aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, January 13, 2006

VT sex offender sentence: talking sense

No one I watch wrote about the 60-day sentence in Vermont for sexual abuse handed down by District Judge Edward Cashman. Instead, I heard it on the Today Show just now (they have nothing about it on their website, don’t bother clicking):

Judge Edward Cashman: My heart goes out to this [victim’s] family and I would hate to be in the situation this family is, but there’s other families out there. And there’s other people who could be victimized and I’m trying to take the long view [...]

ON PUNISHMENT: I discovered it accomplishes nothing of value. It doesn’t make anything better. It costs us a lot of money. We create a lot of expectation. We feed a lot of anger.

JUDGE’S STATEMENT: I am aware that the intensity of some public criticism may shorten my judicial career. To change my decision now, however, simply because of negative sentiment, would be wrong.

Conservative media is evidently in an uproar. And the judge is a conservative. AP Wednesday:

MONTPELIER, Vt. --Edward Cashman should be the darling of conservatives: The churchgoing Vietnam vet is a former prosecutor; his two sons have served in the military. As a judge he is best known for his hard-line stands: A decade ago he jailed for 41 days the parents of a prime suspect in a rape case because they refused to cooperate with prosecutors.

Conservatives, though, have turned Cashman into Public Enemy No. 1 for his sentence of a child molester, a sentence he said was designed to ensure the man got treatment but critics say is too soft.

The criticism multiplied by the thousands - whipped into a frenzy via Internet blogs - after Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly told a national television audience Monday night, as video of Cashman rolled: “You may be looking at the worst judge in the USA.”

It’s not entirely surprising that the judge is a conservative or that when he looked at the facts this was his conclusion. When parole officers called for more reasonable parole policies in Georgia, sex offenders were among those included. (They didn’t get them.)

I know only what I’ve seen and read today, but the judge’s words sure sound reasonable to me.