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Friday, February 23, 2007
And you thought talk of an early Georgia primary would have no impact
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Any doubt that Iowa would be in play was removed this afternoon, as that state’s former governor, Tom Vilsack, withdrew from the Democratic race for president. This according to the Washington Post.
Vilsack’s problem was financial. “This process has become to a great extent about money — a lot of money,” he said. “And it is clear to me that we would not be able to continue to raise money in the amounts necessary to sustain not just a campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire, but a campaign across this country.”
In other words, this move by all the other states, now including Georgia, to move their primaries into early February 2008 has put incredible pressure on shoestring presidential campaigns.
The era established by Jimmy Carter in Iowa in 1976 — in which a handful of fervent supporters, a bit of cash, and early luck could put a nobody governor into the White House — may indeed be over.
Marshall on his Iraq vote: He splits the difference
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Macon) was one of the few Democrats to vote against the House resolution that was critical of President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq.
He told the Moultrie Observer this week that he’d gotten mixed responses on his vote:
“Yeah, people will send me e-mail saying that’s it, they’re cutting me off, they’re not going to vote for me. Then I get contrary e-mails thanking me very much for my vote, saying it must have taken a lot of courage to do it.
“My response to both is that I’m just trying to do what’s right as I see it,” Marshall said.
“We’re going to continue to have debates with regard to the way forward in Iraq. My guess is there will continue to be substantial controversy, so this story is not going away.”
An explanation of how Genarlow Wilson landed a 10-year sentence
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Early this week, in the midst of the debate over Genarlow Wilson, former state lawmaker and current pundit Matt Towery said that the law that put the teenager behind bars for 10 years for oral sex with a 15-year-old had a “phenomenally disastrous” flaw.
This was news, because Towery was the sponsor of the bill. The publisher of InsiderAdvantage.com posted a long explanation of how and why his Child Protection Act of 1995 failed to include a safety valve for teenagers of like age with raging hormones. We offer it below, with permission, in its entirety:
(2/21/07) Yesterday I arose and, half awake, read the first few paragraphs of a story related to a longstanding nightmare which I inadvertently helped create.
Because I have been in negotiations on a television project and have been polling several critical issues in several states, I had not read Sen. Eric Johnson’s comments on Senate Bill 37 nor had I realized that the issue was once again a source of trouble.
I certainly didn’t realize that it had been a subject this week of Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor or CNN.
For the first time in 10 years, instead of sitting in a studio providing analysis and reporting the news, I was instead making it.
I did so only after years of writing columns, talking to influential legislators, and continually asking to find a way to help correct a phenomenally disastrous result coming from a bill which I sponsored in the Georgia legislature in 1995.
From the start let me say that my comments were not directed at Sen. Johnson. Eric is one of the finest public servants I have ever known and has been my personal friend since 1980.
He has every right to hold his own view on this issue and some of his arguments are meritorious. But as I told the reporters present, the real story of “aggravated child molestation” and the punishment for statutory rape in Georgia had to be told.
I did not call Eric before my press conference because I intended to, and did, make it clear that the issue was not Eric Johnson. I did call him immediately afterwards, as his comments were raised by the reporters. Eric was, as usual, the gracious and mature leader he has always been.
So let’s move this story off of my friend Eric Johnson to where it should be—what Paul Harvey called “The Rest of the Story”
It was December of 1994. As chairman of Newt Gingrich’s campaign I was basking in the afterglow of his election as U.S. House Speaker and preparing for the next Georgia legislative session.
I really had it made in the sense that although I was a Republican, I had known Democratic Gov. Zell Miller since I was 10 years old, had a close personal friendship with Democratic Georgia House Speaker Tom Murphy and his family, and had a great relationship with the man who beat me for lieutenant governor (and would later be my business partner), Democrat Pierre Howard.
I say this to explain how a Republican could possibly have passed such a sweeping bill in the days of Democratic domination of the Gold Dome.
That December I saw a news report in which a child had been terribly abused but the laws in Georgia were too weak to properly punish the person responsible.
That led to my introduction of The Child Protection Act of 1995. As introduced, it did create mandatory ten year sentences for those who did certain unimaginable things to children—but it did not raise Georgia’ age of consent laws.
The bill sailed out of the House in a matter of days and landed in the Senate. At that time there existed a bill in [the] Senate Judiciary [Committee] which raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 years of age. The problem was that the House would never accept the bill without using my bill as what we call a “vehicle” to get the age of consent bill to the House.
The chairperson of Senate Judiciary basically made it clear that if I wanted my bill to move, I would allow the committee to add the age of consent to the bill. I agreed. That’s where the disaster started.
No one would budge on the seemingly dangerous fact that kids or young adults - prone to break the age of consent laws from time to time - could easily face the mandatory 10-year sentence and be classified as having committed “aggravated child molestation,” although this clearly was not my intent.
Here’s a good example: A young man aged 17 having sex with a girl, say, two days before her 15th birthday would have been in deep trouble under this bill.
But ironically, since sodomy in Georgia includes oral sex, had the boy engaged in “sodomy” he would have qualified for the status of “aggravated child molestation” and faced 10 years—whereas had he engaged in intercourse, and intercourse alone, the penalty could have been less.
