(I originally wrote this post this morning, and am now re-writing it in light of additional reading and thinking.)
Last weekend, I read and wrote about a suspect study on college sexual assault, and another on sexual assault among women of all ages. Here’s a real-life story, from the local news section of the Chicago Tribune: “Local ‘Jeopardy!’ champ charged with child sex assault.”
The basics of the story: a 28-year-old former Jeopardy champion, now working as a security guard in Arlington Heights, in northwest suburban Chicago, met a 15 year old from Wisconsin on the job. They arranged to meet in Lake Geneva, went to a movie together, then “parked” in the teenage sense of the term — that is, they made out in his car, and he got to second base: “Police said Slowik and a 15-year-old Wisconsin girl were found topless in the back seat of a Hummer parked on a cul-de-sac near Lake Geneva in Wisconsin.”
As a result,
Jerome Slowik, 28, was charged in Walworth County, Wis., with second-degree sexual assault of a child, according to Wisconsin court records. He is due in court next month on the felony charge, which was filed April 16, records show. If convicted, he could face fines of up to $100,000 and 40 years in prison, according to prosecutors.
And here’s something a commenter on the Trib story had to say:
I know this guy and the story. She told him she was 18. When they got caught he was not arrested because the police found no cause and mutual consent. He was free to go the police took her to a friends because mommy wasn’t home. When the police called the next day and mommy found out she lied to save her ass. That’s the story.
What do you make of this? Is your gut reaction, “this man is a predator and should be locked up”? Or something else?
Her’e some background: according to a report in the local Daily Herald, the man won $122,000 on Jeopardy earlier this year, but he works as a security guard at the Mitsuwa Marketplace nearby, a “shopping mall” for Japanese ex-pats. He had a perfect score on the SAT and a near-perfect ACT score, but didn’t attend college. He lives with his parents. And he’s an aspiring writer, with a self-published book on Amazon (kindle only), Sandland, with two five-star (and improbable) and one one-star (and more believable) review.
What do you make of this? It seems more likely that he is, at best, naive, possibly with deficits that prevented him from attending college, maybe even (though I’m hardly a professional) autism-like tendencies (that is, social-skill deficiencies), happy that a girl chatted him up, unable to see warning signs, not really able to truly perceive that there’s a 13-year age difference, or even recognize that, when she said she’s 18, if she did in fact say that, she was lying. Look at the video clip of the Jeopardy-watching “party” on the link above — he seems perfectly ordinary but it’s a pretty small gathering at the bar.
One also wonders how a 15-year-old from Wisconsin ended up at Mitsuwa in the first place. Was she there with her parents, or on her own? And was there some further context that led to this date at Lake Geneva (a resort town just north of the Wisconsin state line)?
(Yes, it’s possible that there’s more to the story, that he has a habit of picking up teenage girls and deceiving them, and he’s just a jerk, but it doesn’t seem to me to be the case.)
So I looked up the details on the definitions and penalties we’re looking at here.
Here is a document describing all of Wisconsin’s sex crimes and penalties; this dates from 2009, and penalties seem to have been stiffened since then, if he’s now looking at a maximum of 40 years instead of 30.
Some surprises:
- In Wisconsin, even sex with a 16 or 17-year old is a crime, unless you’re married. A misdemeanor, and therefore not something to put you on the registry, but a crime nonetheless.
- For younger teenagers, there’s a differentiation between under 13s (first degree) and 13 – 15 year olds (second degree), but “sexual assault of a child” encompasses everything from “sexual contact” (e.g., second base, even with clothes still on) to actual sex, and any such conviction earns you a spot on the sex offender registry, even if the judge sentences you lightly.
- And there’s no exception for a teenager having sex with another teenager!
So what will happen to this man, when this goes to trial? Strictly speaking, he is guilty. The law says that, regardless of whether she gave every appearance of consenting, whether he believed she was older, whether she initiated the date, whether there was any risk at all that she’d let him get past second base, he has in fact committed a felony.
And a spot on the sex offender registry is life-destroying. You’ve read stories before, about men even younger than this, teenagers even, being on the list, and they’re unable to live a normal life, to imagine having a family of their own someday. There have been stories where men accept plea agreements, with the intent to avoid jail, not realizing that they will doom themselves this way. This is a penalty far in disproportion to the crime.
Now, my initial point this morning was this: we all know the expression, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” (according to Answers.com, it was actually not Stalin but Robespierre, in 1790, who first said this). Do people understand that this is an illustration of the ruthlessness of dictators, not a maxim for how to build a just world? The “eggs” being broken are real people whose lives are being ruined far out of proportion to their crime, in order, not to achieve justice, but to accommodate other people’s desire to “feel safer.”
Then I found myself wondering, what would the outcome be in this case, or in similar cases with younger men, even teenagers? Are the cases where boys receive these severe statutory rape penalties in the news because they’re man-bites-dog, and most of the time prosecutors shrug off these cases, if there aren’t circumstances that compound the crime? Will the charge be reduced to the misdemeanor that would apply if she were 16 instead of 15? There’s an article in The Daily Beast from 2009 about a 17-year old charged with felony statutory rape of his 14-year-old girlfriend, where, simultaneously, the same prosecutor charged a 17-year-old girl with a 14-year-old boyfriend with a misdemeanor, but I can’t find anything with the outcome of that case.
Would this situation, or a situation of a teenager with a 15-year-old girlfriend, be more just if we knew that these charges are routinely lowered to a misdemeanor unless it was known that he was acting in some “predatory” manner?
And what bugs me is this: the law should be fair as written. There simply should not be situations where no one enforces the law because everyone knows its unjust, or where the prosecutor uses the legal code to frighten individuals into a plea agreement, but no one intends for individuals to be convicted of the law as its found in the books.
This goes for these sorts of “sexual assault” cases. And this goes for more routine situations as well. Consider speeding, where it’s generally a given that, on highways, for instance, the posted speed may be 65 or even 55, but cops don’t care until you exceed 80 (except potentially if you’re from out-of-state). Of course, our situation with illegal immigrants, in which the government simply says, “we won’t enforce the law.” And other situations in which the law seems to be nothing more than an arbitrary means of the government choosing when to intervene.
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