Posted on 08/04/2004 7:48:54 AM PDT by Spackidagoosh
Mary Kay Letourneau Released From Prison
GIG HARBOR, Wash. — Mary Kay Letourneau (search), the grade school teacher convicted for having sex with a sixth-grade pupil, was released from prison early Wednesday, and her now 21-year-old former lover plans to challenge a court order that bars her from contacting him, a friend said.
"He's relieved that she's out of prison and currently he can't wait to see her," Noel Soriano said on a morning television news program.
Letourneau, who served 71/2 years in prison, slipped unnoticed past the hordes of reporters and gawkers outside the Washington Corrections Center for Women (search) before dawn.
As a condition of her release, Letourneau, 42, can't contact former pupil Vili Fualaau (search), the father of two of her children.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
His mom thought the relationship was so harmless, she sued the city for a million dollars for failing to protect her son.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/17184_vili04.shtml
Besides the harm to the boy, an unemployed high-school dropout father of two children who aren't much younger than he was when he was seduced by Letourneau, we have 4 children without their mother, and two more children with a wacky grandma who did a piss-poor job of raising her own kids, lied on the witness stand during the criminal trial OR else lies to get $1 million from the city, an unemployed high-school dropout 21 year old daddy who can't get his sh%t together to act like a man and a responsible father to provide for them, and a convicted sex offender mother, who has a mental illness, and who still thinks getting it on with a little boy whose messed up home life rendered him starved for affection and ripe for the picking, as "beautiful".
Roses, it's just roses all the way around.
Not sure why you posted this to me.
I didn't say it was a good thing. I said "by and large the harm to boys is not as great as the harm to girls."
From a strictly scientific viewpoint this doesn't prove anything. We don't know if we would have experienced this or other problems if the relationship had never occured.
Fair point - we can't tell who or who will not be harmed. Still, seven years is a lot.
I have been following this case from the start. My feeling is, if she would of been a male teacher and he a sixth grade girl would she have been treated like the media darling? No. She would be treated like some sort of freak, a sicko.
I think there few males out their that had not a boyish crush on at least one pretty teacher. Heck even Leave It To Beaver had an episode on the subject. Teachers know it's going to happen from time to time and they should know how to handle it when it does.
Excellence In Posting
Well, if little miss perfect (in your eyes obviously) had kept her legs closed for a 12 year old she wouldn't have been sentenced at all.
And, when given the chance of early release, on the condition that she didn't see the still minor CHILD, if she had kept her legs closed, followed the court order and had not gotten knocked up a second time, she wouldn't have done 7 years.
Never thought I'd see the day when someone of FR would defend a pedophile.
In law, that standard is meaningless as far as the crime goes. Relative harm to the victim must not be a factor in the crime but is properly considered in the sentence phase.
Consider murder, for example. The harm caused by killing a 92 year old individual with advanced lung cancer cannot may be less than the harm caused to a 32 year old, based on life expectancy. The murderer is after all taking many years from the younger individual while taking possibly only a few months from the elderly man. The same goes for stealing the wallet of a wealthy man as opposed to a poor man.
The killer of the 92 year old is just as guilty as the killer of the 32 year old.
As to sentencing, the judge properly considered the relative harm and gave her a fairly light sentence. She elected to ignore the conditions of the light sentence and was given a more lenghtly sentence. Put yourself in the judge's position. What message does it send if a criminal is permitted to ignore conditions of probation?
And during probation, I suppose that they will be watching her conduct around children. Having sex with a 21-year-old, on the other hand, is not a crime.
She is a very emotionally disturbed woman who is a danger to herself and others especially those two kids she spawned with the boy-man.
She should not be released into the general population.
Is one of those states Washington? Or does the law of the state actually involved even matter to you if you can compare it with another state where the age of consent is lower?
Putting her away again for the maximum struck many of us, including this Libertarian, as excessive. That's a longer senetnce than most carjackers serve.
Oh, puhleeeze. She knew the risk she was taking when she started fogging up windows with the punk again. Quit crying for her. She asked for it, she got it.
