WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT?

6-16-2012 California:

___ is hurt, anxious, and angry.

He might actually be dangerous.

If he wasn’t dangerous before our legal system got hold of him, our legal system may have made him that way.

___ is 39 years old. He has been homeless, on and off, for five or six years.

When he wasn’t homeless during the past few years, he was in and out of jail for parole violations.

___ claims that some of those parole violations were not fair, and that the Corrections Department and the police have constantly looked for some way to put him back in jail.

___ is a registered sex offender.

I’m only using his real name and his photo because he gave me permission to do so.

___ says that he is completely up front with people about his being a Registered Sex Offender. He doesn’t try to hide it. In fact, he is one of the only homeless registered sex offenders who will wear shorts in the Summer. (Most homeless registered sex offenders and other parolees on ankle monitors will wear long pants even in the heat of the summer, to cover up the ankle monitors.)

Back in 2003, ___ was convicted of sexual battery by restraint. That’s a pretty serious charge...even though ___ claims that what he did with the woman wasn’t really that bad.

I have no idea what really happened. I wasn’t there.

My more cynical friends tell me that every convict will tell you that he is innocent.

So, go ahead and be cynical about ___’s claims if you want.

All I can tell you is that there is something about Rick that makes me feel uneasy.

But I don’t think that it’s really his status as a Sex Offender.

I think it may be something else.

The poor man has a way of speaking that might be deemed a form of speaking disability. This speaking disability would make it difficult for him to convince anybody that he was innocent, if he was accused of a crime.

It’s difficult to describe what it is about his way of speaking that is out of alignment. He has no trouble forming words or sentences. And his pronunciation is excellent. Even his grammar is good. So, he doesn’t really have a speech impairment, in the classical sense.

It’s more like an impairment of his tone of speech.

He says that he has been diagnosed as having an anxiety disorder.

He has had this anxiety disorder every since he was a child.

When he was sixteen years old, he tried to kill himself.

I’m no expert, but his anxiety disorder appears to me to be the real thing.

When he speaks to you, he is so nervous that it makes you feel uncomfortable. And you get the uneasy feeling that he’s hiding something... or that something just isn’t right. ..For the rest of this story: by RLitchfield1