From Inquest:
The death threats started almost immediately. On April 3, 2020, The New York Post published the story of our case under an impossibly salacious headline: “Child rapist ordered released to keep him safe from coronavirus.” The article was no better, describing the underlying crime in vivid detail while underplaying how its subject’s multiple, severe medical issues made him vulnerable to COVID, and that the sentence being served was not actually for the crime itself, but rather for so-called “technical” violations of probation. The Post had apparently noticed earlier articles in The Appeal and The Boston Globe — which had both rightly emphasized the obvious injustice and life-threatening danger at the heart of the case — and decided to take the story in another direction. It was that version of the story that spread around the world, from Peru to Brazil to Italy.
In the aftermath, the two of us, the client and his lawyer, were both attacked and threatened. Our hope in sharing what we went through during those early days of the pandemic is to shed some light on how attempting to attain a measure of simple justice can be punishing, daunting, even life-altering. How so many trapped in our system of mass caging seldom get the attention our case did. How even when attention is given, it can become its own form of punishment. And how our laws, practices, and institutions are massively punitive toward people who commit sex offenses. All of this is by design, and largely for political reasons. Any perception of leniency, or even mere humanity, toward someone our society deems repugnant becomes a liability.
This is not an overstatement. The nation witnessed the ugliness of this reality last month, as one United States senator after another sought to weaponize a handful of cherrypicked child-pornography cases against Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee. The chief complaint of Sens. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others, it seems, was that Judge Jackson, like most federal judges, wrestled with how to thoughtfully sentence what is perhaps society’s most-hated class of defendants; that she listened to mitigating evidence and tempered reflexive retribution; that she recognized their humanity and potential for growth and change. She also centered the experience of survivors and showed her understanding of the trauma inflicted by childhood sexual assault. Continue reading >>>
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