, and emphasized that his job did not afford "significant contact with computers."
"The nature of the accusations made against the complainant, upon which his arrest and criminal charges were based, are very disturbing to the commission," the commissioners wrote. "But the language of the relevant statute requires the commission, in applying the substantial relationship test, to consider the elements of the offense for which the complainant was actually convicted, not the offense for which he was arrested or charged."
The world is sick. I want to puke.
You neither know me nor my fiance’s mother, so I’d appreciate you taking that down :)
Plus I rarely wear a tie :)
hey... at least i didn't show yer face!!! 8^)
LOL. I DO appreciate that!
Our entire justice system is sick beyond repair.
We live in crazy times. If they had not fired him and he committed a crime on company property or on company time, they would be sued. Maybe under the circumstances, $27,000 was a bargain.
I think that we all knew that, with gay marriage behind us, the next step is pedophilia...no surprise.
Queers, child molesters....same thing.
State agency in Wisconsin. I’d very much like to hear what the governor has to say about this travesty.
I have considered supporting Govenor Walker, but this is seriously beyond the pale.
Maybe obama is gonna get jared his subway spokesperson job back....
State agency fines Dollar Store in Milwaukee $27,000 for firing employee convicted of child pornography. Employee violated terms of his bail. And mountainbunny — the governor probably doesn’t even know about this case. He will now.
We have really strange employment laws here — where the employer is always in the wrong, no matter what they do. I cannot tell you how many unemployment cases I’ve been on the wrong side. You just pay the fee and shut up. I lost a case once where an out-of-control employee committed a terrible act of insubordination. We finally fired her after we first suspended her and she refused to leave the premises. Because my husband was kind and said she would be paid for the rest of the day, if she would just leave, Unemployment considered her as having received a “blonus” for her fine work and she could collect 2 years of unemployment compensation. Another was continually absent and even showed up for work drunk a few times. 2 years unemployment compensation.
The governor has no say over these agencies.
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping lis.
Thank you very much for your reply. It means a lot, because I still have high hopes for Governor Walker.
Very much appreciated.
Someone really needs to start documenting stuff like this, with names, so that the actors involved can be publicly shunned in perpetuity. There should be consequences for actions like the one here.
It is the year seven, AS (After Sanity), year Zero being the old calendar year 2008, when the electorate lost its collective minds and sent a totally unqualified, unskilled socialist community ideologue to lead the Free World as President of These Once United States.
where the employer is always in the wrong, no matter what they do. alynskites rejoice, cloward pivenites rejoice America has been poisoned by this and false racism and the PC police. The cancer is eating use from the inside out
Pro tip to Dollar General: there are pruning shears in Aisle 9
yep...
Not all. Some thought that just because this country embraced consensual homosexual sex, that it didn't follow it would actually defend a man forcing himself on a boy.
I sure didn't believe that even in these evil times my country would sink to this low.
But you were right. It has.
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