Now, anyone who has been through the legislative process with a major bill knows that we often fool ourselves into believing that the arguments against the bill are covered in the language. Does anyone really think that Pierre Howard or I, or most sane people would have wanted such draconian measures?
In the redrafting, our concerns were allegedly met, but we were unable to get the proponents of the age of consent law to allow for a true “Romeo and Juliet” clause which would have said that if the two consenting partners were within, say, four years of age, then the charge would be a misdemeanor.
Fortunately, several years ago wise minds did insert that provision into this code section.
On the day of the final vote on the bill, Tom Murphy talked to me along with Larry Walker (then the Majority leader). Tom expressed his severe concerns that young people would end up in prison for long periods of time.
(Now understand that by this time my friendship with Murphy had become much closer than anyone at the Capitol knew. We ate together, I had come to spend a great deal of time with his family, and we often got together on holidays or during the summer. )
Tom did not want to rob me of having my chance to pass the bill. But he made it clear that he would fight me from the well.
We had a friendly but very vigorous floor fight. Larry Walker told me last night that he recalled Murphy’s concerns and that he and other leaders were worried as well, but as Larry put it “it was hard to vote against a bill called the Child Protection Act of 1995 and the bill had a lot of merit in many other ways.”
My bill passed by a fairly wide margin. Afterwards Murphy and I were headed out together to get something to eat, as I recall with Bill Lee (the longtime and very bright Rules Chairman) and Butch Benefield along with others.
As we left, Murphy put his arm around me and said something like, “Well, you beat me, but I sure hope little Matthew (my son who he loved and was then 7 years old) doesn’t ever get into trouble with this piece of (insert his favorite expletive)!”
It was then that Murphy and I agreed that if we found judges applying the bill harshly in such cases we would immediately go in together and change the law.
I write this mistake off to several things: the arrogance of a younger Matt Towery who knew he could pass legislation in a Democratic House where Republicans were of little consequence; the insistence by the House Judiciary Chair and the age of consent sponsor that the two pieces of legislation be “married up” with no changes allowed (they feared the House would strip the bill out so it came to the House floor as an up or down vote); and finally our naïve trust that somehow judges and prosecutors could read our minds as to legislative intent.
Do I blame the DA’s who followed this law? No way—we created it. Do I blame the judges who imposed 10-year sentences—no, if the circumstances met the threshold, they had to impose the mandatory 10 years.
I know that my press conference was presented as an attack on Eric Johnson. I regret that not because of any recriminations (he’s not that way) but because it hurt his feelings and put him on the defensive over a bill who’s history even Eric, one of the most senior and savvy legislators in the state, could not have known. No one knew this entire story. Not one soul.
So what do we do?
Well first let me say that I did not do what I did to impact any particular case. I have no idea if the young man in Douglas County was found guilty of any other crimes other than “aggravated child molestation” as a result of the bill I passed.
I know the tapes of their “sex party” are said to be disturbing and I hardly want to endorse that behavior. But ten years in jail?
I do know the jury was horrified when the sentence (which the Judge had no alternative to hand down) was announced. Even David McDade, a great DA who prosecuted the case said he offered far less to the young man because he knew 10 years was too long.
But had we not set the bar so high, might not the offer have been a year, or probation? Who knows?
What I do know is that well-to-do public and private schools have kids having sex outside of the current two-year window far more often than anyone might imagine.
Just this week I learned of a prominent school where a certain STD had broken out from sexual relations between ninth graders (some who could be fourteen) and 11th graders (some who could be 17). Could these youngsters be charged with “aggravated child molestation” and spend ten years in jail? You bet.
But instead the brunt of these cases have fallen to the disadvantaged and often African-American males. Whether that’s a demographic fluke or a difference in prosecutorial “interest,” or simply the result that many of these kids come from homes where there may be no father figure or the privileges and inability to be monitored by the family unit due to financial burdens, I don’t know.
As for the fix, compromise should be in the air. Whether or not it is wise to extend the “Romeo and Juliet” provisions of the bill out to four years is questionable.
But providing review by the courts of only those cases in which the 10-year sentence resulted from age of consent matters prior to the law being changed in the last few years—well that seem a no-brainer.
The arguments against it are that it would cost too much and clog up the court system. Well, that’s just absurd. We already have sentencing review boards that look at every case in Georgia—why couldn’t they isolate the relatively few cases where the earlier version of the law applied and turn them over to the courts for review of sentencing?
That sounds to me like a sound and reasonable compromise given the fact that even one young person in jail serving ten years or a negotiated plea with ten years as the threat to enter such a plea only for violation the age of consent conversion to “aggravated child molestation” is one person too many.
Georgia’s state motto includes “wisdom and moderation.” We may have lacked wisdom in trying to do something good in 1995. But we certainly can find both wisdom and moderation in 2007.
If nothing else, I owed it to Tom Murphy to speak out on this matter, as he is not in the position to be able to speak out on his own. As he went through the immediate aftermath of his second stroke, I sat with his son Mike and held Tom’s hand.
I knew that his life would be incredibly frustrating—such a brilliant mind trapped by the limits the stroke had placed upon him. I vowed to Mike Murphy, a Superior Court Judge of whom Speaker Murphy was so proud, that I would be his voice if ever one was needed.
So I write this not just as my explanation and plea that some reasonable solution be passed, but for Tom Murphy. After all, he was smart enough to know this day would come.