And as for the sentence being more than carjackers serve? Carjackers steal a car, and they're done. Letourneau's ill-gotten children have been given a life sentence: a real loser for a mother.
I am skeptical of my government, but I don't have a morbid fear of it and hostility toward it like some of you laissez-faire types do.
Here's what you said:
None of us know ourselves that well at that age. I made the admittedly snide remarks about "maturity, schmaturity" because the common sense of the oft-stated truism "If I only knew then what I know now" and a statement like yours above cannot co-exist.
Also, as a boy, I can say that speaking for myself, a teacher having sex with me in 6th or 7th grade would not have left me emotionally scarred...Quite the opposite, in fact.
Statements such as yours presume that everything would have gone well with a teacher with obvious mental, emotional, and ethical deficiencies, and that nobody would find out except those who would keep their traps shut.
I will say that based upon Vili Faulaau's testimony and the testimony of his mother and that of the case worker assigned to him that he was not harmed in any appreciable way by the 400+ times he had intercourse with his teacher.
Why did Fualaau (unsuccessfully) sue the school district that hired Letourneau, arguing that it should have "protected" him from her advances?
BTW: 400+ times? Are you sure about that? I didn't know they had contact that regularly. You got a source for that number?
And they've typically left a few dead vctims in their wake. MKL, in contrast, was guilty of having a weird consensual relationship with one specific person. I won't argue with her original sentence because the boy was definitely underage at the time, while she was in a position of professional power. Now that she has served her time and the "victim" is 21, he is legally capable of making up his own mind.
No, what we're dealing with is a tinhorn Javert obsessed with "making an example" of one odd couple. If we punished all the oddball sexual relationships that are out there, we would have to convert all of Cuba into one giant Guantanamo.
I am skeptical of my government, but I don't have a morbid fear of it and hostility toward it like some of you laissez-faire types do.
What I have a morbid fear of is the control-obsessed types who keep using government as an excuse to expand their power. Governments is supposed to be all of us, not theme parks for the power-hungry.
And would you feel this way had it been a 35-year old man with an 11 or 12-year old girl? Somehow, I doubt it. There's nothing I despise more than double-standards, and you're spewing one here.
And apart from the pedohilia aspect, not only did they produce two children that have to live with their screwed up relationship, she has 4 other children who have to suffer the rest of their lives for her selfishness and sickness.
You're correct - I wouldn't feel the same way about a 35-year old man with a girl of the same age. As said, I do believe that in general there are differences between boys and girls and the harm isn't as much to boys.
...And the fact that Fool-laau is still attached to this train wreck of a woman after eight years is evidence of additional emotional scarring
If he had his wits about him, Fualaau would have moved on with his life, and accepted his liaison with Letourneau as a tragic -- but correctable -- mistake.
That's one of the problems; sexual activity results in emotional super glue strength bonding between people. Is 'moving on' even possible? Might Faulkner have been correct when he wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past."?
I think the consequences of this iniquity, like all iniquity, are incalcuable, and not because they are few and small.
Cordially,
The source for the number of intercourse encounters was derived from Gregg Olsen's "If Loving You is Wrong."
The Faulaau family has attempted to capitalize financially from this fiasco on two notable occasions, the first being the lawsuit, and the second in a book published only in France, translated as "One Crime: Love."
I would submit that how well one knows themselves at what age is largely subjective. I had a sexual relationship with my babysitter at age 11. Admittedly, she was only 16, and the age difference was significantly less pronounced, but I have only fond memories of those evenings. We are still friends to this day, though we never talk about what happened then. Was it wrong? From the standpoint of Christian morality, certainly. Did it leave me scarred? No way!
>>>>>>>>>Fair point - we can't tell who or who will not be harmed. Still, seven years is a lot.<<<<<<I have one last nagging question......If I rape (no have consensual sex) with a 12 year old girl and get her pregnant.....how many years do I get?...I am an adult male. I have no idea what a rapist gets but I always thought it was 10-20 in the state pen.
Sorry, you were the good guy in this discussion and I think I responded to a post where your name was included....meant no slight to you with my comment.
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