Posted on 08/18/2003 11:54:42 PM PDT by churchillbuff
A federal judge has ordered New York's Westchester County to pay a twice-convicted pedophile $2,500 for violating his rights by refusing to allow him to perform his clown act for children at a local amusement park.
Judge John S. Martin did approve the county's park regulation crafted earlier this year that bars convicted pedophiles from obtaining performance permits if their acts are designed to "entice a child to congregate around" them. The ruling allows the county to bar Richard Hobbs from performing his clown act in the future at the county-owned park.
County officials hailed the ruling as a victory, though they said they were perplexed by the judge's decision to award Hobbs the money.
"The bottom line here is our children will be protected," Susan Tolchin, chief adviser to Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano, told the Westchester Journal News. "We're less pleased about the part where we have to pay this guy $2,500."
Hobbs, 48, sued the county in 2000, charging that Westchester had violated his First Amendment rights by refusing to allow him to perform his clown and balloon animals act at the 279-acre park.
The county cited two reasons for disallowing Hobbs' performances:
his panhandling act would compete with the county's for-profit operation in the only government-owned amusement park in the country;
his criminal past. Hobbs pleaded guilty in 1978 to second-degree sexual abuse after New Rochelle police charged him with luring an 11-year-old boy into his office and fondling him. Four years later, a Pennsylvania judge sentenced Hobbs to nine months in jail for molesting a 14-year-old boy while driving him to church, where Hobbs performed his clown show for children.
Hobbs' convictions came to light in 2001, when he ran for the Westchester County legislature on the Right to Life Party line. At the time, he told a Journal News reporter, "Regardless of the fact of whether I'm guilty or unguilty, there are no children at the county legislature." The party disavowed his candidacy, and Hobbs lost the election.
In December, Martin handed down a decision that the county had a right to ban Hobbs from performing in the park's money-making venues, like the amusement rides, but not from the public areas, like the boardwalk.
In March, Spano issued an executive order that banned pedophiles from performing acts designed for children's amusement. At hearings in April to determine public and private areas of the park, Hobbs' lawyers challenged Spano's executive order.
In yesterday's 25-page decision, Martin said the county's past wrongful efforts to keep Hobbs from performing at the park cost the pedophile clown $2,500 in income. But, he said, the provision against pedophile performance contained in the new order is allowable.
"It is unquestionable that the county would wish to protect children from exposure to potential harm by preventing convicted pedophiles from performing acts that would entice children to congregate around them in county parks," Martin wrote.
One of the most notorious pedophile-murderers in history, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. of Chicago, also lured boys and young men through a clown act. During a three-year-period, Gacy went on to torture, rape and murder more than 30, most discovered under the floorboards of his home and in the lo
Since when are baloon animals considered freedom of speech? When will this insanity end?
'Homosexual' recruitment strikes again.
Remember the first law of 'homosexuality':
'Homosexuals' don't reproduce, they recruit
I'm glad my daughter is scared to death of clowns.
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