OH- Urine-fetish bill distracts Senate from real issues

3-27-2009 Ohio:

A Columbus man with one of the grossest -- and rarest -- fetishes has befuddled our criminal-justice system. What do we do? Introduce a bill to punish him!

The system of financing just about every state-government operation is on the brink of disaster. A never-more-important-than-now transportation bill is pending this week.

Side issues have stalled crucial legislation that would address prisoner access to DNA evidence that might prove their innocence, in a bill inspired by a Dispatch series.

The list goes on and on; yet, over in the Ohio Senate this week, testimony started on a bill that would address just one man's fetish for drinking boys' urine.

We can't stop Alan D. Patton's desire, but we can punish him, according to the bill, for collecting any bodily fluids without the proper "privilege," such as by doctor's order.

No one has to convince me that this guy should not be running loose amid the general population; the last time Patton was busted for urine collection was at a sports complex that my own son has frequented.

But criminalizing his kinky collections won't make him go away, at least not for very long. We already know that jail and prison time -- a total of four years, 195 days combined -- haven't reformed Patton. The fifth-degree-felony penalty in the proposed bill would carry a sentence of just six months to 12 months.

Yesterday, a judge scheduled a hearing to impose her sentence on Patton for a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief for the sports-complex bust in June, after an appeals court rejected the argument that the judge didn't have the right to order psychological testing before his trial.

That raises an interesting issue. Patton's fetish clearly is associated with sexual deviance. And Municipal Judge Anne Taylor required the psychological test because she wanted to know the extent of Patton's disorder.

But the bill completely disregards the issue of mental abnormality.

The bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Jim Hughes of Columbus, said he wrote the bill that way because he doesn't want to legislate how judges do their jobs -- for example, whether they should order counseling.

Hughes said that he consulted with all sorts of law-enforcement groups but didn't check with even one mental-health expert.

If he had, he might have learned what Dr. Kathy Burns told me. The chief clinical officer for Franklin County's Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health agency said prison sex-offender programs are reserved for inmates with lengthy sentences.

Even if the prisoner could get into a program, 12 months wouldn't have much impact.

And even if the bill did address mental-health issues, Burns said, any such legislation is wasteful when it focuses on just one man. Our money and time, she said, are better invested in sex-offender programs that might help protect more victims.

The rest, she said, is just grandstanding. ..News Source.. by Ann fisher