Dear Editor of the Register Guard,
I read in today's paper that James Matthew Dublin received a 50 day jail sentence for purchasing drugs, giving those drugs to a 15-year-old girl, raping a 15 year-old girl, and pledging to make that 15-year-old girl his regular "plaything" when he is in town. This is an outrage.
It appears that the normal sentence for these crimes would be a total of 62 months in jail, but District Attorney JoAnn Miller and Lane County Circuit Judge Doug Mitchell conspired to downgrade this sentence to a mere 50 days because Dublin, now a convicted sex offender, is a "responsible member of society" with a "clean record" who has never previously been caught drugging and sodomizing 15-year-old girls. Oh, and he's a military veteran with a Master's degree. I guess this makes it all right.
The Eugene police seem to think so, as Sgt. Kevin McCormick seems to say that the embarrassment of getting caught is punishment enough for Dublin and serves as a warning to other Johns. I have always been of the belief that grown men who would have sex with 15-year-old girls had long since abandoned their capacity for embarrassment.
The Register Guard itself completed the task of turning this tragedy into farce with the headline "Teen prostitution case ends." A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted, but let's definitely make the headline about her and her actions. After all, a great guy made a "huge mistake" and now he will sort of not really have to pay for it.
Unfortunately this story is indicative of a culture that is extremely permissive when it comes to sexual crimes against women, where the police, the courts, and the media all go out of their way to make the male perpetrator out to be the sympathetic figure.
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2 comments:
See, what he SHOULD HAVE done is flee the country. Then everyone would agree that CLEARLY he ought not serve even one day in prison!
Also, if you ever get tired of the GTFF and the Pacific Northwest, I know a campus Women's Center at a medium-sized public university in the South that might soon need an associate director. You'd definitely be better in the job than its current occupant.
Seriously, thanks for being such a consistently great ally on issues of violence against women. You rock.
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