Valerie Charles is led out of Hillsdale County Circuit Court after she pleaded no contest to attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Posted on 09/22/2002 4:23:50 AM PDT by JediGirl
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:25:26 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
HILLSDALE - For more than a year, Brian Andrew Newman carried on a friendship, then a relationship, with a Hillsdale County girl.
She was barely 14 years old. He said he was 16. At one point, Brian even lived with the girl and her family.
(Excerpt) Read more at toledoblade.com ...
I only have about a dozen questions.
Only a dozen?
I've got...let's say--several...questions...
Used to be quite synonomous. How far have we fallen?
Woman's cellmate in Hampton jail was teenage boy
By David Chernicky
Daily Press
September 21 2002
HAMPTON -- Sheri Nelson found it peculiar that her new cellmate in the Hampton city jail spent so much time shaving. But Nelson was positively stunned to discover her cellmate for six days was really a 17-year-old boy.
"He slept in the bunk right over top of me," Nelson said. Until a sheriff's deputy came and took him out of the cell, "I never once knew he was a boy."
Sheriff's officials had plenty of trouble on that score, too.
They say they strip-searched the prisoner, who gave the name "Nechelle," before placing him in a women's cell bock the night of Sept. 11.
Maj. Karen Bowden, second in command to Sheriff B.J. Roberts, couldn't explain how a deputy miscalculated Nechelle's anatomy.
"The female deputy had the prisoner remove all her clothes, and followed all the proper procedures for a strip search," Bowden said.
Police picked up Nechelle for shoplifting at the Wal-Mart on Mercury Boulevard earlier that afternoon. A Hampton police officer then delivered the suspect to the district court building, which houses the lockup and magistrate's office.
The arrest warrant identified Nechelle as a female, born July 19, 1983, and living in Newport News. He was wearing women's clothes and had his black, shoulder-length hair braided and pulled back.
But he didn't have a driver's license or any other identification.
It wasn't until much later - after a strip search failed to notice male organs, and Nechelle spent several days in a cell for adult women - that officials learned he had given his sister's name. In fact, Nechelle wasn't a woman, and he also wasn't an adult.
The Daily Press is withholding Nechelle's real name because the paper does not typically identify juvenile crime suspects.
Deputies at lockup called and had Nechelle transferred to the city jail a few blocks away when he was unable to post a $2,500 bond.
That's where a sheriff's deputy strip-searched Nechelle.
Jail managers require a strip search of all new prisoners, not only to verify gender, but also to check for contraband, injury, sores and physical condition.
Bowden wouldn't comment on the procedure at the Hampton jail or the scope of the search, nor would she name the deputy who mistook Nechelle for a woman.
"But there was no indication to [the deputy] that this person was a male," she said.
During his six days with Nelson, Nechelle braided Nelson's hair and joked with the other women on the cellblock.
"She was so young," said female inmate Donna Robinson. "I just called her my little sister."
Nelson, meanwhile, wondered why Nechelle kept borrowing other inmates' razors and going off to shower.
"I just thought it was a woman who had a lot of facial or body hair," she said. "I told her, 'Why don't you just get it plugged or waxed?' "
Nelson, 37, said she now feels violated.
"It is one thing to be in jail with other women, but when there's a male in here and he's seeing you naked every day it's embarrassing," Nelson said.
Nechelle fooled plenty of people.
Hampton Commonwealth's attorney Linda Curtis handled a bond hearing for Nechelle on Tuesday.
"There was some suspicion about her identity, but certainly not gender," Curtis said. "It was clear there was something wrong because there were different social security numbers and different dates of birth given on several occasions but no apparent reason to question her gender."
District Judge Bonnie Jones refused to adjust the bond because of concerns about the defendant's identity, the prosecutor said.
Nechelle likely would have remained in the women's cellblock had a Newport News probation officer not been in Hampton district court during the bond hearing. The probation officer, in Hampton on another matter, recognized Nechelle's alias and knew that the person who used it was a young man.
After the bond hearing and after officials determined Nechelle was really 17, the prosecutor moved the case to juvenile court, where he was charged with shoplifting and obstruction for using a false name.
Kent Willis, director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, couldn't recall a similar case. "Therefore, there does not seem to be a clear precedent for what kind of relief the women are entitled to," Willis said.
"While you lose many of your rights while in prison, you don't lose all of them," Willis said. "A person has some right to be housed with people of the same gender.
"The first question is one of competence. The jail officials obviously need to do a better job of determining gender. That is their obligation and hopefully this will at the very least serve as a lesson for the sheriff's office to be more thorough in their strip searches."
The Virginia Department of Corrections requires "a complete search of the individual, clothing and possessions." A classification interview is also mandatory in determining the housing of a prisoner.
The Peninsula Regional Jail has a detailed strip-search procedure, said assistant administrator Sherry Castellaw. The policy defines strip search as "the unclothed observation or the arrangement of clothing to such a degree as to permit a visual inspection of the genitals, buttocks, anus, female breasts, or undergarments of person."
"The officer should look over the offender's entire body," Castellaw said.
Since the regional jail opened in June 1997, Castellaw could not recall another case of a correctional officer mistakenly classifying a prisoner's gender.
"I can recall two cases where the offenders were in the process of changing gender," she said. "In both those cases we housed those people separately."
David Chernicky can be reached at 247-4743 or by e-mail at dchernicky@dailypress.com
Copyright © 2002, Daily Press
In days of old, when men were bold,
And condoms weren't invented,
They'd wrap a sock around their ________,
Thus babies were prevented!
It seems to me that impersonating a boy (or man) is a bit more complex than "stuffing" a condom as one might stuff a bra. And socks really don't pass the, how shall we say, rigidity test. I hate to even speculate as to what kind of sock we're dealing with here. Maybe a tennis sock, cut at the ankle? Certainly not a kneesock, which I would assume would create girth anxiety. A "tube" sock would certainly be semantically appropriate, if not altogether feasible. In fact, I just looked in my sock drawer, and no matter how you add it up, three socks would elicit a breathtaking response, from all ages. But I have problems with the performance issues.
So she will get a sex change, become a he, and no longer be a lesbian. Wonder what would happen if the girl she was molesting got a sex change to, would 'brian' still want that person for their personality, would he be gay if he wanted her who was now a him, and could they legally be married 'brian' did get a sex change or if she became a man could she become a priest or would she be a male nun....
For the record, that is not a limerick.
A lesbian tried to be a boy
And have a young girl as a toy
She didn't have a c..c
So she thought that a stiff sock
Might bring the young girl some joy.
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